Now we confront a rude slab fence, an ancient landmark, that terminates its length at the edge of the stream, where its gray and crumbling boards are secured with rusty nails against the trunk of a tall buttonwood-tree. A loosened slab is easily found, and we are soon upon the other side; and after picking our way through a forest of bush-elders, we emerge upon an open lot of low flat pasture-land, known always as the “old swamp meadow.” No other five acres on the face of the earth are so dear to me as this neglected field. I know its every rise and fall of ground, its every bog, and its lush greenness is refreshing even to the thought.
It is a luxuriant garden of all manner of succulent and juicy vegetation; an outbursting extravagance of plant life of almost tropical exuberance. All New England’s most majestic and ornamental flora seem congregated in its congenial soil; and even when a boy I learned to know and love them all, and even call them by their names.
Here are towering stems of iron-weed lifting high their scattered purple crowns, and in their midst the woolly clumps of boneset, its white flowered cushions intermingling with the dense pink tufts of thorough-wort.
On every side we overlook whole patches of these splendid blossoms, with their crests closely crowded in a mosaic of pink and white. And here’s a bed of peppermint and spearmint, interspersed with flaming spikes of cardinal lobelia; and here a lusty plant of Indian mallow, entangled in a maze of gold-thread and smart-weed. Here are massive burdocks six feet high, and great trees of jimson-weed, with their large spiral flowers and thorny pods.
High fronds of chain-fern rise up on every side from a jungle of bur-marigolds and clotburs, and tear-thumbs, with their saw-toothed stems and tiny bunches of pink blossoms.
No inch of ground in the old swamp lot but which does its tenfold duty; and what it lacks in quality of produce it amply makes up in quantity. Even a neighboring bed of clean-washed gravel is overrun with creeping mallow, with its rounded leaves and little “cheeses” down among their shadows.
Farther on we see the lily-pond, with its surrounding swamp and its legion of crowded water-plants. Here are rank, massive beds of swamp-cabbage, and lofty cat-tails by the thousand among the bristling bogs of tussock-sedge and bulrush. Here are calamus patches, and alder thickets, and sedges without number; and the prickly carex and blue-flag abound on every side. There are galingales and reeds, and tall and graceful rushes, turtle-head and jointed scouring grass, and horse-tail, besides a host of other old acquaintances, whose faces are familiar, but whose names I never knew. But they were all my friends in boyhood. I knew them in the bud and in the blossom, and even in their winter skeletons, brown and broken in the snow. Near by there is a ditch: you never would know it, for it is completely hidden from view beneath an interlacing growth of jewel-weed. But see that gorgeous mass of deep scarlet that floods the farther bank! Nowhere within a circuit of miles around is there such a regal display of cardinal flowers as this: skirting the borders of the ditch for rods and rods, clustering about a ruined, tumbling fence, whose moss-grown pickets are almost hidden in the dense profusion of bloom.
Then there is its airy companion, the “touch-me-not,” with its translucent, juicy stem, and its queer little golden flowers with spotted throats—the “jewel-weed” we used to call it. I know not why, unless from the magic of its leaf, which, when held beneath the water, was transformed to iridescent frosted silver. We all remember its sensitive, jumping seed-pods, that burst even at our approach for fear that we should touch them; but no one can fully appreciate the beauty of the plant who has not seen its silvery leaf beneath the water. Here it justifies its name, for it is indeed a jewel.
How often in those olden times have I lain down among these bulrushes and sedges near the lily pond, and listened to the buzzing songs of the crickets and the tiny katydids that swarmed the growth about me, and filled the air with their incessant din. I remember the little colony of ants that picked their way among the rushes; that gauzy dragon-fly too, that circled and dodged about the water’s edge, now skimming close upon the surface, now darting out of sight, or perhaps alighting on an overhanging sedge, as motionless as a mounted specimen, with wings aslant and fully spread. “Devil’s darning-needles” they were called. The devil may well be proud of them; for darning-needles of such precious metals and such exquisite design are rare indeed. They were of several sizes too. Some were large, and flashed the azure of the sapphire; others fluttered by with smoky, pearly wings, and slender bodies glittering in the light like animated emeralds: and another I well remember, a little airy thing, with a glistening sunbeam for a body, and wings of tiny rainbows.