Penguin Persons & Peppermints

by Walter Prichard Eaton

But the steaming manure pile is not the only sign of spring, nor the hotbeds the only things to be attended to. If they only were, how much easier gardening would be—and how much less exciting! There is always work to be done in the orchard, for instance, some pruning and scraping. I always go into the orchard on the first really warm, spring-like March day, with a common hoe, and scrape a little, not so much for the good of the trees as for the good of my soul. The real scraping for the scale spray was, of course, done earlier. There is a curious, faintly putrid smell to old or bruised apple wood, which is stirred by my scraping, and that smell sweeps over me a wave of memories, memories of childhood in a great yellow house that stood back from the road almost in its orchard, and boasted a cupola with panes of colored glass which made the familiar landscape strange; memories of youth in that same house, too, dim memories “of sweet, forgotten, wistful things.” My early spring afternoons in the orchard are very precious to me now, and when the weather permits I always try to burn the rubbish and dead prunings on Good Friday, the incense of the apple wood floating across the brown garden like a prayer, the precious ashes sinking down to enrich the soil.

The bees, too, are always a welcome sign of the returning season, hardly less than the birds, though the advent of the white-throated sparrow (who delayed till April twenty-first last year) is always a great event. He is first heard most often before breakfast, in an apple tree close to the sleeping-porch, his flute-like triplets sweetly penetrating my dreams and bringing me gladly out of bed—something he alone can do, by the way, and not even he after the first morning! But the bees come long before. The earliest record I have is March thirty-first, but there must be dates before that which I have neglected to put down. Some house plant, a hyacinth possibly, is used as bait, and when the ground is thawing out beneath a warm spring sun we put the plant on the southern veranda and watch. Day after day nothing happens, then suddenly, some noon, it has scarcely been set on the ground when its blossoms stir, and it is murmurous with bees. Then we know that spring indeed has come, and we begin to rake the lawns, wherever the frost is out, wheeling great crate loads of leaves and rubbish upon the garden, and filling our neighbors' houses with pungent smoke.

There is a certain spot between the thumb and first finger which neither axe nor golf-club nor saw handle seems to callous. The spring raking finds it out, and gleefully starts to raise a blister. My hands are perpetually those of a day-laborer, yet I expect that blister every spring. Indeed, I am rather disappointed now if I don't get it, I feel as if I weren't doing my share of work. The work is worth the blister. I know of few sensations more delightful than that of seeing the lawn emerging green and clean beneath your rake, the damp mould baring itself under the shrubbery, the paths, freshly edged, nicely scarrowed with tooth marks; then of feeling the tug of the barrow handles in your shoulder sockets; and finally, as the sun is sending long shadows over the ground, of standing beside the rubbish pile with your rake as a poker and hearing the red flames crackle and roar through the heap, while great puffs of beautiful brown smoke go rolling away across the garden and the warmth is good to your tired body. Clearing up is such a delight, indeed, that I cannot now comprehend why I so intensely disliked to do it when I was half my present age. Perhaps it was because at that time clearing up was put to me in the light of a duty, not a pleasure.

There is alas, too often a tempering of sadness in the joy of taking the covers off the garden. One removes them, especially after a cold open winter, with much the same anxious excitement that one opens a long-delayed letter from a dear friend who has been in danger. What signs of life will the peonies show under their four inches of rotted manure, and the Japanese irises by the pool, and the beds of Darwins, so confidently relied upon to ring the sundial in late May and early June, before the succeeding annuals are ready? How will the hollyhocks, so stately in midsummer all down the garden wall, have withstood the alternate thaws and freezes which characterized our abominable January and February? Then there are those two long rows of foxgloves and Canterbury bells, across the rear of the vegetable garden, where they were set in the fall to make strong plants before being put in their permanent places—or rather their season's places, for these lovely flowers are perversely biennials, and at least seven times every spring I vow I will never bother with them again, and then make an even larger sowing when their stately stalks and sky-blue bells are abloom in summer! Tenderly you lift the pine boughs from them on a balmy April day (it was not until almost mid-April last year), when snow still lingers, perhaps, in dirty patches on the north side of the evergreens. Will they show frozen, flabby, withered leaves, or will their centers be bright with new promise? It is a moment to try the soul of the gardener, and no joy is quite like that of finding them all alive, nor any sorrow like that of finding them dead. At first I used to give up gardening forever when the perennials and biennials were winter-killed, just as a beginner at golf gives up the game forever each time he makes a vile score. Then I began to compromise on a garden of annuals. Now I have learned philosophy—and also better methods of winter protection. Likewise, I have learned that a good many of the perennials which were stone-dead when the covers were removed have a trick of coming to life under the kiss of May, and struggling up to some sort of bloom, even if heroically spindly like lean soldiers after a hard campaign. The hollyhocks, especially, have a way of seeding themselves undetected, and presenting you in spring with a whole unsuspected family of children, some of whom wander far from the parent stem and suddenly begin to shoot up in the most unexpected places. An exquisite yellow hollyhock last summer sprouted unnoted beneath our dinning-room window, and we were not aware of it till one July morning when it poked up above the sill. A few days later, when we came down to breakfast, there it was abloom, nodding in at the open window.

Another spring excitement in the garden is the pea planting, both the sweet peas and what our country folk sometimes call “eatin' peas.” No rivalry is so keen as that between pea-growers. My neighbors and I struggle for supremacy in sweet peas at the flower show in July, and great glory goes to him who gets the first mess of green peas on his table. We have tried sweet-pea sowing in the fall, and it does not work. So now I prepare a trench in October, partially fill it with manure, and cover it with leaves, which I remove at the first hint of warm weather in March. The earth-piles on either side thaw out quickly, and I get an early sowing, putting in as many varieties as I can afford (my wife says twice as many as I can afford), jealously guarding the secret of their number. The vegetable peas are planted later, usually about the first or second day of April, as soon as the top soil of the garden can be worked with a fork, and long before the plowing. We put in first a row of Daniel O'Rourke's, not because they are good for much, but because they will beat any other variety we have discovered by two days at least. Then we put in a row of a better standard early variety. How we watch those rows for the first sprouts! How we coddle and cultivate them! How eagerly we inspect our neighbors' rows, trying to appear nonchalant! And doubtless how silly this sounds to anyone who is not a gardener. Last summer we got our first mess of peas on June twenty-first, and after eating a spoonful, we rushed to the telephone, and were about to ring, when somebody called us. “Hello,” we said into the transmitter. A voice on the other end of the wire, curiously choked and munchy, cried, “We are eating our first peas! My mouth's full of 'em now!”

“That's nothing,” we answered, “we've got our first mouthful all swallowed.”

“Well, anyhow,” said our disappointed neighbor, “I called up first! Good-bye.”

How is that for a neck-and-neck finish at the tape?

As April waxes into May, the garden beds are a perpetual adventure in the expected, each morning bringing some new revelation of old friends come back, and as you dig deep and prepare the beds for the annuals, or spade manure around the perennials, or set your last year's plantings of hollyhocks, larkspur, foxgloves and campanulas into their places, you move tenderly amid the aspiring red stalks of the peonies, the Jason's crop of green iris spears, the leaves of tulips and narcissuses and daffodils, the fresh green of tiny sweet William plants clustered 'round the mother plant like a brood of chicks around the hen. You must be at setting them into borders, too, or putting the surplus into flats and then telephoning your less fortunate friends. One of the joys of a garden is in giving away your extra plants and seedlings.

One morning the asparagus bed, already brown again after the April showers have driven the salt into the ground, is pricked with short tips. That is a luscious sight! Inch by inch they push up, and thick and fast they come at last, and more and more and more. My diary shows me that we ate our first bunch last year on May ninth. On that day, also, I learn from the same source, the daffodils were out, the Darwin tulips were budding, and we spent the afternoon burning caterpillars' nests in the orchard—one spring crop which is never welcome, and never winter-killed. At this date, too, we are hard at work spraying, and sowing the annuals out-of-doors in the seed beds, and planting corn (the potatoes are all in by now), immediately following the plowing, which was delayed till the first of May by a belated snowstorm. Winter with us is like a clumsy person who tries over and over to make his exit from a room but does not know how to accomplish it. It is a busy time, for no sooner are the annuals planted, and the vegetables, than some of the seedlings from the hotbeds have to be set out (such as early cosmos), and the perennial beds already have begun to bloom, and require cultivation and admiration, and the flowers in the wild garden—hepaticas and trilliums and bloodroot and violets—are crying to be noticed, and, confound it all, here is the lawn getting rank under the influence of its spring dressing, and demands to be mowed! Yes, and we forget to get the mower sharpened before we put it away in the fall.