Maddened by the Catalogues of Peace-Time, One Lover of Gardens Yet Managed to Build a Little Eden, and Tells How He Did It for a Song
By WALTER PRICHARD EATON
War-time economy (which is a much pleasanter and doubtless a more patriotically approved phrase than war-time poverty) is not without its compensations, even to the gardener. At first I did not think so. Confronted by a vast array of new and empty borders and rock steps and natural-laid stone, flanking a wall fountain, and other features of a new garden ambitiously planned before the President was so inconsiderate as to declare war without consulting me, and confronted, too, by an empty purse—pardon me, I mean by the voluntarily imposed necessity for economy—I sat me down amid my catalogues, like Niobe amid her children, and wept. (Maybe it wasn't amid her children Niobe wept, but for them; anyhow I remember her as a symbol of lachrymosity.) Dear, alluring, immoral catalogues, sweet sirens for a man's undoing! How you sang to me of sedums, and whispered of peonies and irises—yea, even of German irises! How you spoke in soft, seductive accents of wonderful lilacs, and exquisite spireas, and sweet syringas, murmurous with bees! How you told of tulips and narcissuses, and a thousand lovely things for beds and borders and rock work—at so much a dozen, so very much a dozen, and a dozen so very few! I did not resort to cotton in my ears, but to tears and profanity.
Then two things happened. I got a letter from a Boston architect who had passed by and seen my unfinished place; and I took a walk up a back road where the Massachusetts Highway Commissioners hadn't sent a gang of workmen through to "improve" it. The architect said, "Keep your place simple. It cries for it. That's always the hardest thing to do—but the best." And the back-country roadside said, "Look at me; I didn't come from any catalogue; no nursery grew me; I'm really and truly 'perfectly hardy'; I didn't cost a cent—and can you beat me at any price? I'm a hundred per cent American, too."
I looked, and I admitted, with a blush of shame for ever doubting, that I certainly could not beat it. But, I suddenly realized, I could steal it!
I have been stealing it ever since, and having an enormously enjoyable time in the bargain.
Of course, stealing is a relative term, like anything else connected with morality. What would be stealing in the immediate neighborhood of a city is not even what the old South County oyster fisherman once described as "jest pilferin' 'round," out here on the edges of the wilderness. I go out with the trailer hitched to the back of my Ford, half a mile in any direction, and I pass roadsides where, if there are any farmer owners of the fields on the other side of the fence, these owners are only too glad to have a few of the massed, invading plants or bushes thinned out. But far more often there is not even a fence, or if there is, it has heavy woods or a swamp or a wild pasture beyond it. I could go after plants every day for six months and nobody would ever detect where I took them. My only rule—self-imposed—is never to take a single specimen, or even one of a small group, and always to take where thinning is useful, and where the land or the roadside is wild and neglected, and no human being can possibly be injured. Most often, indeed, I simply go up the mountain along, or into, my own woods.
I am not going to attempt any botanical or cultural description of what I am now attempting. That will have to wait, anyhow, till I know a little more about it myself! But I want to indicate, in a general way, some of the effects which are perfectly possible, I believe, here in a Massachusetts garden, without importing a single plant, or even sowing a seed or purchasing any stock from a nursery.
Take the matter of asters, for instance. Hitherto my garden, up here in the mountains where the frosts come early and we cannot have anemone, japonica, or chrysanthemums, has generally been a melancholy spectacle after the middle of September. Yet it is just at this time that our roadsides and woodland borders are the most beautiful. The answer isn't alone asters, but very largely. And nothing, I have discovered, is much easier to transplant than a New England aster, the showiest of the family. Within the confines of my own farm or its bordering woods are at least seven varieties of asters, and there are more within half a mile. They range in color from the deepest purple and lilac, through shades of blue, to white, and vary in height from the six feet my New Englands have attained in rich garden soil, to one foot. Moreover, by a little care, they can be so massed and alternated in a long border (such a border I have), as to pass in under heavy shade and out again into full sun, from a damp place to a dry place, and yet all be blooming at their best. With what other flower can you do that? And what other flower, at whatever price per dozen, will give you such abundance of beauty without a fear of frosts? I recently dug up a load of asters in bud, on a rainy day, and already they are in full bloom in their new garden places, without so much as a wilted leaf.