by A. & C. Black
Once, I remember well, when I was hungering for a breath of country air, a woman, brown with the caresses of the wind and sun, brought the Spring to my door and sold it to me for a penny. The husky rough scent of those Primroses gave me news of Home that I longed to hear. When I had placed my flowers in a bowl and put them on the table where I worked, they told me stories of the lanes and woods, how thrushes sang, and the wild Cherry Blossom flaring delicately across the purpling trees.
A flower often will reclaim a mood when nothing else will bring it back.
To garden, to garner up the seasons in a little space, is part of every wise man’s philosophy. To sow the seeds, to watch the tender shoots come out and brave the light and rain, to see the buds lift up their heads, and then to catch one’s breath as the flowers open and display their precious colors, living, breathing jewels, is enough to live for. But there is more than that. A man may choose the feast to spread before his eyes, may sow old memories and see them grow, and feel the answering colors in his heart. This Rose he used to pass on his way to school; it nodded to him over the high red wall, while next to it a Purple Clematis clung, arching over, so that, by standing on his pile of school-books, he could reach the flowers. This patch of Golden Marigolds reminds him of a long border in the garden where he spent his boyhood (they used to grow behind the bee skeps, had a little place to themselves next to the Horseradish and the early Lettuces).
There’s a hedge of Lavender full of association, he may remember how he was allowed (or was it set him for a task?) to cut great sheaves of it and take them to the Apple-room, and hang them up to dry over old newspapers. To look at Lavender brings back the curious musty smell of that store-room, where Apples wintered on long shelves; where the lawn-mower stood, and the brooms, and the scythe (to cut the orchard grass), and untidy bundles of bass hung with string and coils of wire. What a wonderful place that store-room was, with the broken door and the rusty lock that creaked as the big key turned to let him in: to reach the latch he had to stand on tip-toe, and to turn the key seemed quite a grown-up task. There was all a garden needs stored in that room. It had been a dining-room once, a hundred years ago, a room where the members of a bowling club convivially met and fought old games; bias, twist, jack, all the terms ring in his ears, even the click of the bowls, sharp on the summer air, comes back; and the plastered ornamental ceiling had sagged and dropped away here and there, showing the laths.
There was a big dusty window, across which the twisted arms of a Wisteria stretched, and a broken window seat in it that opened like a box to hold the bowls. Just the hedge of Lavender brings back the picture of the boy whose cherished dreams hung about those four walls; who, having strung his bunches, neatly tied, on wooden pegs along the walls, and spread his papers underneath to catch the falling seeds, sat, book in hand, and traveled into foreign lands with Mungo Park. There, on his left, and facing him as well, shelves lined the walls, and Pears, Apples and Medlars were arranged in rows, while by his side, placed on the window ledge to catch the sun, were fallen Nectarines, Peaches and big yellow Plums set to ripen.
What curious things a garden store-room holds! The tins, slopped over, of weed-killer, of patent plant foods, of fine white sand. The twisted string, cris-crossed upon a peg of wood, covered with whitewash, the string that serves to guide the marker for the tennis-court. Then an array of nets to cover Currant bushes, and bid birds beware of Gooseberries, Cherries and ripe Strawberries. A barrow, full of odds and ends, baskets, queer little bags of seeds, a heap of Groundsel gathered for a bird and lying there forgotten. Like a Dutch picture, half in gloom with bright lights on the shears, and along the edge of the scythe, and on the curved wire mesh made to guard young seedlings. Empty seed packets on the floor, bright colored pictures of the flowers on the outsides, a little soiled by the earth and the gardener’s thumb.
Plant memories, indeed! A man may plant a host of them and never then recapture all his joys. There’s his first love garnishing a rustic arch, a deep yellow Rose, beautiful in the bud—William Allen Richardson: she wore them in her sash. He can laugh now and see the long yellow hair floating in a cloud behind her as she ran, and the twinkling black legs, and the merry pretty face looking down on him from between the leaves of the Apple-tree she climbed. He grows that Apple in his orchard now, and toasts her memory when the first ripe fruit of it shines on the dish before him at dessert.
The Clove Carnation with its spice-like scent he bought from a barrow in a London slum, brought with care—wrapped in paper on the rack of the railway carriage—and planted it here. This Picotee he hailed with joy in the flower-market at Saint Malo and carried it across the sea, each bloom tied up to a friendly length of cane. His neighbors marvel at his pains, but it recalls many a happy day to him.
There, in a corner under a nut-tree, is a grass bank thick with Primrose plants—another memory. A picture comes to him from the Primroses very clear, very distinct, a picture of the world gone black, of a day when a boy thought heaven and earth purposeless, cruel; when he ran from a garden to the woods and threw himself on a bank, covered with Primroses, sobbing and weeping till the world was blotted out with his tears, because his dog had died. It had been the first thing he had learned to love, the first thing he had had to care for, to look after. All his childish ideas were whispered into the big retriever’s silky coat. They had secret understandings, a different language, ideas in common, and the dog’s death was his first hint of death in the world. Years after, when he planted this garden, he gave a place to Don, and planted the Primroses himself. The earth was kindly and the flowers flourished. The earth is kindly, even your cynic knows that and marks the spot where he hopes to lie, and thinks, not sourly, of the Daisies over his head.
There is something more than memory in a garden. There is that urgent need man has to be part of growing life. He must have open spaces, he takes health from the sight of a tree in bud, from the sight of a newly plowed field, from a plant or so in a window-box, a flower in his button-hole. Men, who by a thousand ties are held at desks in cities, look up and hear a caged thrush sing, and their thoughts fly out to fields and the common wayside flowers, and, for a moment, the offices are filled with the perfume—indescribable—of the open road.