A Year in a Lancashire Garden Part 3

The Snowflakes have been flowering abundantly, but they are now pa.s.sing.

The Greek name for the Snowflake is the Leucoion--literally the white Violet--and I think it possible that in a pa.s.sage of Ovid, where he speaks of the Violet, the Poppy, and the Lily being broken by a storm, he is really thinking of the Snowflake. I am satisfied, as I have already said, that the _Iris_ is never (as Lord Stanhope a.s.serted) called the Violet.

My Auriculas are not as good as they should be in a Lancas.h.i.+re garden, for of all flowers it is the old Lancas.h.i.+re favourite. It is still known as the Basier (a corruption, no doubt, of Bear's Ear), and a pretty Lancas.h.i.+re ballad ends every verse with the refrain,

"For the Basiers are sweet in the morning of May."

The old-fas.h.i.+oned Columbine is in full bloom, as is also the Aquilegia glandulosa. I have planted the Aquilegia coerulea, but both the plant and some seeds which I have sown have failed me, and I half fear I may never be successful with this finest of the Columbines. Before I leave the Columbine, let me mention a mistake in one of Jean Ingelow's very prettiest poems, which her _literary_ critics seem never to have detected. She says--

"O Columbine, open your folded wrapper, Where two twin turtle-doves dwell."

But she is confusing the Columbine with the Monk's Hood. The doves of the Columbine cl.u.s.ter round the centre like the doves of Pliny's vase.

The doves of the Monk's Hood are only seen as you remove the "wrapper,"

and then the old idea was that they are drawing a "Venus' chariot."

The accidental grouping of plants on a mixed border is often very happy.

A week or two back I found growing out of a tuft of Forget-me-not a plant of the Black Fritillary. The blue eyes of the Forget-me-not seemed to be looking up into the hanging bells of the Fritillary, and were a pleasant contrast to the red-brown of its petals. Gerarde's name for the Fritillary was the "Turkie or Ginnie-hen Flower," and the name of the Fritillary was itself derived from the _fritillus_ or dice-box, which the common Fritillary was supposed to resemble in its markings.

In the middle of each group of beds, which the gra.s.s walk divides, is a circular bed full of American shrubs. Among these shrubs are several rather fine Kalmias. Very often they do not flower at all, or at best bear a bloom only here and there. This year they are laden with blossom, which is now just ready to burst, and I shall have a show of Kalmia flowers such as I have not seen, since two-and-twenty years ago, I wandered among the Kalmia brakes in the forests of Virginia; and the flower is so beautiful--pink outside, and, as Ruskin says, inside "like the beating out of bosses in hollow silver, beaten out apparently in each petal by the stamens instead of a hammer."

Another bed, which will be very effective in a day or two, is a bed of the double Persian Brier, pegged and trained. The festoons of yellow buds are all but out, and will be one ma.s.s of sweet and lovely little Roses.

The Nemophila bed has done very well, but we did not plant it as thickly as we should have done, and there are bare places here and there.

I have still to mention the great bushes, or rather trees, of Hawthorn, of which some stand in front of the dining-room windows, while others fling their perfume across the hedge that divides the garden and the croft. There is another Lancas.h.i.+re May song, from which I cannot but quote a few lines, as it is but little known. The Mayers come to the door and sing (or sang, rather, for the custom no longer holds with us):--

"We have been rambling all this night, And almost all this day; And now, returned back again, We've brought you a branch of May.

A branch of May we have brought you, And at your door it stands; It is but a sprout, but it's well budded out, By the work of our Lord's hands."

VII.

The Summer Garden--The Buddleia--Ghent Azaleas--The Mixed Borders--Roses--The Green Rose.

_July 13._--There is a longer interval than usual since my last notes; but I have been away among the Soldanellas and the Gentians of Switzerland, and I have had to leave my garden to the gardener's care.

Now that I have returned, I find how much has gone on, and how much I must have missed. The Nemophila bed, I hear, gradually filled up and became a perfect sheet of brilliant blue. The Anemone bed was very good, and that of Ranunculus very fair; but best of all, as I knew it would be, was the bed of Brier Roses, with their trained branches laden with sweet little yellow blossoms.

The Kalmias too are over, and the alpine Rhododendrons (Roses des Alpes) are also nearly at an end; but I have just found them wild upon the Wengern Alp, and that must be my consolation. There is nothing I am more sorry to have missed than the great shrub--almost tree--of Buddleia globosa, which grows in the centre of one of the herbaceous borders. It has been, as it always is, covered with its golden b.a.l.l.s, smelling of honey, and recalling an old garden in Somersets.h.i.+re which I knew years ago. It is certainly true that nothing calls up a.s.sociations of the past as does the sense of smell. A whiff of perfume stealing through the air, or entering into an open window, and one is reminded of some far-off place on some long-past day when the same perfume floated along, and for one single moment the past will seem more real than the present. The Buddleia, the Magnolia, and one or two other flowers always have this power over me.

I have still one Azalea, and only one, in blossom; it has a small and very fragrant white flower.

I have been lately reading several articles about the fly-catching flowers. Is it generally known that no fly-catcher is more cruel and more greedy than the common Ghent Azalea, especially, I think, the large sweet yellow one? On one single blossom, which I gathered just before leaving home, at the end of May, I found no less than six flies; four of them were quite dead, and of one or two nothing remained but a shred of wing. Two others were still alive, but the Azalea had already nearly drained their life away, and held them so tightly with its viscid hairs that I could hardly release them from its grasp. On the other blossoms in the truss were other flies, three, four, or five; so that the entire Azalea shrub had probably caught some hundreds.[4]

[4] See note II. on the Azalea viscosa.

The mixed borders are almost past their best,--at least the hairy red Poppy, the day Lily, and the early purple Gladiolus are over, and, of course, the Irises and Paeonies. At present various Canterbury Bells, Valerian (which I saw bedded out the other day at Liege), and the white and orange Lily, are the gayest things we have. There is a Mullein, too, which is well worth a corner in any garden. Not long since I saw, in some book of rambles through our southern counties, the spire of a cathedral with its pinnacles and crockets compared to a spike of Mullein flower. It is certainly the Mullein (the distinctive name of which I do not know) which is now in bloom with me; and, indeed, the resemblance had occurred to me before I had read the book.

But I hardly care to linger over other flowers, when the Rose-beds are in their fullest splendour. The summer Roses must have been better a fortnight back, but the perpetuals are as good as can be, and many of the summer Roses yet remain. I sometimes fear that the pa.s.sion for large, well-formed blossoms, and the desire of novelty, will make some of the dear old Roses of our childhood pa.s.s into entire neglect; yet, when we think of a Rose, of which any poet has written, it will not be La France, or Senateur Vaisse, or Alfred Colomb--beautiful as they are.

When Herrick warns us--

"Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may,"

or when Hood tells us--

"It was the month of Roses, We plucked them as we pa.s.sed,"

--their Roses were other than the favourite Roses of to-day. Perhaps they were the old Cabbage Rose, a great bush of which grows next to a bed of Lavender, and pleasantly scents the garden as you enter it.

Perhaps they were the Portland Rose, of which I have some three beds, and than which no Rose is better for the making of Pot Pourri, as the young ladies in Mr. Leslie's picture may learn to their advantage.

Perhaps they were the Moss Rose, with its mossed buds and fragrant blossoms, of which I have another bed entirely for itself. Perhaps they were the Maiden Blush, or the York and Lancaster, or the sweet old China, with its pink sh.e.l.l petals, which comes so soon and lingers on so late--the last Rose, not of summer but of autumn.[5] Then there are other old Roses which should not be neglected. The Rose Unique, which is a white Cabbage Rose, is one; the Rose Celeste, the thin delicate buds of which are so beautiful, is another. Then there is the little Rose de Meaux, and the old Damask, which indeed seems to have nearly disappeared.

[5] It is mentioned in the _Baroness Bunsen's Life_ how Mrs. Delany loved to fill her china bowls with the pink buds of the Monthly Rose, surrounded by sea-green shoots of the young Lavender.

It must have been one of these Roses, be sure, and not a Tea or a perpetual, which Lady Corisande finds in her garden for Lothair.

Not of course that we are not grateful for the new Roses, with their brilliant colouring and their perfect form, but we are unwilling that the old should be forgotten. The Gloire de Dijon and General Jaqueminot seem to me the most vigorous and most useful, if not the finest; but I have two old standards which are at the moment more effective than anything I have. One is Boule de Nantes, the other an old summer Rose, the name of which I do not know, but which, when fully out, much resembles the Comtesse de Jaucourt. They are not trained in any way, and I find, measuring round their heads, that one has a circ.u.mference of 12 feet, and the other of 12-1/2 feet. In the South of England it is no doubt different, but for us these are large dimensions; and certainly nothing I now get from the nursery gardens seems inclined to attain to half the size.

There is one Rose in my garden which flourishes abundantly, but which is the only Rose, of which I should decline to give a cutting. It is so ugly that it is worth nothing, except as a curiosity; and if it ceased to be a curiosity it would be quite valueless. It is a _green_ Rose. I got a small plant from Baltimore, in America, some years ago, and I find it perfectly hardy. It flowers very freely, and all through the summer; the bud is a perfect Rose bud in appearance, but the open flower shows that the Rose is of monstrous and not natural growth; the petals are, it seems to me, no real petals at all, but an expansion of the green heart, which often appears in Roses, and which has here been so cultivated as to take the place of the natural Rose. These petals are coa.r.s.e and irregular, and have serrated edges, with a very faint scent.[6]

[6] Mr. Buist, of the Rosedale Nurseries, Philadelphia, has since written to the _Gardeners' Chronicle_ on the origin of the Green Rose:--"There appears to be some uncertainty in regard to the origin of this Rose. It is a sport from Rosa Indica (the China Rose of England and Daily Rose of America). It was caught in Charleston, S.C., about 1833, and came to Baltimore through Mr. R. Halliday, from whom I obtained it, and presented two plants to my old friend, Thomas Rivers, in 1837."

How the Rose twines itself around all history and all literature! There are the Rose gardens of Persia, and the loves of the Rose and nightingale; there are those famous Roses once plucked in the Temple Garden, of which "the pale and b.l.o.o.d.y petals" (to use a fine expression of Hawthorne's) were strewed over many an English battle-field; there is the golden Rose which the Pope gives as the best of gifts to the foremost among Catholic monarchs--emblem at once of a fading earthly life, and of the unfading life in heaven.

Of English poets is there one, who does not celebrate the Rose, and of all is there one, who draws from it a more tender morality than Waller in "Go, lovely Rose"?

But no nation ever loved the Rose as did the Greeks, and it was _their_ legend that told us how the Rose sprang to birth. Bion's "Lament for Adonis" has been translated by Mrs. Browning, and I know no translation equal to it in general fidelity and vigour of expression. It appears to me, on the whole, perhaps the very best translation in the language.

Here are the lines which tell this part of the story:--

"Ah, ah, Cytherea! Adonis is dead; She wept tear after tear with the blood which was shed, And both turned into flowers for the earth's garden close,-- Her tears to the Windflower, his blood to the Rose."

Another still more famous Greek poem about the Rose is one by Sappho, which Mrs. Browning has also most beautifully translated--a fit task, which unites the names of the two great poetesses of Greece and England.

The poem begins:--

"If Zeus chose us a king of the flowers in his mirth, He would call to the Rose and would royally crown it: For the Rose, ho! the Rose, is the grace of the earth; Is the light of the plants that are growing upon it."

No wonder the Greeks wove their wreaths of the Rose, or that "under the Rose" they pa.s.sed many a gay and happy hour, to be kept in memory, if untold in words.

My bedding-out is of course finished, but of this I must speak on the next occasion. The weather has been hot, and rain will now be welcome.

VIII.

The Fruit Crop--Hautbois Strawberries--Lilium Auratum--Sweet Williams--Carnations--The Bedding-out.

_August 15._--It is, I find, a dangerous thing to leave a garden masterless for even a month. The best of gardens will probably fall short in some respect, and I certainly discover several matters which would have been otherwise had I remained at home. My readers will hardly be interested by the details of my grievances; it is pleasanter to tell where we have been successful.