Blue garden scillas and wild white saxifrage.
Black-birch catkins and wind-flowers.
Plants of the various wild violets, according to season, arranged in an earthen pan with a moss or bark covering.
Old-fashioned myrtle, with its glossy leaves, and single narcissus, or English primroses.
Bleeding-heart and young ferns.
English border primroses in small rose bowls.
Lilies-of-the-valley, with plenty of their own leaves, and poets"
narcissus.
Tulip-tree flowers and leaves.
The wild red-and-gold columbine with young white-birch sprays.
Pinxter flower and the New York or wood fern.
Jack-in-the-pulpit with its own leaves, in a bark or moss covered jar.
Pink moccasin-flowers with ferns, in bark-covered jar.
Pansies with ivy or laurel leaves, arranged in narrow dishes to form a parterre about a central mirror.
Iceland poppies with small ferns or gra.s.ses.
May pinks and forget-me-nots.
Blue larkspurs and deutzia (always put white with blue flowers).
Peonies with evergreen ferns, in a central jar.
Sweet-william, arranged in separate colours for parterre effect or in a large blue-and-white bowl, with graceful sprays of honeysuckle flowers.
Wild roses with plenty of buds and foliage, in blue-and-white bowls.
Roses in large sprays with branches of the young leaves of copper beech--or ma.s.ses of Chinese honeysuckle.
Roses with short stems arranged with their own or _rugosa_ foliage in blue-and-white dishes that have coa.r.s.e wire netting fitted to the top to keep the flowers in place.
White field daisies, clover, and flowering gra.s.ses, in a large bowl or jar.
Mountain laurel with its own leaves, in central jar and parterre dishes.
Nasturtiums, in cut-gla.s.s bowl or vase, with the foliage of lemon verbena.
Sweet peas of five colours with a fringe of maiden-hair ferns, the deepest colour in a central jar, with other smaller bowls at corners, and small ferns laid around mirror and on cloth between.
j.a.pan lilies, single flowers, in parterre dishes with ivy leaves, and sprays in central vase.
Balsams arranged in effect of set borders.
Asters in separate colours.
Spotted-leaved pipsissewa of the woods with fern border, in bark-covered dish.
Red and gold bell meadow lilies, in large jar, with field gra.s.ses.
Gladioli--the flowers separated from the stalks and arranged with various leaves for parterre effect, or stalks laid upon the cloth with evergreen ferns to separate the places at a formal meal.
Sweet sultan, in separate colours, in rose bowls, with fragrant geranium or lemon-verbena foliage.
Shirly poppies with gra.s.ses or green rye, in four slender vases about a larger centrepiece.
Margaret or picotee carnations with mignonette, arranged loosely in a cut-gla.s.s vase or bowl.
Green rye, wheat, or oats with the blue garden cornflower--or wild blue chickory.
Wild asters with heavy ta.s.selled marsh-gra.s.ses.
Goldenrods with purple iron weed and vines of wild white clematis, arranged about a flat dish of peaches and pears.
All through autumn place your central mirror on a mat made by laying freshly gathered coloured leaves upon the cloth.
Wallflowers and late pansies.
White j.a.panese anemonies and ferns.
Gra.s.s of Parna.s.sus, ladies tresses, and marsh shield ferns.
Garden chrysanthemums, in blue-and-white jars and bowls, on a large mat of brown magnolia leaves.
Sprays of yellow witch-hazel flowers and leaves of red oak.
Sprays of coral winterberry, from which leaves have been removed, and white-pine ta.s.sels.
Club-mosses, small evergreen ferns, and partridge vine with its red berries, in a bark-covered dish of earth.
XI
A SEASIDE GARDEN
(Barbara Campbell to Mary Penrose)
_Gray Rocks, July 19._ Your epistle upon the evils of an excess of flowers in the house found us here with the Cortrights and Bradfords, and I read it with Lavinia and Sylvia on either side, as the theme had many notes in it familiar to us all! There are certainly times and seasons when the impulse is overpowering to lay hold of every flower that comes in the way and gather it to one"s self, to cram every possible nook and corner with this portable form of beauty and fairly indulge in a flower orgie. Then sets in a reaction that shows, as in so many things, the middle path is the best for every day. Also there are many enthusiastic gardeners, both among those who grow their own flowers and those who cause them to be grown, who spare neither pains nor money until the flowers are gathered; then their grip relaxes, and the house arrangement of the fruit of their labour is left to chance.
In many cases, where a professional gardener is in charge, several baskets, containing a confused ma.s.s of blossoms, are deposited daily in porch or pantry, often at a time when the mistress is busy, and they are either overlooked or at the last moment crammed into the first receptacle that comes to hand, from their very inopportuneness creating almost a feeling of dislike.
When once lodged, they are frequently left to their fate until they become fairly noisome, for is there anything more offensive to aesthetic taste than blackened and decaying flowers soaking in stagnant water?
Was it not Auerbach, in his _Poet and Merchant_, who said, "The lovelier a thing is in its perfection, the more terrible it becomes through its corruption"? and certainly this applies to flowers.
Flowers, like all of the best and lasting pleasures, must be taken a little seriously from the sowing of the seed to the placing in the vase, that they may become the incense of home, and the most satisfactory way of choosing them for this use is to make a daily tour about the garden, or, if a change is desired, through the fields and highways, and, with the particular nook you wish to fill in mind, gather them yourself.
Even the woman with too wide a selection to gather from personally can in this way indicate what she wishes.
In the vegetable garden the wise man thinks out his crop and arranges a variety for the table; no one wishes every vegetable known to the season every day, and why should not the eye be educated and nourished by an equal variety?
We are all very much interested in your flower-holders of natural wood, and I will offer you an idea in exchange, after the truly cooperative Garden, You, and I plan. In the flower season, instead of using your embroidered centrepieces for the table, which become easily stained and defaced by having flowers laid upon them, make several artistic table centres of looking-gla.s.s, bark, moss, or a combination of all three.
Lavinia Cortright and I, as a beginning, have oval mirrors of about eighteen inches in length, with invisibly narrow nickel bindings.
Sometimes we use these with merely an edge of flowers or leaves and a crystal basket or other low arrangement of flowers in the centre. The gla.s.s is only a beginning, other combinations being a birch-bark mat, several inches wider than the gla.s.s, that may be used under it so that a wide border shows, or the mat by itself as a background for delicate wood flowers and ferns. A third mat I have made of stout cardboard and covered with lichens, reindeer moss, and bits of mossy bark, and I never go to the woods but what I see a score of things that fairly thrust themselves before me and offer to blend with one of these backgrounds, and by holding the eye help to render meal-times less "foody," as Sukey Latham puts it, though none the less nourishing.
Last night when we gathered at dinner, a few moments after our arrival and our first meeting at this cottage, I at once became aware that though host and hostess were the same delightful couple, we were not dining at Meadow"s End, their Oaklands cottage, but at Gray Rocks, with silver sea instead of green gra.s.s below the windows. While the sea surroundings were brought indoors and on the centre of the dinner table the mirror was edged by a border of sea-sand, glistening pebbles and little sh.e.l.ls were arranged as a background instead of mosses and lichens, and rich brown seaweeds still moist with the astringent tonic sea breath edged this frame, and the more delicate rose-coloured and pale green weeds seemed floating upon the gla.s.s, that held a giant periwinkle sh.e.l.l filled with the pink star-shaped sabbatia, or sea pink, of the near-by salt marshes. There was no effort, no strain after effect, but a consistent preparation of the eye for the simple meal of sea food that followed.
In front of the cottage the rocks slope quickly to the beach, but on either side there is a stretch of sand pocketed among the rocks, and in the back a dune stops abruptly at the margin of wide salt meadows, creek-fed and unctuous, as befits the natural gardens of the sea.
The other cottages lying to the eastward are gay in red-and-white striped awnings, and porch and window boxes painted red or green are filled with geraniums, nasturtiums, petunias,--any flowers, in short, that will thrive in the broiling sun, while some of the owners have planted buoy-like barrels at the four corners of their enclosures and filled them with the same a.s.sortment of foliage plants with which they would decorate a village lawn. This use of flowers seemed at once to draw the coolness from the easterly breeze and intensify the heat that vibrates from the sand.
Have you ever noticed that the sea in these lat.i.tudes has no affinity for the brightest colours, save as it is a mirror for the fleeting flames of sunrise and sunset?
The sea-birds are blended tints of rock, sand, sky, and water, save the dash of coral in bill and foot of a few, just as the coral of the wild-rose hips blends with the tawny marsh-gra.s.ses. Scarlet is a colour abhorred even by the marshes, until late in autumn the blaze of samphire consumes them with long spreading tongues of flame. How can people be so senseless as to come seaward to cool their bodies, and yet so surround themselves with scarlet that it is never out of range of the eye?
Lavinia Cortright and the botanical Bradfords, as Evan calls them, because though equally lovers of flowers, they go further than some for the reason why that lies hid beneath the colour and perfume, have laid out and are still developing a sand garden that, while giving the cottage home the restful air that is a garden"s first claim, has still the distinct ident.i.ty of the sand and sea!
To begin, with one single exception, they have drawn upon the wild for this garden, even as you are doing in the restoration of your knoll.
Back of the cottage a dozen yards is a sand ridge covering some fairly good, though mongrel, loam, for here, as along most of the coasts of sounds and bays, the sea, year by year, has bitten into the soil and at the same time strewn it with sand. Considering this as the garden boundary, a windbreak of good-sized bayberry bushes has been placed there, not in a stiff line, but in blended groups, enclosing three sides, these bays being taken from a thicket of them farther toward the marshes.
An alley from the back porch into this enclosure is bordered on either side by bushes of beach plum, that, when covered with feathery white bloom in May, before the leaves appear, gives the sandy sh.o.r.e the only orchard touch it knows. Of course the flowering period is over when the usual sh.o.r.e season begins, though nowadays there is no off time--people go to sh.o.r.e and country when they are moved; yet the beach plum is a picturesque bush at any time, especially when, in September, it is loaded with the red purple fruit. In the two s.p.a.ces on either side the alley the sand is filled with ma.s.sed plants that, when a little more time has been given them for stretching and anchoring their roots, will straightway weave a flower mat upon the sand.
Down beyond the next point, one day last autumn, Horace and Sylvia found a plantation of our one New England cactus, the p.r.i.c.kly pear (_Opuntia opuntia_). We have it here and there in our rocky pasture; but in greater heat and with better underfeeding it seemed a bit of a tropical plain dropped on the eastern coast. Do you know the thing? The leaves are shaped like the fans of a lobster"s tail and sometimes are several-jointed, smooth except for occasional tufts of very treacherous spikes, and of a peculiar semitranslucent green; the half-double flowers set on the leaf edges are three inches across and of a brilliant sulphur-yellow, with ta.s.selled stamens; the fruit is fleshy, somewhat fig-shaped, and of a dark red when ripe--altogether a very decorative plant, though extremely difficult to handle.
After surveying the plantation on all sides, the tongs used by the oyster dredges suggested themselves to Horace, and thus grasped, the p.r.i.c.kly pears were safely moved and pegged in their new quarters with long pieces of bent wire, the giant equivalents of the useful hairpins that I recommended for pegging down your ferns.
Now the entire plot of several yards square, apparently untroubled by the removal, is in full bloom, and has been for well-nigh a month, they say, though the individual blossoms are but things of a day. Close by, another yellow flower, smaller but more pickable, is just now waving, the rock rose or frostweed, bearing two sorts of flowers: the conspicuous yellow ones, somewhat resembling small evening primroses, while all the ground between is covered with an humble member of the rock rose family--the tufted beach heather with its intricate branches, reminding one more of a club-moss than a true flowering plant. Not a sc.r.a.p of sand in the enclosure is left uncovered, and the various plants are set closely, like the gra.s.ses and wild flowers of a meadow, the sand pinweed that we gather, together with sea lavender, for winter bouquets much resembling a flowering gra.s.s.
The rabbit-foot clover takes kindly to the sandy soil, and, as it flowers from late May well into September, and holds its little furry tails like autumn p.u.s.s.y-willows until freezing weather, makes a very interesting sort of bed all by itself, and ma.s.sed close to it, as if recognizing the family relationship, is the little creeping bush clover with its purplish flowers.