Writing the Garden. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
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Home of George Washington.” Old Time Gardens by Alice Morse Earle, 1901.
Like Thaxter, Earle had a literary bent, and Old Time Gardens is laced with many quotations and verses of poetry. Here, in words reminiscent of Thaxter’s, she singles out the poppy for poetic praise:
There is something very fine about a Poppy, in the extraordinary combination of boldness of color and great size with its slender delicacy of stem, the grace of the set of the beautiful buds, the fine turn of the flower as it opens, and the wonderful airiness of poise of so heavy a flower. The silkiness of tissue of the petals, and their semi-transparency in some colors, and the delicate fringes of some varieties, are great charms.
Each crumpled crêpe-like leaf is soft as silk;
Long, long ago the children saw them there,
Scarlet and rose, with fringes white as milk,
And called them ‘shawls for fairies’ dainty wear’;
They were not finer, those laid safe away
In that low attic, neath the brown, warm eaves.
And when the flowers have shed, oh, so lightly! their silken petals, there is still another beauty, a seed vessel of such classic shape that it wears a crown.
It is not surprising that Earle devotes an entire chapter to “Childhood in a Garden.” She promoted her belief that “the intense enjoyment of nature is a sixth sense” with this explanation:
We are not born with this good gift, nor do we often acquire it in later life; it comes through our rearing. The fullness of delight in a garden is the bequest of childhood spent in a garden. No study or possession of flowers in mature years can afford gratification equal to that conferred by childish associations with them; by the sudden recollection of flower lore, the memory of child friendships, the recalling of games or toys made of flowers; you cannot explain it; it seems a concentration, an extract of all the sunshine and beauty of those happy summers of our lives when the whole day and every day was spent among flowers. The sober have grown up knowing not when ‘the summer comes with bee and flower.’
Recalling her own childhood in the garden in “ ‘little cubby houses’ under the close-growing stems of Lilac and Syringa, with an old thick shawl outspread on the damp earth for a carpet,” she says:
Let us peer into these garden thickets at these happy little girls, fantastic in the garden dress. Their hair is hung thick with Dandelion curls, made from pale green opal-tinted stems that have grown long under shrubbery and Box borders. Around their necks are childish wampum, strings of Dandelion beads or Daisy chains. More delicate wreaths for the neck and hair were made from the blossoms of the Four-o’clock or the petals of Phlox or Lilacs, threaded with pretty alteration of color. Fuchsias were hung at the ears for eardrops, green leaves were pinned with leaf stems into little caps and bonnets and aprons, Foxgloves made dainty children’s gloves. Truly the garden-bred child went in gay attire.
There were sensory as well as sartorial experiences to be savored. Earle confides, “I never walk through an old garden without wishing to nibble and browse the leaves and stems which I ate as a child, without sucking a drop of honey from certain flowers. I do it not with intent, but I waken to realization with the petal of Trumpet of Honeysuckle in my hand and its drop of ambrosia on my lips.”
“The Children’s Garden.” Old Time Gardens by Alice Morse Earle, 1901.
Calling our attention to one illustration, she writes:
[This] is a glimpse of a Box-edged garden in Worcester, whose blossoming has been a delight to me every summer of my entire life. In my childhood this home was that of flower-loving neighbors who had an established and constant system of exchange with my mother and other neighbors of flowers, plants, seeds, slips, and bulbs. The garden was serene with an atmosphere of worthy old age; you wondered how any man so old could so constantly plant, weed, prune, and hoe until you saw how he loved his flowers, and how his wife loved them. The Roses, Peonies, and Flower de Luce in this garden were sixty years old, and the Box also; the shrubs are almost trees. . . . Here bloom Crocuses, Snowdrops, Grape Hyacinths, and sometimes Tulips, before any neighbor has a blossom and scarce a leaf. On a Sunday noon in April there are always flower lovers hanging over the low fences, and gazing at the welcome early blooms. Here if ever,
‘Winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring.’
A close cloud of Box-scent hangs over this garden, even in midwinter; sometimes the Box edgings grow until no one can walk between; then drastic measures have to be taken, and the rows look ragged for a time.
“An Old Worcester Garden.” Old Time Gardens by Alice Morse Earle, 1901.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941), an English novelist, became famous for her first book, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), which was so immediately popular that it ran to twenty printings in the initial year of its publication. Couched in the form of a diary, it describes the free-spirited author’s efforts to become a gardener in the face of the mores of aristocratic society in provincial Germany and the duties imposed on her as the mistress of her husband’s large Pomeranian estate.
Elizabeth, a nom de plume devoid of a surname (her maiden name was Mary Annette Beauchamp), was forced to disguise her identity at the request of her domineering husband, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, whom she refers to throughout her book as the “Man of Wrath.” Some readers today will object to her high-handed treatment of servants and censorious attitude toward most of her visitors. To her credit, “German Elizabeth,” as she became known to readers, scolds herself for being disagreeable when in pursuit of escape from the strictures of the Man of Wrath and the household responsibilities and social demands that take her away from her beloved garden:
The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter, not the house. In the house are duties and annoyances, servants to exhort and admonish, furniture, and meals; but out there blessings crowd around me at every step—it is there that I am sorry for the unkindness in me, for those selfish thoughts that are so much worse than they feel; it is there that all my sins and silliness are forgiven, there that I feel protected and at home, and every flower and weed is a friend and every tree a lover. When I have been vexed I run out to them for comfort, and when I have been angry without just cause, it is there that I find absolution. Did ever a woman have so many friends?
In addition to skirting the Man of Wrath’s disapproval of the solitary hours she spends in blissful retreat in the garden, sometimes surrounded by her little ones—“the April baby, the May baby, the June baby”—rather than inside overseeing the domestic staff and the workers who are restoring the large old nunnery that serves as their family castle, Elizabeth must overcome her horticultural ignorance and accomplish the creation of her German paradise in the face of the gardener’s stubborn insistence on laying out single plant varieties in regimented rows. The novice gardener can identify with her cheerful account of failed and successful experiments with different plant varieties and women readers with her spirit of subversive independence. We can all enjoy her joie de vivre as she revels in the scenery of nature when taking friends in a sleigh for a winter picnic beside the Baltic:
The Man of Wrath loathes picnics, and has no eye for nature and frozen seas, and is simply bored by a long drive through a forest that does not belong to him; a single turnip on his own place is more admirable in his eyes than the tallest, pinkest, straightest pine that ever reared its snow-crowned head against the setting sunlight. . . . He went once and only once to this particular place, and made us feel so small by his blasé behavior that I never invite him now. It is a beautiful spot, endless forest stretching along the shore as far as the eye can reach; and after driving through it for miles you come suddenly