The Idyl of Twin Fires

  Chapter XXIII

  SPRING IN THE GARDEN

  The excitement of our first spring at Twin Fires will probably never beequalled in our lives, though no spring can recur in a garden without itsexcitements. But about our first spring there was a glorious thrillof the unexpected which, alas! can come but once. To begin with, it wasStella's initiation into rural April, and the feet of the south windwalking up the land brought hourly miracles to her sight. In the secondplace, everything in the garden was an experiment. The new hotbeds werean experiment. The bulbs and perennials sown the year before were anexperiment. The ramblers were an experiment. The fertilizers I put uponthe soil (more or less to Mike's disgust) were an experiment. We werelearning everything, and after all no rapture is quite like that oflearning.

  The last snow melted and the ice went out of the brook in March, but coldnasty weather followed for two weeks. We planted a row of Spencers onMarch 20th, but it was not till the first day of April that we couldspade up 200-foot long rows in the vegetable garden and plant earlypeas, which I inoculated with nitrogen-gathering bacteria while Mikelooked on with unconcealed scorn. I tried to explain the growing processof legumes to him, but gave up the task as hopeless.

  "Bugs!" he said. "Puttin' bugs in the soil! No good never came o'that. Manure's the thing."

  About this time, too, we started the hotbeds, a long row of them on thesouth side of the kitchen. The fresh manure cost us $2 a load, for,owning but one horse, we did not have enough in our stable; and, asStella said, the piles "steamed expensively," like small volcanoes,as they stood waiting in the sun after a warm, drenching shower. We wereall impatience to start our beds, but Mike kept us waiting till the soiltemperature had gone down. Then the sowing began. While Mike was puttingin his beds large quantities of cauliflowers, which had proved one ofour most profitable crops the year before, and celery and lettuce andtomatoes and peppers and radishes and cabbages, we divided our beds intoone-foot squares, and sowed our different colours of antirrhinum,asters, stock, _Phlox Drummondi_, cosmos, annual larkspur, heliotrope,and _Dimorphotheca Aurantiaca_, a plant chosen by Stella because shesaid the name irresistibly appealed to a philologist. Later we agreedthat that was about its only appeal.

  While the hotbeds were sprouting, demanding their daily water and nightlycover, there was the ploughing to be done, the perennial beds to beuncovered, the new beds by the pool to be made ready, more pruning to beaccomplished, and consequently more litter to be removed, birds to bewatched for excitedly, and crocus spears in the grass, and, of course,the little lawn beyond the pool to be sowed to grass, and some grassseeds worked into the sundial lawn, which was still thin and patchy.

  "Oh, I don't know which is the real sign of spring," said Stella, oneevening, as we wandered on the terrace before the south room and heardthe shrill chorus of the Hylas from our swamp. "Sometimes I think it'sthe Hylas, on the first warm evening; sometimes I think it's the foxsparrows who appeared suddenly the other day at 10.01 A.M. while youwere working, and began hippity-hopping all over the grass. Sometimes Ithink it's the soft coot-coot of our new hens in the sun. SometimesI think it's a crocus leaf. Sometimes I think it's the steaming manurepiles. Sometimes it seems to be the figures of Mike and Joe driving oldDobbin and the plough, against the sky and the lone pine, like a Milletpainting."

  "Lump them," I suggested. "It's all of them combined. In New Yorkit is when the soda fountains have to be extended over the toothbrushcounter."

  "New York!" sniffed Stella. "There _is_ no such place!"

  April flew past us on gauzy wings, and May came, with violets by ourbrook and in our pasture, and the trilliums we had transplanted theyear before burst into bud. Nearly all our perennials had come throughthe winter, thanks to the sixty-seven days of snow, and the one plantof blue May phlox which had survived its fall planting made us eagerfor a second trial, the next time in early spring. More sowings of peaswent into the ground. The sundial was set out. Hard Cider came to buildour pergola, and the clematis vines arrived to grow over it. The grapearbour along the west side of the sundial lawn was also built, of plainchestnut. The perennials were all moved to their permanent places, thebeds fertilized and trimmed.

  About the first of May, too, I took a tip from Luther Burbank and putearly corn into a mixture of leaf mould and fresh manure in a big box.When the time came the middle of the month for the first planting, myseeds had developed snaky white roots and stalks. Again to Mike'sdisgust, I made a long trench and put these sprouted seeds in thickly.In a couple of days they were up, and by the time his conventionallyplanted hills had sprouted, I had a long row of well-started corn whichI thinned out to the strongest stalks.

  "Now, Mike," said I, "I'll beat you and the town in the market."

  "Well, bedad, it beats all how you fellers that don't know nothin'about farmin' can do some things," he said, regarding my corn withcomical amazement.

  "That's because we are willing to learn," said I, and left him stilllooking at the six-inch high stalks.

  (Incidentally, I may remark that I did beat everybody in the market, andmade about $15 extra by my simple experiment.)

  But Stella's chief joy in the garden was in the surprises of theblooms: in the stately clumps of Darwins against the pillars of the roseaqueduct; in the golden bursts of daffodils here and there where we hadsown a few bulbs and forgotten the spot; in the _Narcissus poeticus_,which were in their element close to the brook and did verily look atthemselves in the tiny pool below the dam; in the pale gold ring ofthe great Empress narcissus bordering the iris spears around the largepool; above all, perhaps, in the maroon of the trilliums which we hadbrought home from that first wonderful walk in the woods. Not aloneher heart, but her feet, danced with the daffodils, and I could hearher of a morning as I worked, out in the garden singing or bringing ingreat bunches of blooms to decorate the house.

  On several afternoons we made further trips to the deep woods afterwild-flower plants, and set them in along our brook. The thrush hadreturned, the apple blossoms had made all the garden fragrant whilethe plants were budding (this year they were carefully sprayed twice,for, though it cost nearly as much to spray them as the entire value ofthe apples, one thing I cannot stand on my farm is poor or neglectedfruit; besides, the improved aspect of the trees themselves was worththe price). Now that their petals had fallen came the new fragrance,subtler but no less exquisite, of many flowers after May rain, of aspring brook running under pines, and near the house the pungent aromaof lilacs.

  Then came the German irises, like soldiers on parade, around the pool,and the bright lemon lilies in the shady dooryard. Scarce had the irisesbegun to fall when the foxgloves began to blossom, and all suddenly onemorning after a very warm night the sundial was surrounded by a statelyconclave of slender queens dressed in white and lavender, while morequeens marched down from the orchard to the pool, and yet more stoodagainst the shrubbery beyond it, or half hid the bare newness of ourgrape arbour.

  "I don't need to take digitalis internally for a heart stimulant!"cried Stella. "Oh, the lovely things! Quick, vases of them below theHiroshiges! Quick, your camera! Quick, come and look at them, come andsee the bees swinging in their bells!"

  "I suppose they are breakfast bells," said I.

  "This is no time for bad puns," she answered, dragging me swiftly downthrough the orchard, and up again to the sundial.

  Indeed, the June morning was beautiful, and the foxgloves ringing thewhite dial post above the fresh green of our lawn had an indescribableair of delicate stateliness in the sun. And they were murmurous withbees. Again and again that morning I looked up from my work and sawthem there, in the focussed sunlight, saw my wife hovering over them, sawbeyond them, through the rose arches, Mike and Joe at work on thefarm, saw still farther away the procession of my pines, and then the farhills and the blue sky. Again, at quiet evening, when a white-throatedsparrow and an oriole were competing in song, we watched the foxglovesturn to white ghosts glimmering in the dusk, we heard the bird songsd
ie away, the shrill of night insects arise, and then the tinkle ofour brook came into consciousness, as it ran ever riverward in the night.

  "The spring melts into summer," said Stella, "as gently as the littlebrook runs toward the sea. I wish it would linger, though. Oh, John,couldn't we build a dam and hold back the spring? A little pool ofspring forever in our garden?"

  "We shall have to make that pool within our hearts," said I.