Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set ForthEarle, Alice Morse
History
Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth
Earle, Alice Morse
Gardens; Landscape gardening
We used to catch bumblebees in the Canterbury Bells, and hear them buzz
and bump and tear their way out to liberty. We held the edges of the
flower tightly pinched together, and were never stung. Besides its
adaptability as a toy for children, the Canterbury Bell was beloved for
its beauty in the garden. An appropriate folk name for it is
Fair-in-sight. Healthy clumps grow tall and stately, towering up as high
as childish heads; and the firm stalks are hung so closely in bloom.
Nowadays people plant expanses of Canterbury Bells; one at the
beautiful garden at White Birches, Elmhurst, Illinois, is shown on page
111. I do not like this as well as the planting in our home garden when
they are set in a mixed border, as shown opposite page 416. Our tastes
in the flower world are largely influenced by what we were wonted to in
childhood, not only in the selection of flowers, but in their placing in
our gardens. The Canterbury Bell has historical interest through its
being named for the bells borne by pilgrims to the shrine at Canterbury.
I have been delighted to see plants of these sturdy garden favorites
offered for sale of late years in New York streets in springtime, by
street venders, who now show a tendency to throw aside Callas, Lilies,
Tuberoses, and flowers of such ilk, and substitute shrubs and seedlings
of hardy growth and satisfactory flowering. But it filled me with
regret, to hear the pretty historic name--Canterbury Bells--changed in
so short a residence in the city, by these Italian and German tongues to
Gingerbread Bells--a sad debasement. Native New Englanders have seldom
forgotten or altered an old flower name, and very rarely transferred it
to another plant, even in two centuries of everyday usage. But I am glad
to know that the flower will bloom in the flower pot or soap box in the
dingy window of the city poor, or in the square foot of earth of the
city squatter, even if it be called Gingerbread Bells.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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