Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set ForthEarle, Alice Morse
History
Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth
Earle, Alice Morse
Gardens; Landscape gardening
Gardens fanciful of name, a Saint's Garden, a Friendship Garden, have
been planted and cherished. I plant a garden like none other; not an
everyday garden, nor indeed a garden of any day, but a garden for "brave
moonshine," a garden of twilight opening and midnight bloom, a garden of
nocturnal blossoms, a garden of white blossoms, and the sweetest garden
in the world. It is a garden of my dreams, but I know where it lies, and
it now is smiling back at this very harvest moon.
The old house of Hon. Ben. Perley Poore--Indian Hill--at Newburyport,
Massachusetts, has been for many years one of the loveliest of New
England's homes. During his lifetime it had extraordinary charms, for on
the noble hillside, where grew scattered in sunny fields and pastures
every variety of native tree that would winter New England's snow and
ice, there were vast herds of snow-white cows, and flocks of white
sheep, and the splendid oxen were white. White pigeons circled in the
air around ample dove-cotes, and the farmyard poultry were all white; an
enthusiastic chronicler recounts also white peacocks on the wall, but
these are also denied.
On every side were old terraced walls covered with Roses and flowering
vines, banked with shrubs, and standing in beds of old-time flowers
running over with bloom; but behind the house, stretching up the lovely
hillside, was The Garden, and when we entered it, lo! it was a White
Garden with edgings of pure and seemly white Candytuft from the forcing
beds, and flowers of Spring Snowflake and Star of Bethlehem and
Jonquils; and there were white-flowered shrubs of spring, the earliest
Spiraeas and Deutzias; the doubled-flowered Cherries and Almonds and old
favorites, such as Peter's Wreath, all white and wonderfully expressive
of a simplicity, a purity, a closeness to nature.
I saw this lovely farmstead and radiant White Garden first in glowing
sunlight, but far rarer must have been its charm in moonlight; though
the white beasts (as English hinds call cattle) were sleeping in careful
shelter; and the white dog, assured of their safety, was silent; and the
white fowl were in coop and cote; and
"Only the white sheep were sometimes seen
To cross the strips of moon-blanch'd green."
But the White Garden, ah! then the garden truly lived; it was like
lightest snow wreaths bathed in silvery moonshine, with every radiant
flower adoring the moon with wide-open eyes, and pouring forth incense
at her altar. And it was peopled with shadowy forms shaped of pearly
mists and dews; and white night moths bore messages for them from flower
to flower--this garden then was the garden of my dreams.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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