Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set ForthEarle, Alice Morse
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Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth
Earle, Alice Morse
Gardens; Landscape gardening
The greatest beauty of this flower is in late autumn, when it springs up
densely in shaven fields. I have seen, during the last week in October,
fields entirely filled with its exquisite sulphur-yellow tint, one of
the most delicate colors in nature; a yellow that is luminous at night,
and is rivalled only by the pale yellow translucent leaves of the
Moosewood in late autumn, which make such a strange pallid light in old
forests in the North--a light which dominates over every other autumn
tint, though the trees which bear them are so spindling and low, and
little noted save in early spring in their rare pinkness, and in this
their autumn etherealization. And the Moosewood shares the mystery of
the Butter-and-eggs as well as its color. I should be afraid to drive or
walk alone in a wood road, when the Moosewood leaves were turning yellow
in autumn. I shall never forget them in Dublin, New Hampshire, driving
through what our delightful Yankee charioteer and guide called "only a
cat-road."
This was to me a new use of the word cat as a praenomen, though I knew,
as did Dr. Holmes and Hosea Biglow, and every good New Englander, that
"cat-sticks" were poor spindling sticks, either growing or in a load of
cut wood. I heard a country parson say as he regarded ruefully a gift of
a sled load of firewood, "The deacon's load is all cat-sticks." Of
course a cat-stick was also the stick used in the game of ball called
tip-cat. Myself when young did much practise another loved ball game,
"one old cat," a local favorite, perhaps a local name. "Cat-ice," too,
is a good old New England word and thing; it is the thin layer of
brittle ice formed over puddles, from under which the water has
afterward receded. If there lives a New Englander too old or too hurried
to rejoice in stepping upon and crackling the first "cat-ice" on a late
autumn morning, then he is a man; for no New England girl, a century
old, could be thus indifferent. It is akin to rustling through the
deep-lying autumn leaves, which affords a pleasure so absurdly
disproportioned and inexplicable that it is almost mysterious. Some of
us gouty ones, alas! have had to give up the "cat-slides" which were
also such a delight; the little stretches of glare ice to which we ran a
few steps and slid rapidly over with the impetus. But I must not let my
New England folk-words lure me away from my subject, even on a tempting
"cat-slide."
[Illustration: Overgrown Garden at Llanerck, Pennsylvania.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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