XIX
My Mother's Gardeners
Of gardens "so much has been said and on the whole so
well said," that I might perhaps restrain my pen from
turning up that overworked soil. But yet the gardens
of which I write have not been like the gardens of the
published page. They have not brought forth generously
either prose of lusty vegetable or poetry of spicy
blossom. Although the gardens have been many, they
might almost be described, so alike have they been, as
if they were one, an itinerant garden that has
accompanied us from one little hill village to another;
for I write of the stony, arid, sterile garden-plot of
a country parish.
Now, however forbidding the garden that has
stretched rearward of each new domicile, my mother has
always fallen upon it with a valiance of hope that
neither years nor disappointment can destroy. She
always thinks that things are going to grow in her
gardens, and things do grow in them, too; but they are
not always the things my mother has led me to expect.
For her, I hope she will find the
garden of her
dreams in Paradise; for me, this earth will do, even
this small, hill-circled scrap of it; for I am no
gardener in my heart, only an observer of gardens. I
own to an unregenerate enjoyment in watching my
mother's vegetables misbehave, just as,
surreptitiously, I can't help loving the whimsical
goats of my father's rustic flock.
As I glance back over the unwritten journal of my
childhood, I find the words Choir, Vestry, Garden
always printed in capital letters. The Gardener was a
figure as momentous in my infant horizon as was the
Senior Warden. In respect to gardens my mother has
never had any confidence in the assistance of her own
family. There have been occasions when some son or
daughter, temporarily in favor, has been allowed to hoe
softly, under supervision; but as to her husband,
banishment is the sole decree. In fact, my father,
genuine old English, imported direct from Trollope,
does not show to best advantage in a garden. In
general I have observed that our country clericals are
likely to be at quarrel with the soil, that arid
independent old soil which will grow things in its own
way, in utter despite of parsons. My father's original
sin was due to the usual pastoral reluctance to let the
tares and the wheat grow together unto the
harvest,
and it was when he mistook our infant
carrots for Heaven-knows-what seed of the Enemy that
the decree of banishment against him as a marauder
occurred. Rather than initiate one of her own
home-circle into her garden mysteries, my mother has
chosen the unlikeliest outsider, and solicited advice
from the most unprecedented sources, or by any methods
of cajolery; she has been no stickler in regard to any
man's creed or practice when it has been a question of
so vital a matter as cucumbers.
My retrospect shows our gardeners stretching back
to the bounds of my memory, a lean, gnarled, hoary
procession. One of the earliest of them is Father Time
himself, with hoe instead of scythe, and with white
locks rippling down his back. Father Time's frank
admission when engaged might have daunted some, but did
not daunt my mother, for he confided to her at once
that he could hoe but could not walk. He proved useful
when carefully hauled from spot to spot, but our garden
was cultivated that season in circles, of which the hoe
was the radius and Father Time the center.
Another of our ancient hoe-bearers was a veteran.
I do not know whether he had lost his eye on the
battlefield or elsewhere, but certainly he had not
exchanged it for wisdom.
That is why he is the
favorite of my mother's recollections. She likes her
gardeners a little imbecile. They are more manageable
that way. The burden of their intelligence is the more
usual trouble. A simple faith united to an instant
obedience is the desideratum in gardeners; usually a
gardener is as obstinate as he is conservative, and
this is not at all to my mother's mind. She loves to
glean gardenlore from every source, but better still
she loves to invent garden-lore of her own. She likes
to be allowed to set out on an entirely new tack with
some poor erring cabbage, and it is all she can do to
hold on to her ministerial temper when she finds that
her gardener has ruined the work of regeneration by
some old-fashioned disciplinary notions of his own.
Our ancient warrior, however, had no notions of his
own, disciplinary or other, and that is why he
possesses a shrine apart in our memories. He was as
meek in my mother's hands as his own hoe, and he never
did anything she did not wish him to do except when he
died!
On a bad eminence of contrast my memory declares
another figure. I do not remember whether it was an
invincible audacity, or an utter despair of securing
likelier assistance, that led us that year to employ
our own sex
ton. It is an axiom known to every
ministerial household that it is unwise ever to put any
member of your own flock to domestic use. A brawny
Romanist, if such can be obtained, for laundry
purposes, a Holy Roller for the furnace, and a
Seventh-Day Baptist for the garden—these are samples
of our principle of selection. I do not know just why
those of our own fold are undesirable,—it is wiser
perhaps that the silly sheep should not see the antic
gamboling of the sober shepherd behind his own locked
door, or guess what internal levities spice the
discreet external conduct of his family. I do not know
how it was that we fell so utterly from the grace of
common sense as to employ our own sexton that summer.
Apart from sectarian issues, a sexton is the most
mettlesome man that grows, and not at all to be subdued
to the ignoble uses of a hoe. This sexton was an agony
to my father in the sanctuary, and an anguish to my
mother in the garden. He went about with a chip in his
mouth, and he always held it in one corner of his lips
and chewed it aggressively and bitterly, and with the
other corner he talked, just as bitterly. Within his
own house he must have exchanged the chip for a pipe,
for although I never saw him smoke, the fragrant
tobacco fumes of him were spread through the
house
after every back-door colloquy. He talked more
willingly than he worked, and that summer was a lean
and sorrowful season, when the garden languished and my
mother was browbeaten, unable, all because he was the
sexton, to bring the man to order with the sharp nip of
her words across his naughty pate.
We were more cautious next time and availed
ourselves of one no less meek than a certain village
ancient prominently known to be an Anarchist and a
Methodist. The combination is unusual, I admit, but
you may look for almost anything in a gardener. As an
infant, I used to scan his person for a glimpse of the
red shirt, and his lips for a spark of the incendiary
eloquence, but no symptom of either ever showed. He
was old and underfed and taciturn, and he gardened
exactly as he wished to, without paying the tribute
even of a comment to my mother's suggestions. He had
such original methods of his own that, for very
amazement, she gave up her own initiative for the
pleasure of watching his. Once when he was seen
solemnly planting stones in one earthy mound after
another, he did break his icy reserve to answer her
irrepressible inquiry; he believed that potatoes grew
better that way, since
the roots did not have to
pierce the earth for themselves but could wriggle
through the friendly interstices of the stones. That
summer was one of cheerful surprises. This singular
spirit had, I believe, a genuine sympathy for the poor
toiling vegetables; I remember that he spent one
afternoon in tying up his tomatoes in copies of a
certain sectarian sheet he brought with him for the
purpose. A sportive wind arose in the night, to die
before the Sabbath morning, on which we beheld not only
our rectory lawn, but the utterly Episcopal precincts
of the church, bestrewn with "Glad Tidings of Zion."
He was a lonely soul and dwelt apart, chiefly in a
wheelbarrow. The vehicle was one of his
idiosyncracies. He never appeared without it. Up and
down our leafy streets would he trundle it; but yet I
never saw anything in the wheelbarrow except the
gardener. He appeared to push it ever before him for
the sole purpose of having something to sit on when he
wished, from the philosophic heights of his theological
and sociological principles, to ruminate upon the evil
behavior of "cabbages and kings."
As I look back over a long succession of gardeners,
I see it, punctuated as it may be here and there by
some salient personality,
for the most part
stretching a weary line of the aged and infirm of mind
and body, and I wonder by what survival of the
unfittest society devotes to gardening purposes only
those already devoted to decrepitude. As a matter of
fact, the more one becomes acquainted with the vagaries
of growing things, the more one is convinced that it
requires nimble wits and supple muscles to subjugate
the army of iniquitous vegetables the humblest garden
can produce. The more you know of the deception and
ingratitude to be experienced in the vegetable world,
the sadder you become. In addition to sharpened brain
and taut sinews, the worker in gardens needs a heart
packed with optimism. This last my mother possesses,
and though garden after garden may have gone back on
her, nothing can prevent her running with overtures of
salvation to meet the next little grubby potato-patch
life offers her. With hope indomitable my parents
survey each new glebe, while I, the incredulous,
secretly meditate upon the kinship in conduct of all
parochial gardens, expecting only that the sheep and
the potatoes will find some new way of going astray;
and may Heaven forgive me that I should be diverted by
their versatility of naughtiness! For example,
you
can never tell what you may expect from a
tomato, for your tomato is a vegetable of temperament.
Poetically sensitive to atmospheric environment, it
fades to earth under the mildest sun, wilts at a frost
imperceptible to its more prosaic neighbors.
Capricious ever, it will sometimes, in mock of its own
cherished nervous system, exhibit a sturdiness out of
pure perversity. One chill June morning we found our
young tomato plants flat to earth, a black and hopeless
ruin. We bought new ones and set them out in their
stead, whereupon the old plants popped up and sprouted
to wantonness,—nothing but the elemental energy of
jealousy. The tomato is like to be as barren of
production as the human sentimentalist, either bringing
forth a green bower of leafage, or drooping to earth
with the weight of crimson globes that, lifted, show a
corroding hole of black rot.
In homely contrast consider the bean. The bean is
the kindliest vegetable there is. From the seed up, it
is well-intentioned, for the bean may be eaten through
and through by worms, and yet, planted, will sprout and
spring, and bring forth fruit out of the very stones.
The beet is another simple-minded, dependable
member of the congregation, and
even more generous
in contribution to the minister's support than is the
bean, for the beet yields top and bottom, root and
branch. In summer the beet-top furnishes the first
succulent taste of green, and afterwards the round red
root of him is a defense against the lean and hungry
winter months.
But for the most part vegetables are an
ill-behaving lot. The cabbage inflates itself with an
appearance of pompous righteousness, the longer to
deceive our hopes and the more largely to conceal its
heart of rot. The radish sends up generous leaves as
if it meant to fulfill all the mendacious promises of
the seed-catalogue, and when uprooted exhibits the pink
tenuity of an angle-worm. The cucumber is at first,
for all our ministrations, hesitant and coy of leaf
within its box, and then suddenly bursts into a riot of
leafiness whereby it does its best to conceal from our
inquiring eye its swelling green cylinders. Corn,
deceptive like the radish, is prone to put forth a
hopeful fountain of springing green, only to ear out
prematurely, and reward us with kernels blackened and
corroded.
In the parochial garden the pea is one to tease us
always with its might-be and might-have-been. If peas
are to grow beyond "the kid's lip, the stag's antler,"
they require the
moral support of brush, and brush
is something a minister's family, aided only by a
decrepit gardener, cannot always supply. Unsupported
by brush, our fair peas lie along the ground, an
ever-present disappointment.
Two vegetables have always haunted my mother's
aspirations, in vain. I hope they grow in heaven, for
it is in the nature of things that celery and asparagus
should be denied to a nomadic earthly clergy,
requiring, as the one does, richness of soil, and as
the other, permanence. Illusory asparagus, it takes
three years to grow him! Of course if some
disinterested predecessor had planted him, we might in
our turn eat him. But our too itinerant clergy do not
give overmuch thought to their successors. Barren
parochial gardens hint just a shade of jealousy about
letting Apollos water.
But it is not the vegetables alone that strain my
mother's sturdy optimism. All gardens are subject to
invasion by marauding animals, differing in size and
soul and species, all the way from the microscopic
tomato-lice, past woodchuck and rabbit and playful
puppy, up to the cow, ruminating our young corn-shoots
beneath the white summer moon, on to my father himself,
planting aberrant feet where his holden
ministerial
eyes behold no springing seedlings in
the blackness of the soil. But our worst enemies are
hens, and as it happens at present, dissenting hens,
sallying forth from the barnyard fastnesses of the
Baptist parsonage upon our helpless Anglican garden,
plucking our young peas up out of the soil, and then
later and more brazenly prying them out of the very
pod! Forthwith they fall upon our lettuce-beds,
scratching away with fanatic fervor, as if for all the
world they meant to uproot Infant Baptism from out the
land. All this is too much for my mother. On the
vantage-ground of the back doorsill she stands and
hurls coal out of the kitchen scuttle at the sectarian
fowls,—coal and anathema, low-voiced and virulent.
Hers is no mere vulgar many-mouthed abuse. There is
nothing of so delicate pungency as the vituperation of
a minister's wife, really challenged to try the
subtleties of English and yet offend no convention of
seemliness. Add to the fact of the challenge, another
fact, that she is of Irish blood, and that her gallery
gods are just inside the door, and it is a pity her
audience should be merely the hens and I.
Thus do I ever hover at hand, softly applausive of
my mother's defense of her garden, secretly
appreciative of the devious
ways of vegetables,
witnessing—to forgive—the wanderings of my father's
flock. For if all the flock were abstemious and
orthodox instead of being, as some are, frankly given
over to alcoholism and agnosticism and what not; and if
the gardens grew, as gardens should grow, into honest,
God-fearing cabbages and potatoes; if the righteous
corn parted green lips from kernels firm and white as a
dentist's placard, how then should the parish gardens
that dot our hill-strewn countryside bring forth that
fruit of laughter which consoles the dwellers in these
our tiny strongholds of lonely effort?
