Nature in a City Yard/Chapter 5

THE last snow has fallen. The country-man is now embogged, and is losing temper and dollars because of the delays, difficulties, and damages he has imposed on himself by his cheap and miserable roads, and the city man is returning thanks that his yet more miserable street has ceased to be a place of navigation, and may now be forded, with rubbers. The first warm days take one out of doors: albeit in town they bring a forecast of the frightful August weeks to come, when men and horses fall at their work and have to be put on ice,—that is, the men do,—and babies die by hundreds in the tenements; die wretchedly within half a dozen miles of health and life; die because their parents are hopeless victims of the aggregation habit.

​Now, we pull down the books and magazines on gardening; likewise the seeds which are to grow into vines that will climb all over the ward and star themselves with flowers as big as soup-plates, as brilliant as Solomon and society at the opera, but less sounding than either. We go out and poke the crooked spade into the ground, and fetch up a rich assortment of old boots, rubbers, bustles, oyster-cans, spikes, cinders, cobblestones, and other reminders that this is “improved property”—save the mark! This is the beginning of joy. The birds are coming back—to other people; the brooks are tinkling—just listen to our gutter; and the flowers will be here by and by; but ah! will they be according to those vivid colored catalogues of the seedsmen? Verily, I have a fear; for many benefits turn to blights. There is the manure that we paid the stable-keeper a dollar a load for, last fall, and look at what we are getting from it: insects, eggs, cocoons, wireworms, centipedes, all brought in with that enrichment, Sometimes it does n’t seem worth while to reform, be​cause the new evils that come with reformation appear so much worse than the old ones.

It all has to be looked up again, every spring: the way to put bulbs and seeds in, where, how deep, how many, in what soil; and even after the ground is prepared the dibble is sure to strike subterranean pans and flatirons, and the spade has to be resumed, Then, when it is late and mild enough to sow, the weeds are up in a lot of new places, and are stealthily encroaching on the space reserved for plants that would please us better. And if we are wise we do our weeding betimes. Completeness is rare in this industry. I have seen only one exhibition of it, and that was in the close of one of the English cathedrals, where two women were seated on the earth, patiently digging out of it, with steel dining-forks, every growing thing that was n’t grass. The average man will admire that conduct—and refrain.

In moderation, the exercise of weeding encourages to good nature. It satisfies the human instinct of destruction, and, unlike ​other forms of violence, it tends to good results—in us. If only we could weed humanity of its parasites, its vicious, its criminal elements as quickly and ruthlessly as we weed our gardens! We should have no army of 50,000 tramps to beg, bully, and steal a living out of us, no burglars, no drunken, corner-loafing, wife-beating, non-washing, swearing, insolent creatures. When we are better ourselves, we shall be less soft toward the irreclaimable, I fancy. If any escape the right parental and other formative influences, we shall! exile them to barren lands, where they must hustle healthfully to live. The weeding of the human race cannot begin too soon, and the outlook for the rest of us will be brighter when criminals, by surgery if by no other means, can be prevented from longer begetting their kind, for it is a bad kind.

Like all reforms, weeding is easiest when earliest. You can thrust your fingers into the loose soil, and trace a root of witch-grass six inches under the surface and a foot in length, all spiked with yellow blades ​that would have been up in another day or two; and as to the thousand other things, —plantain, thistles, and the like,—you have only to whistle to them, and out they come, But in August—well, that ’s different. And weeds are so outrageously healthy. Or, do they merely seem so? The energy of vice and destructiveness always seems greater than that of virtue, probably because it is forced so disagreeably on our notice. Ugly dogs, ugly men, armies, beasts of prey, birds, fishes—what waste of ferocity and excess of effort in working their purpose! Yet I don’t believe this tale that all is fear and suffering in the lesser world. Insects, at all events, de not suffer before they are eaten. Harshness is but a little part of nature, and benefits go with it. Though the storm, the flood, the thunderbolt, work harm, look on the fields, and see what kindness is in the sun and air and rain.

If we would let the weeds alone, or if we would be good to them and water them and cut away the corn and potatoes and geraniums when they encroached, who ​knows what food for sight and stomach they might pay us with? For every plant was a weed once. Yet I more incline to fancy that the fed weed would sicken in disgust and shame at being thus taken for something desirable, and would peak and pine and shrink into the earth. The skunk-cabbage I bought of a sidewalk fakir simply refused to stay alive in the yard. He had hurt its feelings, maybe, by calling it an Egyptian water-lily. But with planting to do, we cannot stop to guess what the burdock and the ragweed might come to. We slash them down, and know that their brothers and sisters will be up next week. Still, this weeding takes us into the open, and makes the flowers so much the more precious in that they have been fought for. No doubt it is better that we should have nothing as we want it. That enables us to enjoy the wakeful emotion of surprise. It likewise incites us to effort, and the effortless man is stagnant, useless, decadent.

Did a man ever plant a thing—a seed or an idea—that he did not watch to see it come up? He must be a freak, or very ​busy, if he did n’t. He has made himself responsible for it; he has jibed his conduct to that of nature; he is a creator, in a way, and it hurts his pride a little if he can’t raise beans. And it is a serene and pretty satisfaction to see things come out of the earth. It is as big a mystery as it was when man did no planting and did no thinking with his teacupful of brains, save of the wherewithal to be fed. As they rise out of the soil, these shoots are so alike for some days that we, with our ill-trained eyes, puzzle over their identity. What we decide to be a daisy is a plantain, and our lily in the other bed is an orchid. But they all stick loyally to their type, and the genista never turns out to be an apple-tree. Once we coddled a weed for a month, in the supposition that it was argeratum. It grew from the spot where we had one of these plants; so far as its leaves were concerned, it beat the argeratum, too, and did not have a horde of green, repellent grubs upon it, either.

Such a fresh rainbow-green as these new things wear! The eye never tires of ​it. Or, if it wants awakening, let it look at the other colors for a minute, and it enjoys them; still it returns to the green with gladness. Be sorry for the man who takes no pleasure in color. Be twice as sorry for the woman. Pray for them both.

There are men, usually artists, who live by color as much as by bread. One such, whom I know, clung to his brass and china through a long time of almost starvation, and would not sell one of his studio treasures, He was a crank. Admirable institution, the crank—the only one of us who wears any picturesqueness in these days. It would be a happier world if everybody in it were a crank. A crank is a man who is more interested in something than his neighbors are. He thinks he knows more about it, and they hate him for that, and suspect him of designs. But if everybody were a crank, there would be no such sour. ness of thought toward him, because no-body would take a contract to hate the whole human race. Besides, there are not many bad cranks. I used to know a fellow who had a passionate interest in neck​ties. If he could stand in front of you and study yours while you told him where you got it, and when, and why, and what you paid for it, it was all he asked. He grew in influence as he got older and had a political job. He is distinguished by the gorgeousness of his scarfs. None of us is self-centered: we are results of the past; and I have vainly tried to imagine what brought him about.

Scarfs suggest color, again, and that suggests art, and both recall me to the yard, where I have been setting out petunias, which are among the safest, steadiest, and most remunerative of all bloomers. But I wanted to say that what we call the artistic sense is often but the feeling for nature altered by generations of a society that seeks its self-protection at the expense of normal impulse. Once meshed in the house-staying habit, the victim, who has already lost the fineness of his sense of smell, the delicacy of his touch, and the savage’s quickness of sight, resolves to keep his palate with high-seasoned appliances, and to distinguish colors, anyhow, with his ​eyes. The cook is an artificer; but we forgive and even encourage him in his inventions. But what is the meaning of our rugs, our pottery, our pictures, our jewels, our morocco bindings, our implements of brass and silver, our patterned upholstery, our wall-papers, if not to afford color-equivalents of leaf, lower, water, rock, distance, and sunset? So we employ artists at many cunning trades, solely to keep our heads above the social swim by color-callings to our souls. A set of Chinese single-color porcelains makes, as near as may be, an epitome of the chromatics of the outer world. While they are on our shelves our eyes are not forlorn.

Winter is not an offense to me, even in town. They say it is kind of me not to object to it. There is a keen delight in fighting a north wind, in wading through snow, in feeling the tingle of blood that such a wrestle sends through one. And the beauty of snow, the silver of it, the shine of it, the stillness of it, the health of it, freezing and smothering the evil fraternity of microbes—these are not to be gain​said. But with the peep of spring we begin to be willing to see green. There is a lot of life in winter, especially in ourselves; but life without vegetation is not complete. Green is the assurance of life. So we watch for the coming of the grasses, of the clover, hop-clover, wild clover, chickweed, pigweed, purslane, plantain-rod, English plantain, dandelion, smartweed, shepherd’s-purse, oxalis, mallow, daisy, sorrel, camomile, wild parsnip, ragweed, butter-and-eggs, thistle, aster, yellow-dock,—all of which are indigenous to our yard,—while we keep an eye on the moss, alps, and fungi, and rejoice to see their increase. The foregoing list is not complete: it is merely recalled. When I looked first at the yard I saw nothing but grass. The eye sees what it wants or expects, or is used to see, After a time I noticed clover. I am not sure that I discovered the abundance of chickweed until the canary-bird needed some. Now I find that every yard is a botanical garden of unguessed variety and extent. Even some yards in that Sahara they call New York—yards ​with a dozen spears of vegetation—have at least two or three forms of plant life.

There is one lack in city farming, however, and that is birds. The chattering, quarreling English sparrow, who has driven American birds away, infests us, of course ; but the robins, the bluebirds, yellow-birds, and orioles, that I used to see in town in my youth—they are gone: hidden in the country, some; sacrificed for women's hats, others. Once I did hear a robin in a tree a few rods away, and an unknown bird was singing in our hearing at another time. There is a plenty of songsters in the park, and I often run out there on my wheel to hear them. The park is only a mile away, yet almost never does one of these birds alight in our preserve.

The night-hawk is our only visitor who is truly wild, and he has never come to earth in my sight. He appears in May, and his harsh squawking is heard often on consecutive evenings until fall. As he arrives in the twilight it is hard to get a peep at him; but one afternoon he began to cry before sunset, and it was easy to place him ​then. His flight is short and jerky as compared with that of the great hawk. From an elevation of perhaps three hundred feet he twice swooped rapidly to within a hundred feet of ground. His squawk must have frightened his prey, if he saw any. On another evening he came flying from the southwest, hurriedly passing not more than sixty or eighty feet overhead. Three of these hawks came over in company at another time, and their shrilling was far more agreeable to me than the yell of “Clams! Soft-shell clams!” on the next street. But many will not believe it. His harsh and threatening note is a gratefully wild one in the dry, warm town. Though it sounds but a few rods up in the air, you see nothing with straining of your eyes; so there is something elfish and uncanny as well as exhilarating in this shriek from a viewless source.

If only a crow would come around once in a while and sing for us, the bricks and noise would be forgotten, though not forgiven, and the country would be near. ​Never having crops to lose,—for that matter, knowing that he eats more insects than corn,—the caw of the crow is music to me, It is strong, calm, and confident—a voice of nature. So, I take it, is the voice of Reginald McGonigle, who may be regarded as the crow of this neighborhood, since he despoils yards at his pleasure.

Did I omit the pigeons? Still, they are not wild. Look at a flight of them: human-like creatures, following each other without question as to the straight, sensible, profitable way. On nearly every morning they are to be seen rising from a stable roof on another street; more than a score of them. They fly over the roofs at a height of sixty to a hundred feet, circling in a ring fifty yards in diameter. After going perhaps twenty times from right to left, a few will spring higher into the air, the rest following, as in “snap the whip,” and reverse the motion, so that the flight goes from left to right. Do they get dizzy like green waltzers or romping children? After wheeling for a time in the new direction they drop to the roofs, as by general con​sent, occasionally resuming the exercise later. What are they doing? They do not seem to be chasing any luckier one of their number with a crust in his beak, though at times there is a moment of livelier rush, as if hoping to overtake something. It seems rather a sport. They play circus, or follow-my-leader. They are literally skylarking, except for the song.

When spring comes in town the arrival is quick, but especially insidious. You quarrel with your overcoat, and your graceless pot-hat makes your brow sweat, Then you notice that it is warm, and you look to the earth to prove it. Yes, the grass is an inch out of the ground, yet only the day before yesterday you noticed the yard narrowly, and there was no new green, only the dusty green of the rhododendron leaves and the buds it has been cherishing since fall; the gray green of the honeysuckle; the streaks of old green in the grass, where it was cheated by a midwinter spell of October weather into coming out, then brutally nipped; and the dull stalks of the roses with their leaf-buds in the axils of ​old stems that fell off at a touch in December. The iris, though its older leaves are drooped and faded, keeps its inner and shorter stalks firm and summery-looking until the very last of the snowy season.

In our coast towns the awakening of the year is heralded by a chorus of sneezes and coughs; for the air is charged with moisture, making it seem warmer than it is, and men steal into chambers to shed their flannels and exchange them for gauze, avoiding publicity and confession of this swap to escape a scolding. Then they go out, and the mercury drops twenty degrees unannounced, and they go back home and have things the matter with their lungs and other interior fittings. At least they do if they live up to the expectations of those elderly female relatives who gather at the bedside and say, “I told you so.” Taking no joy in hot and scratchy flannel, some of them, among whom I humbly number myself, wear none of it, and have nly the usual number of colds. When it is chilly one can put on an overcoat. Doubtless if we would breathe deeply and ​use out lungs as we should, a change in temperature or atmospheric condition would not bother us. A few people think it a solemn duty to acquire fevers, boils, bad blood, and other incorrect habits in the spring; and this class of the self-deluded afflict themselves with bitter herbs and nauseous stews, which are known as “spring medicine.” As if there could be a spring medicine! The advertising quack vends gallons of nostrums on the strength of-an inherited faith, There are no spring disorders, any more than there are autumn disorders, or a “line storm,” or a devil, or a will-o’-the-wisp.

It is a subtle and wondrous change that the trees make in the few first days of leafage. Red is a common color for the newest foliage, and in certain of the oaks it is almost as strong a red as you find in October. Does this serve any protective purpose against insects or browsing animals? Hardly. It is that the sunlight has not had time to kindle the chlorophyl.

Rains are to be looked for now; and after a long, hard one I notice that the ​shade-maples in the street are drooping, as if water-soaked or chilled. Does the lack of light sadden them? The effect is somewhat lasting, for they do not brighten promptly when the sun returns. But how the fall of water inspirits the algæ! Look for them on the north side of tree-trunks after rain. Small boys who want to trail grizzlies and red men through the woods may begin their education in forestry in our yards and streets.

Earth is deceptive—at least the mixed kind on our block is so. It looks as if it would be an easy thing to spade up the whole yard in a day; but as it is impossible to run a blade full depth in less than three tries, the job becomes appalling before even the borders are dug over. We gather up the cobbles and coal-hods that are exhumed in this industry, and after dark cast them into a hollow across the way, where they and the bed-springs are sure to become springs of profanity in the man who is going to build there. (And serve him right for shutting out our view!) Once the digging promised to be interest​ing, for it looked as if we had discovered moles; but on penetrating their supposed tunnel, it was found to be caused by the soil working out under the fence into the carpenter's yard, which is a foot or so lower than ours. But there is some instinct in us, dating back to more-times-great-grandfathers than we would try to enumerate, that bids us dig, and there is a natural conscience that approves when we have put in and covered the seeds. The world is going to be richer for our day’s work, and when we come in with lame back and trembling hands, marveling that physical labor should be so hard to the unaccustomed, we feel a glow of pride, and an assurance that we have earned sleep and a dinner. Better, we have earned health, We have no pessimism where green things are and people dig for their dinners. Pessimism is worse than tragedy: it is a tragedy of the soul; the attribute of a tired-out race. When we keep in touch with nature we share her splendid life.

On the day in early March when, for the first time in the year, I saunter forth without an overcoat, with the youngsters in ​tow, likewise without top-coats, to their relicf and glee, we find the Scleranthus aanuus brightening. What a name to roll under the tongue, and what nonsense to give it to such a little, harmless plant! Also we find springing grass in warm corners, a few feet from old snowdrifts partly glaciated to a depth of three or four feet. But the find of the day is a caterpillar moving stiffly over an old newspaper. Where was he quartered all winter? And only last night there was a tight freeze. Clarence and Harold carry this creature into the house and put him under a tumbler, as partial offset for the loss of the turtle. The second turtle they brought from New Jersey would come into the house in the fall whenever a door was opened, instead of burying himself as he would have done if he had never learned that houses were warm, We wrapped him in carpets, put him into a box, and he went to sleep; but during some zero weather his slumber merged into the long one. His predecessor was kept in a warm cellar, and did not hibernate. He did worse—he died.

On the night of this same March day ​we are able to see the eclipse of the moon from our yard as well as if we had been in Walden.

With the graying and thinning of our hair we have less warmth under it, they say, and begin to live in the past—in that period when we amounted to something, or thought we did. And in this season of the year one childish episode returns to me: May Day. The good old custom, set by the Druids, of rambling off to field or grove on the first of May, and making a show of gathering flowers that usually were not there, was as general in Boston in my early years as that of shooting gunpowder and each other on the Fourth of July among the boys of all our towns to-day. School was dismissed, and the children put on wreaths of flowers, and traveled about in groups, playing games or picnicking with their teachers or other elders among the Cambridge elms, the Middlesex fells, and the Newton hills. As there were few florists in those days and little pocket-money among the juvenile Puritans, their wreaths were made of paper; and sheets of colored ​tissue, from which these garnitures were cut, were offered in the shops at a cent apiece, as freely as toys at Christmas. These sheets the maternal hand wrought into marvelous roses, camelias, and other blossoms that had no likeness to anything on earth; but there was color, and the effect was innocent and pretty. Now and then one heard of dances about the Maypole, and the garlands were of paper, too. The only garlands I ever saw were made of that. Yet, from the way the poets used to talk about them, you might suppose that flowers grew that way on every bush. The sweet old day is gone. Perhaps Decoration Day takes the place of it. It was net very seasonable, anyway; and a boy with a wreath of flowers, upturned collar, and red nose did not look entirely spring-like. If the true allegory of New England’s May is ever painted, she will be represented in a sealskin sack and a pair of overshoes, with hothouse roses in her hand.