Nature in a City Yard/Chapter 6

SUMMER is the time when the yard looks best and feels worst—meaning that the human creatures who maintain it are least at ease; for we have about four months in the year when the temperature is infernal. Those who can, and are wise, fly to the hills. Those who are poor and can’t, or won’t, stay among the baking bricks and blistering asphalt, and toil and drink and grumble and die. And it is not every one who can show a yard with fifty varieties of plant in bloom at once to mitigate the temperature. For, really, it seems a shade less hot when you can smell] roses through the windows, and when the lusciousness of honeysuckle pervades the steaming, stagnant air. In the morning, when people are gasping at the humidity, ​and the heat is rippling up from the flagstones and out from the house-fronts, we have only to go to the back windows and look down into the lush greenery to feel as if there were less perspiration. In New York a yard, save just enough of one for clothes to dry and cats to sing in, is an exception. I would rather rent this two-story affair with a few feet of nature added, than live in Fifth Avenue and have no grass to put my feet on.

And there goes a statement that will be doubted, because there are so many who believe that everybody wants to be rich. Comfortable, free from anxiety, yes. Rich, no. The joys of wealth have been extolled openly in converse, covertly in writing. Few have published the joys of poverty—not the pretty sentiment of song and picture, the roses and love and bread and cheese and lowly cottage and all that, but the real enjoyment of it. Think of its irresponsibility, of its freedom from duns, for nobedy will trust you; of the security from invitation to drunken dinners, insipid calls, pretentious receptions, solemn func​tions, and fussy teas; of the liberty to do nearly as you like, and go where you please, and enlarge upon Mrs. Grundy as roundly in words as you are sure to do in thought. Poverty throws a man on himself, and he is happiest and best when he is making the most of himself. His pleasures, being simple and intellectual, are lasting. He is relieved of a lot of worry about yachts, starch, balls, dresses, precedence, and fluff; and he does n’t have insomnia because the papers failed to get his name “among those present” at the dinner to Lord de Livrus. There is a man who struggled for years to get into the set that calls itself society and strangely overweens itself because Jenkins hangs on its skirts and reports its breathings in the public prints. Ever since he got in he has been wondering why he did it. We are all rainbow-chasers. The pains of poverty, where they occur, depend on the width of the gap between a victim’s material aspirations and his possessions. The poorest people I know are bankers and speculators with yearly incomes of $50,000 or so, and two ​houses to keep. The chief blessing of poverty is that other folks don’t ask you to help them to live.

Truly, the opulence of gold may comfort one, but it cannot be a substitute for the wealth of color in our yard. No, it is not a vain statement. Reason it out for yourself: limitless gold, in bareness and dullness and squalor; or next to none of it, and brightness and gaiety and liberty and action?

This is when we reap that which we have sown in the spring. We have coddled it through the frosts, and now we glean it for dinner and the neighbors, and some sprays and blossoms for the always eager children of the tenements. Reginald McGonigle comes over the fence and helps himself, though he does n’t care much about flowers. Few good things come without work,—it is only the bad things that do that,—and my wife often puts in a morning when I am at the shop, and we labor together for an hour after I come home in the evening. Insects take most of our time, but there are dead leaves to ​pinch off, earth to stir, vines to train, enthusiastic bushes to trim, weeds to pull, grass to cut, cats to shoo away, and the whole place to water. If time is worth money, it is cheaper to buy flowers at the shops; but it is the raising of them that makes the best fun. Remit your care, even for a few days, and the place becomes “a sight.”

It is surprising that weeds want se much room. Tear them up, and you see much bare earth under and about them. They not only steal the nutriment from the flowers, but try to monopolize the sunshine. The thrifty weed is like the thrifty man, and even the thrifty mind; yet no: for the best mind is one-sided, and does not get in the way of lesser ones. They will have it that we ought to develop our minds generally as well as specifically. A mind evenly grown is prettier to look at, like the box-trees in old-fashioned gardens after the gardener has trimmed them; but shapeliness is not enough: strength and reliability are more.

The mind of a Newton, a Darwin, an ​Edison may, after all, be big in one department, and in others shrunken from disuse. One may even have a mind like a Turner or—no, I will not mention the musician’s name—that would show itself on the outside of the head by one big bump in a desert of depression. And here is Got, dean of the Comédie Française, claiming that in his calling people get on best without minds. Bother it all! The worst of thought in this nineteenth century is that you don’t know what to think. My Emerson and Bacon, even my Burroughs and Thoreau, shall suggest nothing to me to-day. I will leave my brains in the house, and sit among the petunias and) sweet-peas. For nature, even a yardful of it, makes health in her communicant. Get away from self-consciousness. Think not of your mind nor of your fate. Why be always thinking on your end? as graveyard literature hath it. We are here to live, not to die, Continue the good work that these might have done who are gone. So shall you be prepared to die.

There may be matters that people hold ​more different minds about than gardening, but I doubt it. The study of it from magazines and floriculturists is an experience to blister the understanding and destroy confidence in man. I bought some roses.

“Don’t you water ’em much,” said the man who sold them to me; “for if you do you are sure to rot them. They ’ll send their roots down and get all the water they want.”

The man was so confident he aroused my suspicions, so [ went to a magazine to see if he knew his business. He did n't; for the periodical put stress on watering, and said that roses could not do without it. They needed sun. Then I tried another magazine. It had nothing to say about water or lime or sun, but it insisted on very rich earth, and on letting the bushes alone after they were set out. Then I tackled a gardener, and he said: “Roses? Well, they ’re kind of unsatisfactory; have so many diseases and bugs; but if you ’H dust them with tobacco and use a sandy soil and give them manure-water and let them have a drink when they look thirsty, and stir the earth up ​around them every little while, they will generally bloom, sometimes.”

And then I looked up the boss of a large flower-shop and asked him, and he said: “Roses will live out and bloom all the time in any kind of a soil, and it does n't make any difference whether they have light or shade.”

Now, then, what are you going to do about it? I’m going to keep on treating mine as I treat the rest of the plants: weed them, shower them at evening, and pick the worms off. Then if they won't bloom they can make way for something that will. I may mention that the only roses that gave us any satisfaction were the cheap, common kinds that were well grown before we bought them. The dwarfs, so pretty in the catalogues, were a mean and measly lot, producing perhaps one flower apiece; and the crimson rambler that was to cover our fence with pounds of bloom, promptly rambled down into the earth and stayed there, like our California violets that were to bear flowers something less large than saucers.

​But if roses do not always behave in town as you expect them to, there are other flowers that surpass expectation. The fleur-de-lis (flower of Louis—the “royal lily” of France, which is not a lily, and belongs to us as much as to Europe) is one of those steady, reliable growths that nobody should be without. We put ours into a clump, and as they have grown they have matted together, so that for a month we have a gorgeous array of white, yellow, blue, and purple flowers, faintly fragrant and greatly satisfying. Insects do not make too much havoc with them, and they almost never touch the blooms.

Then there are morning-glories that sow themselves like weeds, and petunias that flower all summer, ditto geraniums, and the sunny nasturtium with its variants of lemon, gold, orange, scarlet, red, and crimson, the modest yet showy portulaca, and sundry others. But you do not have to buy anything. Raise wild flowers. Every vacant lot has them, and the suburbs are gay with dozens of species all the way from April to snow-time. I have never been ​without them since we occupied our present quarters, and there are few things to beat our golden-rod, daisies, violets, buttercups, and dandelions. We have a wild corner where these and other plants thrive among ferns and mosses, and it is the prettiest and most reliable part of the yard.

The golden-rod was sown by accident. It was supposed to be something choice, and we watched and watered and weeded it. After it was a foot or so out of ground the leaves began to look oddly familiar. It was perhaps two feet tall before we recognized it fairly as the roadside weed and breeder of hay-fever, in other people; but it was then so green and fair that we could not bear to tear it up. We took up only a root or so to set nearer to the house, and in September we had two bouquets of yellow as pretty as one would wish to see. Next year the plants had increased the number of their shoots, ran to a height of five feet, and bloomed copiously. Last year they were six feet high, and their flower-spikes were majestic.

So with our “jimson-weed.” It should ​be explained, for the enlightenment of the very few who don’t know, that the name is a corruption of Jamestown weed, as the plant spread itself liberally over the site of Jamestown, Virginia, after that town had been burned in 1676, as the only way to keep the scampish and dunderheaded Berkeley out of the place. How this particular weed got into our premises nobody knows ; but without warning or planting it just came up and grew. There is none other within a thousand feet of us, I should say; the wind certainly did not carry the seeds, and I should not suppose that birds would, either, for they are poison—at least to featherless bipeds. And being there, I made the best of it, and before cool weather set in it had become an exhibition, But I find that others have discovered it as a flower, for a seedsman's catalogue, lately arrived, sets forth the merits of Datura Strasmonium, which is an alias for the humble jimson. It likewise rejoices in the name of thorn-apple in some localities.

“Hello! You ’ve got a castor-oil plant ​back there, have n’t you?” exclaimed one visitor, as he entered our reservation; and he would n’t believe it, for a while, when I told him it was jimson. That was after several weeks of feeding and watering and stirring of the earth about its roots. Haying made a cultivated plant of if, it rewarded us by inviting in a lot of insects and blooming profusely. It has a regal and tropical look, with its sleek stem and huge leaves; and its long lavender trumpets, streaked with purple and delicately perfumed, are as fine as if the plant were expensive. The flowers last but a day or so, then droop. We find them on the day after blooming collapsed and depending from the long, thread-like pistil at the base of which the nutty-looking fruit is forming. Its pet pest is a tiny black beetle that peppers the leaves with holes. The stramonium would be acknowledged as a horticultural masterpiece if only it would get rid of its smell—the sickish, soupy odor that arises whenever it is jostled. But we put up with evil smells from other plants—the lantana, for example. ​No; the objection to stramonium, as to all other wild flowers, lies in its cheapness. The vacant lots are full of it, and it is called a weed; so that settles it.

Nothing better than the jimson illustrates the necessity a plant is under of blooming when you pick its wilted flowers, and refuse to let it go to fruit. A plant has a maternal desire for offspring, and when thwarted it constantly renews its attempt to make seed. The flower is simply a means to an end. Its odor and color draw the insect who, in his search for food, unconsciously fertilizes it; and conception occurs as soon as the pollen of one flower is dusted on the pistil of the next by the legs or wings of the moth or bee. Some plants have not vitality enough to form a second crop of blossoms when the first has been picked; but others crack along all summer, blooming prodigiously. Such others are the petunias, geraniums, phlox, pansies, and oxalis. Indeed, almost all plants, except those of the rose and lily tribe, will put forth a second series of flowers if the first is clipped. I made ​a moth-mullein bloom three times in a few weeks after transplanting it from a vacant lot, by cutting off its seed-pods; and the balsams were long kept in flower by the same treatment. That is one of the charms of the garden: the flowers give back more than you take away.

And there are the yarrows, pink and white, and their humbler cousin the camomile. Cultivate a yarrow. No prettier plant grows. But let it have its own wild way so far as you can. So with the camomile, which is an honest as well as a free and modest plant, and if it has over-much attention it will stunt and sicken. The camomile that comes out of dusty lots, generously hiding bricks and old bottles, is among the soundest and largest. It is but one of the half-noticed and wholly misprized beneficences that the town does not deserve. Coddle the plant, shade it, manure it, and you will have done what the flatterer does to a man from whom he wants some favor; it will droop away from you and withdraw painfully from the unwelcome service. Sensitive, sensible ​plant! Left to itself, it may heighten its beauty or take on strangeness. Hamilton Gibson said that he once found a head of yarrow blossoms that was surrounded with rays like a daisy or a camomile. The foliage of yarrow and camomile are so alike that it is easy to mistake the one for the other; but pinch a leaf of each to extract the smell, and the difference is plain: the camomile is rank and herby, the yarrow spicy and nutty. The flowers are widely different, and the camomile is often called a daisy by city folks because it is yellow with white rays.

What a wonder it is that people who like flowers do not make more of the wild ones! Take the dandelion, noblest of the early blooms, and the only fearless one, and what might not be made of it? Fancy a window full of these golden disks in winter! I chose one of these plants out of half a hundred in our yard one spring, and made an aristocrat of it for a month, not taking it from its place, but merely giving it extra attention. It had manure-water now and then, it was sprinkled every even​ing, broken and faded leaves were picked off, and an effort was made to keep down the florescence. Our dog, Arthur, and even Skimplejinks, the cat, interfered to some degree with the experiment; but even after many leaves and blossoms had been torn off, the plant formed a heavy mat of green, and the flower-heads, though not large, were numerous. It was not so successful a dandelion—absurd corruption of dent de lion—as one can often find by the wayside, but it was the best in our yard, There was one that bore twenty-five heads of flowers at a time, yet the plant was so small I could cover it with my hand. Dandelion roots are so long that they do not take kindly to the restraints of civilization, I put a small one into a pot about six inches deep, which I plunged in one of the beds. Through the hole in the bottom the roots cast many threads that had to be torn when it was taken up for winter housing, but the plant bloomed in captivity.

Speaking of cultivated plants, I brought in a cinquefoil from the vacant lot across ​the way, potted it, and sank it in a bed to see if cultivation would improve it. I believe it did, a little. On taking it up, I was surprised to find the interior of the pot lined with tough pale-brown paper, so that when the plant was pulled out it brought this paper with it, a perfect cast of the pot. I was sure I had put nothing into it but earth, and a chip of brick to secure drainage, and this phenomenon puzzled me. I tore up the wrapping and discovered that it was connected by many threads with the roots of the plant. The mystery was solved: the paper was a sheet of rootlets. The pot was small, and so, in their effort to get out and drink, the rootlets had gone up and down the inner side, weaving a fine sheath for the bit of earth in which the cinquefoil had been set. It is an odd fact that some domesticated plants do not flower until they are pot-bound.

Not all wild flowers submit to care. They get into wrong soils and situations, and plants do not survive misfits so well as men. Few of us are where or what we want to be, and the world is full of round ​holes with square human pegs in them, If a plant is not rightly placed, it simply dies and gets out of its trouble. Yet sometimes, when we think it dead, it is only invalided and is biding its time. It is a plant that loves sand and sun, and has got into a shaded piece of muck; or it wants shade and repose, and its foothold is hot and windy: but a few days of drought or rain, or warmth or coolness, will revive the forlorn little thing, and it pops back into daylight once more, puzzled, maybe, but robust and glad.

And how seldom has a misplaced man an experience like this! Even our yard is not a hermitage. If only the jangle of the door-bell did not penetrate to this seclusion of phlox and petunias! It is the world’s demand to be let in to play the spy and gossip. It is the analogue of the Westerner who, finding a cabin in the wilderness with curtains drawn, reached through the window and brushed them aside, inquiring, “What ’s going on here so darned private?” In a sense it reminds us of an alleged and supposititious ​duty that we owe to the world; something too much of our debt to the world, and of our claims upon it; something too much of dragooning into the sciolistic socialism of the time—a blind reaching for more and mere animal comforts. A man’s duty is mainly to himself. If he absolve the world from its part in the conventional arrangement, the world must do the like for him, even though, in loving nature more than man, one resigns some of his humanity, and shapes his destiny to larger, rougher, more unsocial ends than those of his fellows. Mountains become more than people to him, so he goes back to primal strength and eke to savagery.

We are afraid of unpopularity—shockingly afraid. We would rather be wrong than unusual. Unconventionality is a greater offense than sin, Litter the street with rubbish, breed contagion in the neighborhood, be a prize-fighter or an alderman, swindle your friend in a stock deal, and the law will not trouble you; but cut the two buttons from the back of your coat, let your hair grow, wear sandals, ​bring your favorite hippopotamus into the house, leave off a crinoline or bustle when these horrors are rife, and whew! the gabble and the scolding! The laws laid down by Mrs. Grundy are the most stringent of all laws. Shall we ever wake up and do our own thinking? Let loose a Luther, or Bellamy, or Marx, and what a coil! Because they tell something that the others have not told, How afraid we have been of science, because its facts disagree with the whimsies we have been expecting it to prove! We ought to love a revolutionist, even one of destructive theories, because he puts life enough into us to make us complain, at all events.

Look at the superstitions that have laid held on us—superstitions about wealth and society, and other superstitions about equality; superstitions about secret fraternities and spring medicine, equinoctial storms and amber beads, goose-bones, Bhagavat Gitas, unlucky Fridays, and night air. Superstition is a roundabout process of false reasoning; and it is harder to reason falsely than right; yet see how we keep on ​doing it. Let one man swear that thirteen is an unlucky number, and you will have to disprove it thirteen times to prevent an epidemic of belief. It all comes through fear, and dates back to the time when fear was a proper and self-preservative condition among men. It kept them at a safe distance from each other, and from mososaurs and mastodons. Most people have to be afraid of something in order to keep their moral balance. Among the roughs this fetish is the police, among the better sort it is law, government, and governors; and when you meet people who think disrespectful things of honorable bar-keepers and the equator, you will find them cringing before an Idea: their own Idea, too. As to—

Ah, I see what ’s the matter. The thermometer in my yard marks 98° in the shade, and the humidity is about 80, States of mind are likely to happen in a city summer. I will get out the hose and spray the grass. Its brightening color will bring up visions of the country.

Since the yard has been watered regu​larly toadstools have increased in number. There are at least two varieties, and on some days the ground is dotted-with them. The beds that contain the heavier plants, which cast deep shadows, are rife with crucibulum vulgare, the oddest fungus that grows. At first it was mistaken for the seed-cup of the portulaca, left from last year, for it is dry and rusty-looking; but the appearance of new ones, and their change from balls to bowls, did away with that notion. The cup is one third to one half an inch in diameter, and holds what appear to be black seeds. They are not seeds, however, but spore-cases, lightly held to the cup by white threads, and quite like eggs in a nest.

These fungi and oddities always make us look into them. Flax-bloomts and their like are monotonously perfect—classic. The classic is the perfection of the regular. The picturesque, on the contrary, is delight in the irregular. Ragged vegetation is picturesque; so are the woods; so are orchids and cacti. Gardens are introductions of the classic into nature—the hu​manizing of nature. It depends on the humanizer whether the process is quietly submitted to or not. But I am glad to see that parks and gardens are no longer “slicked up” as they used to be. Vain man has discovered that nature can do some things well. For two thousand years we have been influenced in matters of form by the Greeks. The Greeks are a little too perfect for some moods. Their work has net enough in reserve. It is like Mozart’s music, all light and no shade. Let us have some rudenesses and weaknesses. Let us be grandly and gloomily Gothic, once in a while.

Yet the Parthenon has subtle and intentional irregularities. There is not a line in it which is mathematically straight. Its architects must have studied the charm of diversity and taken lessons from the flowers and trees. Nothing exactly conforms to rule, and sometimes rule is set at naught. For instance, I have seen this summer a double wild cherry—two stones and one stem—a pear growing absolutely upright, and flowers that freaked unaccountably in ​shape and color. Such things emphasize a general regularity, yet we are pleased with the latent chance of divergence: it gives latitude. Indeed, in all forms and expressions of worth and beauty we swerve from our original aim and bend toward its opposite. Painting that has no temper of breadth, tone, sobriety,—repellent things to the new eye,—how sugary, thin, and pretty-pretty it is! In music we would tire of major harmonies forever, and want a season of minor, which is nearer to discord,—yes, and even a diminished chord and discord itself for contrast’s sake. We do not take our colors in prismatic purity; we do not want our sculpture, bronze, and porcelains in weak, smooth forms. The palate objects to pure sugar, and will have a hint of acid or of bitter. Man will not be led wholly by his senses, nor suffer himself to be confined by their experience, Especially in the outer world should he be willing to merge his prejudice, for when he is fairly and sympathetically in the heart of nature he does not find its spirit reserved and distant, as one philosopher declares it ​to be, but close and lovable and as near frank as it can be in silence. Its magnificences are human.

Say, rather, our humanity still finds itself a brother to it. Carlyle and some others who are interested only in men complain if one writes of scenery: as if Thoreau’s rhapsodies and Burroughs’s studies and Blackmore’s descriptions were not as well worth the effort as Carlyle’s dyspeptic grumbles at the very fellows who entertain him. The vanity of men in claiming to be all! As if there would be no bears or turtles to enjoy the world if man were not on hand to oversee them! Man’s study is himself? Well, perhaps; but how can he know himself if he fails to know that grander, finer, more enduring creation that has spawned him on this drifting globule of matter? In nature we touch life. The world’s—creation’s—vital juices course in every sapling. In the animals who have shaken their roots loose and gambol among the fields those juices are stronger than among those who have walled and shedded themselves away from the ​earth, air, and light,—men and barnacles,—and delivered themselves to abstractions. The sun! Light! Heat! Let us go to the source. Let us be Parsees, Be distant with men, once in a while, for sanity’s sake. Let their tumult come to you softened, as their Sunday bells sound across the fields, Then they, too, will seem to fit into the scheme of things, which is all beauty, except where man has made it otherwise.

And I cannot think our yard is otherwise in its dress of flowers this summer.