Nature in a City Yard/Chapter 7

OF all seasons in town, autumn is most irksome mentally. Summer causes more profanity and drink, but autumn is the time when people want to be out of doors. Man takes an incurable interest in himself. Let him get up a fair to show what he can do, and how he runs to see it! The greater fair of nature—he has n't always time for that. Except in autumn. And there never was so rank a citizen that he did not look at the fall color and exult in it. Even the English visitor who said that our October woods were “rawther tawdry, ye know,” did us the honor to look at them. With the chilling of the nights and the passing of the flowers, the yard is left partly to take care of itself. Some of the plants, being annuals, in seed, ​or past the time of it and promising no more, have been pulled up; a few have been cut down; some have been mulched; and the place no longer wears the tropic look of summer. In the shortening afternoons I shower the grass with a hose, and keep that bright ; but the best of the flower-time is passing. So I steal away on my bicycle, and run through the parks and out on Long Island, and on the roads that overlook the Hudson ; for the color of the garden now is as nothing to the color that fills the woods. There are yellow, orange, scarlet, crimson, purple, brown, green, sometimes confusing, always gorgeous, triumphant, joyous, exhilarating. There are no tapestries, no Oriental rugs, no Chinese porcelains, no silks from the East, like unto these leaves of beech, birch, poplar, maple, sumac, oak, ampelopsis, and woodbine. The poplar is nearly at the top of the gamut with its pale yellow, the oak at the bottom with its crimson bronze mottled by dark green; but the chief factor in the celebration, the carnival that precedes the winter rest, is the maple, most gorgeous ​thing that grows, with every shade of red and yellow known to the painter in its leaves, and the sun turning them into gems and stained-glass windows. Why is it that with our commercial determination we have never made merchandise of this splendor? Leaves that have been waxed and ironed keep their color for a long time, and one would suppose that a bouquet of them would sell in the highways as readily as roses. I gladly note that they are beginning to sell daisies and goldenrod in town, and a girl in Nantucket picked up $150 in a summer by making up books of pressed wild-flowers of that windy, ocean-pounded moorland.

With a lessening in the humidity that is such a cause of suffering in summer, the temper of the populace improves. You hear less squalling and slapping when you pass the tenements (may the man be forgiven who invented those abominations!), and there are not so many tired eyes and lagging steps in the streets. Man was not born to be an amphibian. He prefers his air and water separate. Happy, ye ​dwellers amid the hills, who know not the sweltering August fogs and hazes of the shore!

Autumn color is obviously a result of ripening. You find it without frost. In October the maples are often as brilliant in Florida as they are in Maine, and the contrast they make with the dark green of the palms and the lush green of the undergrowth is startling. We need pure air, however, for this color; and the town is gray and brown, as it always is, the shade-trees merely withering, The west- and east-side streets of New York are the ugliest places in all the earth. Every spear of grass, every tree, has been carefully rooted up, that brawling humanity may have nothing green in its eye and its way; and if in better streets you find a row of starveling maples, they show no gaiety in these days. Yet just across the river the noble Palisades are sheeted in reds and yellows that fruit in the sun resplendently. And even in our yard the evil air steals in and rusts the leaves where they should glow. The blossoms of the gourd no ​longer emit their refined musky odor in the morning, but the fruit makes spots of gorgeous orange against the dulling leaves. Chrysanthemums and cosmos are coming to flower, and dandelions are putting up a second crop. The little sheep-sorrel that is red in the spring is likewise red in the fall, and is one of the few plants that have vivacity in town. Certain of the lesser things have vanished. The gradual but utter disappearance of many plants after flowering is one of the oddest and most unaccountable things in nature. There is the little Scleranthus annuus, for example: where does it go?

I have mentioned our toads. They were brought home from the suburbs in a botany-box while young—so young they could have been put into a walnut-shell. Their fare of insects has been so plentiful that they have waxed fat, the first inhabitant having taken on almost unseemly proportions. The ability of the fellow to disappear is surprising. You beat about the bush, as it were, and turn the leaves, but he never shows up until he is good and ready, when ​he will pop out from vacancy under your very nose. Probably he buries himself at the first frost. One of our earlier and experimental batches of toads never appeared again after their first winter. I fear they suffered in the early spading of the flowerbeds, either being jammed deep, beyond hope of resurrection, or cut in twain by the ignorant implement.

Toads are not pretty, but they are useful in eating insects, and there is no harm in them. The bigger toad is active about nightfall, but he hops into the shade if he sees me coming. When I take him up e discharges water and tries to get away, ducking and flinching every time I stroke his head. One hot afternoon I discovered him in a dense growth of sweet alyssum by his croak, a short, faint hen-like note several times repeated. When one of the children took him up he croaked in his hands. Later in the season he became more vocal. This toad appeared to get his growth in about two months, and his voice came with his stature. On taking him up in the fall, he would occasionally ​utter a low “gur-r-r-r,” with rippling throat. I found him one morning on the water-hyacinth. He had to climb over a rockery set with cactus to get there; and in running from me he jumped square into one of the most spiny and vicious of these plants, apparently without injury to himself or the plant.

There used to be a belief that toads were poisonous. A dog will not hold one in his mouth very long, they say. I never hold them long that way, either. But I often hold them in my hand, to their distress probably, and find that they do not “give warts.” And that belief is like many another. We ought to get up a society of exploders—men who will blow up fallacies of custom, government, laws, and quotation. How many venerable sayings would be killed off by such a society! You hear, for instance, that “you can't make bricks without straw.” Unless you have been in the East, or in Mexico, which is much the same, you never saw a brick with straw in it. Haverstraw bricks have never a straw. They speak of elusive hopes as will-o’-the-​wisps. Well, there are no will-o’-the-wisps, except in scientific books. Shakspere tells us that “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” Look at the crowned heads of Europe. Are they not a sleek, self-satisfied, well-fed, well-slept company of ornaments? Science, philosophy, and art need purgation by common-sense. The best have the most of this uncommon quality. People who describe great men they have seen always exhibit a dumb surprise that they look and act so like other folks. Greatness never consists in holding yourself above the mass, though you may need to stand at one side of it. You will not be seen at all unless you are content to stay at the human level. The great are great in common things. It is the clear, patent truth in Shakspere that is admirable. Speaking of Shakspere does not remind me of our turtle. I just remembered him as one of our autumn enlivenments. He is the third we have owned, and was imported from New Jersey. I don’t know what he finds to eat, but he is healthy and happy, though in these chilly mornings he ​is apt to be sluggish. Like the toads, he has ability in self-effacement, and can stay lost by the quarter-hour in our few square feet of yard. The youngsters have named him Plato—the same being the name they called the others by, though one had been discovered to contain eggs. Why Plato, more than James Q. Smith, I do not know, unless it be for the gravity of the creature and the inscrutability of his wisdom.

The carpenter’s dog is surprised and interested when Plato toddles across the yard. This dog climbs upon a lumber-pile to view the proceedings and bark his opinions. But the turtle does not mind. He travels about in his uncouth fashion, getting his meals; and after acquiring nutriment he likes to cover himself with an old sod at the back of the yard, where the sun shines warm. He will remain there, motionless, for hours; and wherever he may be carried, he will amble back to his sed at once, On being taken up, he hisses and retires promptly within his shell; though if put on the ground he will try to walk away, even when one is holding him. If ​put into water, he tries to get out; but after a dry spell we have held him under running water, and have seen him drink, with a slow elongation of the neck at each swallow. On a mild morning, after rain, he takes a joy in promenades; and from the window he seems to be eating petunias and alyssum, snapping at them like a hen.

Our turtles, like other savages, have been spoiled by civilization. They fell into a way of coming into the house out of the cold. They did not learn that worms and things are not provided in a house; and as they refused to eat anything that we offered to them, they paid the penalty of culture with their lives. They refused to bury themselves as the cold increased, and lumbered into the kitchen whenever the door was opened, making something of a struggle to climb the step. They knew where it was warm; and if the door failed to open, they sat on the grass and became comatose, like beggars who faint of starvation or “throw fits” on your door-step in revenge for the refusal of drink-money and your second-best clothes.

​Plato I. was especially persistent in coming in, so we let him have the run of the cellar. He stayed awake until January or so, bumbling around in the half-darkness, refusing such food as we offered to him, and drinking little; and so he wasted and died. Plato Il. was equally stubborn, He was stupid on cold days, and often appeared to be dormant, for he would allow himself to be handled without waking. So we rolled him in a carpet, put him in a box in the shed, and expected him to sleep until spring. But when the weather modified he scratched his way to freedom again, and stayed out of doors fora day. Once I took him from his wrappings and set him on the grass. He awoke and maundered aimlessly about until the sun began to sink, when he drew into his shell and apparently went to sleep again. He was returned to his carpet and box, and after a series of bitter nights, when the mercury dropped to zero, he was found dead of freezing.

Our autumn insects are lively until after the frosts. One September day there is a ​great to-do among the ants in the aster bed. Dozens of winged ants are out with them. All run in and out in desperate haste or anxiety. Wonder for what. Perhaps a fresh crop of young ones has arrived. Could the rain have beaten in their roofs? Is this a new arrival of slaves? Or are they holding an election?

One of the first indications of the oncoming cold is the retirement of the earth-worms, Do they feel the chill at the surface, and burrow deeper to get away from it? Ordo the roots of vegetation strike lower as the year wears on, and do the worms follow them, or keep away from the spread of their meshes? Men owe much to these humble creatures. Without worms to loosen the soil, the face of the earth would be a desert, dry, hard, incapable of supporting any other vegetation than cactus and sage-brush. The farmer could not exist if it were not for the worm. He swallows his way into the ground, ejecting the earth behind, instead of scratching his way in with claws that he does not have. And to think that these creatures lift to ​the surface fifteen to twenty tons of earth to the acre in this manner every year! Soft as they are, their muscular tissue is not weak. Stamp your foot near them when they are lying half out of their holes at evening, and see how instantly they pull themselves in, out of sight.

One of them, a foot long, was found wriggling over our flagged walk, like a snake, in his haste to get to cover. I watched another, about six inches long when extended, crawling over the walk. On arriving at the flower-bed, rich and heavy with recent rain, he almost immediately began to dig. In four minutes by the watch he had buried himself, all but the tip of his tail. Fast going, for a creature that has no bony substance. When the yard has been manured and the rains are heavy, the worms appear in great abundance, They are slimy and loathsome until you come to know them; but when you discover use in things you cease to fret about their appearance, I can see that their burrowings and castings loosen and lighten the soil, and have never learned ​that they injured vegetation. In this they differ from the insects that depredate among the leaves; and the dependence of animals on plants is painfully, exasperatingly obvious to any one who tries to raise the latter. It is the killing and exile of our birds, no doubt, that have caused such an alarming increase in vermin—weeds of the animal kingdom, creatures whose use has not been discovered. Animal life is in plant life everywhere. You find worms curled in the spore-cups of lichens.

I once found a shelf fungus draped with curling white threads, and wondered if they could be strings of loosening spores; but on breaking it open, I found grubs inside. The strings were their excreta. And even in water I have found earth-worms, though how long they had been there I don’t know. Our water-hyacinth fell into a rusty aspect; but it doubled its blooms after I had taken it out of the jardinière that served as a tank for it and culled away full half its substance in dead leaves, bladders, and a few of the long, feather-like roots. It was in this process that I dis​covered an earth-worm quite alive in the mud at the bottom. Had he been there during the weeks of the plant’s growth, or had he just fallen in? Had he climbed the rockery, among the cacti, to reach the water; was he trying to drink, or had Reginald McGonigle tossed him in during an unbidden visit? One of these worms, dropped from a flower-pot, was found on the leaf of a pitcher-plant. His surprise and bewilderment were betokened by questioning ventures this way and that.

And as we have rotations in crops and weeds, so I find rotations of insects and things. This year the wire-worm is about in myriads, the wood-louse or sow-bug outdoes his brethren of last year five to one, the hard-shelled, swift-footed centiped is turned up so deep in the earth that I think he must use the holes of the angle-worms to get there, and the thrip is more plentiful on the roses. Next year it will be tarantulas and megatheriums, maybe. Reginald McGonigle is the only constancy.

We begin to prize the autumn greenery, and occasionally to put boxes or papers ​over plants when a frosty night is threatening. The papers are generally blown about the premises before morning, and probably in their flight they break as much as they should have saved. Our calceolaria, having been pinched down, is blooming anew; our buttercup is still at it; the roses have a few belated buds; while the cosmos, with its honest, wholesome, daisy-like flowers and its feathery foliage, is just enjoying itself, One of our cosmos plants freaked in November in a singular fashion: one of its flower-stalks had thickened laterally until it was perhaps three quarters of an inch wide,—obviously the union of several stems,—and at its crest it bore a long comb of stamens and pistils, with a fringe of petals. This comb, or oval flower, must have consisted of at least five united flowers, and was three inches long. A potted dandelion sulks. I stripped the seeds from a head in the summer, and pressed them under the mold in the pot. They all came up together, a score of tiny green shoots; but perhaps because they crowded each other they stopped at an ​inch. We have few thistles, for the lawnmower gives little chance to them, and the Russian thistle has been frightened away to the west because of the laws against it. I wonder why they don’t pass a law against jimson-weed, aphides, and Reginald McGonigle. I’m sure they need it. But most likely it would never be enforced. Some barrister would lend himself to an opposition, and would cite acts of King Stephen or the Virginia colonizers to prove that these offenses had received a special sanctity. If chosen to the legislature, he might change his heart and his mind. Such things have been heard of, you know, as paying a lawyer a state salary to frame or pass laws in the legislature, and discovering him in court afterward in heated argument against the validity of his own laws.

Late fall and early spring are good seasons for the study of geology and mineralogy, as the vegetation is light, and the character of the ground may be seen. And our yard, in common with the other yards of this town and some thousands of miles of unyarded country, has had an ​interesting history. Had I stood 18,000 years ago where I stand to-day when I weed the hydrangeas and stir the earth about the “pinys,” I should have been facing a wall of ice, the receding glacier of the last Ice Age. And I and certain millions of others live on the debris of that glacier. This enormous mass, over a mile thick, moving sluggishly but irresistibly southward to its melting-point, brought with it millions of tons of sand, soil, gravel, and boulders, and dumped them into the Atlantic, building up from the bottom of that sea an island 120 miles long, and leaving parts of its moraine at other points between here and the Rockies. A conjunction of exterior planets had pulled at the earth by gravitative force, elongating its orbit, so that for some years the winters on the side slanted from the sun were lengthened and the summers shortened. The southern half of the globe will be frozen up in about 75,000 years, when the conjunction is repeated.

And in the light of such portentous events the back yard becomes important. ​I know the locale of certain fragments that I find there—speaking now of minerals and rocks, instead of the commoner rags, boots, bottles, and other materials of “made land.” The green mica I know comes from Fort George, New York; the green feldspar from a mile or two south of that point; the basalt from the palisades of the Hudson; the jasper from a now extinct reef of it which may be traced beneath that river; the serpentine from Hoboken; but mixed with these are specimens from the Hudson Highlands, the Adirondacks, the Connecticut hills, the Green Mountains, perhaps from those oldest hills of all, the Laurentians—a noble range, no doubt, that the glacier wore down to mere roots and stumps of its old self. When we record or guess upon these things, man and his work appear too trivial to think about, and time, space, mass, force, too great for his understanding, There is too, in the passing of the autumn, some hint of the cold death that must overtake the race of humankind, the world it lives in, and the solar system in which it moves. It is too vast and ​lonely a theme for the imagination. By potting the plants for winter blooming, tearing up the faded annuals, setting bulbs that are to flower in spring, and mulching the beds against the coming of cold weather, one can forget these grandeurs, and his mind is comforted.