Elisabeth Woodbridge Morris

“ And now—hurrah for the garden house-cleaning! The garden is dead—the garden of yesterday! Long live the garden—the garden of to-morrow! For suddenly my mind has leaped ahead to spring.
I can hardly wait for breakfast to be over, before I am out in working clothes, pulling up things—not weeds now, but flowers, or what were flowers. Nasturtiums, asters, cosmos, snapdragon, stock, late-blooming cornflowers—up they all come, all the annuals, and the biennials that have had their season. I fling them together in piles, and soon have small haystacks all along my grass paths, and—there I am! ”

“ The trees and bushes are dwarf oaks, with their old leafage still clinging in tawny masses, and willows, with their bunches of slim, yellow shoots. Even the little river is yellow-brown, from the sand and pebbles and leaves of its bed, and the sun, as it slants down the length of the valley, wraps it in a warm, yellow haze.
I call the valley mine, for no one else seems to know it. The long grass is never cut, but left to wave its glory of yellow all through the fall and winter and spring. There is a little footpath running through it, but I never see any one on it. ”

“ The joy of pilgrimage—of going, not there and back, but on, and on, and yet on—is a joy by itself. The thought that each night brings sleep in a new and unforeseen spot, with a new journey on the morrow, gives special flavor to the journeying.
Not the least among the pleasures of the cruise were the night-camps. When the shore looked inviting, and harborage at an inn seemed doubtful, we pulled our boat above tide-water, turned her over and tilted her up on her side for a wind-break, and there we spent the night. The half-emptied dunnage bags were our pillows, the sand was our bed. ”

“ The sight and the feel and the smell of my brown garden beds gives me a pleasure that is very deep and probably very primitive.
But there is another source of pleasure in my fall gardening—a pleasure not of the senses but of the imagination.
For as I do my work my fancy is active. As I transplant my young hollyhocks, I see them, not little round-leaved bunches in my hand, but tall and stately, aflare with colors—yellows, whites, pinks. As I dig about my larkspur and stake out its seedlings, they spire above me in heavenly blues. ”

“ I believe that one of the very best things about our way of following a partridge is the sense of intimacy with the countryside which it creates—an intimacy which nothing else has ever given us. In most outdoor faring one sticks to the roads and paths, in fishing one keeps to the water-courses, in cross-country tramping one unconsciously goes around obstacles. Nothing but the headlong and undeviating pursuit of a bird along a path of his choosing would ever have given me that acquaintance with ledge and swamp and laurel copse that I now possess. ”

“ All summer it makes a thick green wall on the garden’s edge, beside the flagged path. In the other beds it rises in luxuriant masses, giving background and body with its wonderful deep green foliage, which is greener and thicker than any other phlox I know. And when its season to bloom arrives—a long month, from early August to mid-September—it is a glory of whiteness, the tallest sprays on a level with my eyes, the shortest shoulder high, except when rain weighs down the heavy heads and they lean across the paths barring my passage with their fragrant wetness. ”

“ Best of all is the orchard; the old apple trees blossom prodigally for a brief season in May, blossom in rosy-white, in cream-white, in pure white, in green-white, transforming the lane and the hill-slopes into a bower, smothering the old house in beauty, brooding over it, on still moonlight nights, in pale clouds of sweetness. And then comes a wind, with a drenching rain, and tears away all the pretty petals and buries them in the grass below. But there are seldom any apples; all this exuberance of beauty is but a dream of youth, not a promise of fruitage. ”

“ About a road that ends there is no glamour. It may be pretty or useful, but as a road it is a failure. For the Road is the symbol of endless possibility. From the faintest footpath across a meadow, where as a child one has always felt that some elf or gnome may appear, or along which, if one were to wander with sufficient negligence, one might be led into the realm of "faerie" to the broad turnpike which fares through open country, plunges through the surging cities, and escapes to broad lands beyond—any path, any road, makes this appeal. ”

“ Jonathan is “busy.” I am “busy.” We know that, if April passes, there is still May and June, and so, if at the end of April, or early May, we do at last pick up our rods,—all new-bedight with red silk windings, and shiny with fresh varnish,—it is not alone the call of the trout that decides us, but another call which is to me at least more imperious, because, if we neglect it now, there is no May and June in which to heed it. It is the call of the arbutus.
Any one with New England traditions knows what this call is. Its appeal is to something far deeper than the love of a pretty flower. ”

“ Sundays are the big beads on the chain. They need not be all of the same color, but there must be the big beads to satisfy the eye and the finger-tip.
And a New England Sunday always is different. Whatever changes may have come or may be coming elsewhere, in New England Sunday has its own atmosphere. Over the fields and woods and rocks there is a sense of poise between reminiscence and expectancy. The stir of the morning church-going brightens but does not mar this. It adds the human note—rather not a note, but a quiet chord of many tones. ”

“ Thus I watched, through the typical stages of the sport: the delicate flip of the bait into the current at just the right spot; its swift descent, imperceptibly guided by the rod’s quivering tip; its slower drift toward deep water; its sudden vanishing, and the whir of the reel as the line goes out; then the pause, the critical moments of “feeling for him”; at last the strike ... and then, a flopping in the grass behind me, and Jonathan crawling back to kill and unhook him. ”

“ With all the strongest and deepest instincts of my nature I long to go out into the green beauty of the world, to fling myself down in some sloping meadow and feel the sunshine envelop me and the warm winds pass over me, to see them tossing the grasses and tugging at the trees and driving the white clouds across the blue, and to feel the great earth revolving under me—for if you lie long enough you can really get the sense of sailing through space. All this I long for—from my window. ”

“ There were nine of them, fat and sputtering, and while they cooked, we made toast and arranged the camp. Then we had supper, and watched the red coals smouldering and the white moonlight filling the world with a radiance that put out the stars and brought the blue back to the sky. The little basin of the bay was quiet as a pool, the air was full of stillness, with now and then the hushed flip-flip of a tiny wave that had somehow strayed in from the tumbling crowd outside.
We slept well, but once Jonathan waked me. “Look!” he whispered, “White heron.” ”

“ The haystacks reiterated the color notes—gold on their sunset side, deep brown on their shadowed one.
There is a moment sometimes, just at sundown, when the quality of light changes. It does not fall upon the world from without, it radiates from within. Things seem self-luminous. Yet, for all their brightness, we see them less clearly, one's vision is dazzled, enmeshed. It is the time when that wondrous old word "faerie" finds its meaning. It is a magic moment. It laid its spell upon us.
Jonathan emerged first, bracing himself. "It will shut down soon. We haven't a minute to spare. ”

“ It is always good to be out of doors. And there are seasons when one is glad to wander slowly over the [Pg 198] fields and byways; there are times when it seems best of all to be still—in the heart of the woods, on the wide hill pastures, in the deep grass of the meadows. But not in the fall! Is it a breath of the migrating instinct that makes us want to be off and away, to go, and go, and go? Yes, fall is the time for the hunt—gay, boisterous fall, rioting in wind and color to keep up its spirits against the stealthy approach of winter. ”

“ For a keel demands a special landing-place—a wharf—and a wharf means human habitation, and then—where is your thrill of discovery? Ah, no!—a little boat! And you can land anywhere, among rocks or in sandy shallows; you can explore the tide creeks and marshes and the little rivers; you can beach wherever you like, wherever the rippling waves themselves can go. A little boat for romance!
A little boat, but a long cruise, as long as may be. To be sure, a boat and a bit of water [pg 205] anywhere is good. Even an errand across the pond and back may be a joy. ”

“ In the warmth of the Indian summer noon the shade of the woods was pleasant, and I let Jonathan go back to the bees while I lay on a dry slope above the brook and watched the slim, tall chestnuts swaying in the wind. It is almost like being at sea to lie in the woods and look up at the trees. Their waving tops seem infinitely far away, but the sky beyond seems very near, and one can almost feel the earth go round. ”

“ Thus, a garden rises in my fancy, a garden where neither beetle, borer, nor cutworm doth corrupt, and where the mole doth not break in or steal, where gentle rain and blessed sun come as they are needed, where all the flowers bloom unceasingly in colors of heavenly light—a garden such as never yet existed nor ever shall, till the tales of fairyland come true. ”

“ They leaned confidingly against the great barn and settled comfortably among the bare faces of rock in the barnyard, as if they had always been there, as, indeed, they had been there longer than any one now living can remember. Neither they nor the barn had ever been painted, and they had all weathered to a silver-gray—not the gray of any paint or stain ever made, but the gray that comes only to certain kinds of wood when it has lived out in the rain and the sunshine for fifty, seventy, a hundred years. It is to an old building what white hair is to an old lady. ”

“ There are gardens and gardens. Some, set about with hedges tall and thick, offer the delights of exclusiveness and solitude. But exclusiveness and solitude are easily had on a Connecticut farm, and my garden will none of them; it flings forth its appeal to every wayfarer. And I like it. I like my garden to “get notice.” As people drive by I hope they enjoy my phlox. I furtively glance to see if they have an eye for the foxglove. I wonder if the calendulas are so tall that they hide the asters. ”