My Garden Beasts

I

MASSES of bloom are the ambition of the beginner in the garden. The mellowed and experienced worker values rather privacy, design, individuality, pictorial quality, the motherly shade of old trees, the aroma of low-hanging fruit, and the association of spiritual and bodily comrades who frequent the place. Nor would my particular old garden, sitting at the feet of the old house, be to me all that it is, without the presence and memory of myriad little visitors in fur and feathers, bewinged, betailed, gleaming, gliding, flashing, loafing, usurping the plot of land I so absurdly call my own. By what tenure do birds and ants and fireflies claim squatter rights, — bed, board, and protection in my garden? By broken egg-shells of divers colors and markings, cumuli of clay crumbs and glints of phosphorus. Moreover I not only acquiesce but, like Parkinson of old, ‘honestest Root-gatherer,’ I collect them and their comrades into a Book of Paradise, ‘so that in winter I can read about them and count up how many I have.’

The most memorable bird that ever visited the garden, a rara avis indeed, came toward the close of a desperately long and severe winter, came in direct answer to my ardent longing for him. This robin was as large as a grown hen, and he came and walked beside me and let me, with the extreme caution of approach I once expended in putting salt on robins’ tails, smooth the feathers on his head. My chamber clock struck one just after, but to any caviler I can show in proof the exact path where we walked together, Robin and I, from the gnarled Bosc pear tree to the monkey bed.

The monkey bed had once another name. Only workers in many-bedded and bordered gardens know the convenience of having the parts adequately christened. I was reading by the window when a queer little figure in a red coat leaped out of the border, snatched a pear from under a tree and returned to cover. I rubbed my eyes. Was it a case of Robin Redbreast again? Was this a first symptom of a wandering mind? No, again out dashed a live monkey, seized a pear, and again retreated to the jungle of rudbeckia. An advertisement in a local paper that afternoon led me to telephone the creature’s whereabouts to its owner, who after recovering the little redcoat, related the latter’s adventures as they had reached him from several quarters. The monkey, wandering far in enjoyment of his liberty, saw an open door, entered, found a bed, and accustomed to the freedom of a house jumped up and burrowed between the covers. When a woman turned down the sheets at bedtime, out before her horrified eyes jumped the monkey, making rapid exit through an open window. Checko’s brief sojourn in my garden having added to its nomenclature, I planted there a goodly group of mimulus to keep his memory green.

I always couple with this incident one told me by a justice of our Supreme Court, of how a deer jumped into the dining-room window at his home in Crab Orchard Springs, leaped over the table set for breakfast and out at the opposite window.

I was reading one day in the shade of a great oak, when little particles which I at first took to be oak-galls fell about me. One in my lap suggested investigation, and as it proved to be a bit of fresh fruit, I looked up. Directly above me sat a red squirrel holding in its paws a seckel pear. The annual theft had begun; but it seemed sheer deviltry of the little marauder to use the gardener’s own lap for his scrap basket, and put her in the position of wearing a chip on her shoulder while remaining powerless to strike out. If the squirrels ate the pears it would be less exasperating, but to chew up and drop a good third of one merely to get the few seeds, and, that accomplished, to drop the rest of the fruit, seems criminal waste. Doubtless, however, the chips become the breakfast food of ants and beetles.

Spirally around the trunk of a tree one day ran the most uncanny little creature. Its tail was like a rat’s, its paws were clothed in fur mittens, the rest of its body was naked as one’s knee. I could not believe, till forced to do so, that this ugly beast was a new-born son of the graceful though graceless squirrel. The parents’ penchant for birds’ eggs leads to many a chase by outraged robins and blue-jays. The bird flies furiously at the squirrel which, deftly as a boy at ’tag,’slips around to the other side of the tree trunk. The bird’s impetus carries it far past, but it returns at its enemy, which repeats the trick ad infinitum, till ‘tired out with fun’ master squirrel barks in ironic laughter and scrambles off for other sports. One of these used to be to lick a willow garden chair, which he did piecemeal, morning after morning, for many weeks. Possibly the size tickled his palate. Could he have been secreting mucilage to use in nest-making, for which purpose he chews off great mouthfuls of the rope which fastens the climbing roses to their trellis?

Cats dearly love a garden, and, though because of the birds I deprecate their presence, I can yet take æsthetic delight in the way pussy picks her path delicately among the growing plants. I caught a mother one day in the act of teaching four kittens the approved method of making a day couch, feline version doubtless of man’s hemlock bed. Tabby, closely followed by the kittens, walked into the border of young, feathery cosmos, and with tail stiffly extended turned about until she had gathered in a considerable number of stalks. She was about to lie down thereupon when fate in the shape of a small apple thrown by a practiced hand drove the quintette forth. So far as cats are concerned, daytime cats, the gardener has it mostly her own way, — ‘she makes the rain and the fine weather,’ as the French phrase neatly puts it; but what my near-sighted eyes once took for a great maltese cat proved to be a wild rabbit; and as far as that visitor was concerned I might as well have succumbed at once. He would sit and nibble pansy buds, keeping his weather eye on my approach, and just as I leaned over to seize him by the ears, the most wonderful set of legs in the world would rise to action and Brer Rabbit would be twenty feet away, nonchalantly nibbling my head lettuce. His four days’ visit — visitation — harrows even my memory; but at last he followed the dictate of the sundial to ‘Go about your business.’

I must confess that the cabalistic design which stands for a motto on my sundial is unique in meaning whatever I wish it to mean, varying with the age, temper, and circumstance of its owner. Once I translated it platitudinously as ‘I count the bright hours only.’ Later, when the confidences of youth had a jolt, it read, as in the Vulgate, ‘Cogitavi dies antiquos — I have considered the days of old.’ I have even had the temerity to translate it in the full hours of morning as, ‘I mark Time: dost thou?’ and in the leisure of four o’clock as, ‘Yes, rest awhile.’ Whatever its motto, the flowers that surround it are all and always golden, since Time is golden; and this leads me by quite traceable links of association back to my little visitors.

Glancing into the garden recently, my eyes were greeted by a goldfinch standing on the stone pedestal, beside the brass sundial, with the tall coreopsis and hunnemannia reaching up to join the symphony of color, and the dwarf golden nasturtiums glinting below. No apostle of color effects in the garden can afford to ignore how birds and flowers reciprocally lend each other new forces. Could one imagine a more exquisite setting for a blue-jay than the gray blue of the bushy clematis davidiana, the supporting stakes of which are permitted to protrude just enough to lure his squawky majesty thither? — unless it be the humming bird poised before a stalk of cardinal flowers, the ruby spot on his breast taking an extra nuance from the proximity of that ‘thyrsis bright for the fingers of seraphim’; or the cardinal grosbeak when he flies into a silver maple, and with his advent makes the red stems of its myriad leaves flash forth into prominence.

This interplay of flowers and little beasts shows in the very nomenclature: spiderwort, cranesbill, larkspur, snapdragon, monkey flower; also aquilegia and pteris aquilina, — columbine and brakes, — which mark the spot where a pair of eagles dwelt one summer in the little home school house. In my childhood a few of their feathers still remained, but they disappeared somewhere in the framed collection of tail-feathers which was the pride of our youth. I can still name more birds by the tail-feathers I find in the grass than by their song or plumage in toto. The collection was not only an endless source of search, research and boasting, but exhibited at the county fair, — an entry was specially prepared for it, — it furnished seventy-five cents annually to our coffer, a fortune even when divided among the members of our stock company.

Barring the sparrows, birds fit into my environment without a crease or ruffle. Hordes of robins which evidently look upon my presence much as the Indians did upon that of my forebears, fairly elbow me out of the flower-beds after sprinkling hours. They bathe by twos and threes in the bird-dish, whither they providently bring their lunch of mulberries and cherries, leaning out as they soak their feathers to take festive nips at a rose-bud or verbena head. They are as well provided with the comforts of home as was Marat in his shoe-shaped bathtub, a shelf for his papers edging the top of the shoe where his head decorously stuck out.

Turtles used frequently to visit the garden via the boys’ pockets after mornings in swimming, and I remember one which, tethered to a door-knob, escaped in the night and wandered about the house laying eggs in many corners of rooms. Possibly this fact made the turtle persona non grata; but I have always regretted that one was not kept as a garden accessory, as deer are kept in English parks. One family I know of in the tropics always name a young tortoise at the same time as a new baby, keeping it till the child grows up and marries, when it is killed and eaten at the wedding feast. One ancient and honorable specimen known to many visitors to a Bermuda garden is celebrated for his hatred of rain, shuffling off at the first sprinkling, and running his foolish head into a corner. Gilbert White in Selborne notes the same trait of one in Surrey which, ‘though it had a shell that would secure it against the wheel of a loaded cart, yet discovers as much solicitude about rain as a lady dressed in all her fine attire.’

Toads are treasure-trove in my garden, and when I accidentally dig one up I carefully re-inter him, and for his delectation keep thin flat stones over moist hollows, the stone roofs serving as well for stepping stones and weed discouragers in the borders. Some of the toads grow tame enough to hop up the stone path to the tempo of my whistle, and stand while I tickle their heads with a grass blade, and dart out preposterously long red tongues, seemingly hinged at the fore instead of the rear of their mouths, for the flies I furnish forth.

Ladybirds, too, are ben trovato in my garden. Aristocrats among beetles are they, having, like queen bees, special post-office permits. More than once have I brought home in my handkerchief a colony of jeweled ladybirds to be reëstablished at the foot of some aphis or scale-infested plant, sure that they will accomplish their modest mission on this earth.

When the small domain over which I rule, ‘lord of one lizard,’ as Juvenal puts it, rises to the dignity of a seal of its own, it shall take the form of a sacred beetle; but coccinella not scarabeus shall be its name; symbol, not like Egypt’s of sun and immortality, but of unostentatious benefaction. Like one of Carpaccio’s lovely signatures on a white scroll held in its mouth by a tiny lizard, Ladybird shall stamp my documents, mute reminder that —

II

I have often thought that I should like to carve a frieze on the garden side of the Cot, as the Greeks did on their Parthenon; a frieze depicting scenes from the lives of the animals which through the years have rested foot or wing in my garden. Some presentments would be counterfeit enough, some touched up like a photographer’s negative, others frankly fanciful like those strange beasts of the Apocalypse beloved of the old sculptors. The little red squirrel should be there, true to life, with a seckel pear in one paw and Fouquet’s motto, ‘ J’ascends,’ in the other; but next him might stretch the salamander, with the little Benvenuto Cellini looking on and getting incontinently whipped lest he forget so wonderful a phenomenon. This group belongs to my garden, having entered there as I lay, a child, in the grass, through a Lowell essay dropped there by some older reader; dipping into which brought me first intimation that stories are not limited to story-books.

Monkey in his red coat should figure on the frieze, and next him the unicorn who bounded into the little preserve I call my mind the day I was trying to solve the riddle of Moses’s horns as carved by Michael Angelo. Aristotle believed in the unicorn of such gracious quality that his horn wounded only to heal, and of such wisdom and strength that no hunter could take him save as he voluntarily came from the deep woods and nestled in the lap of a maiden. How often at a sound in the shrubbery did I raise expectant young eyes; and in later years no subject have I pondered oftener than the wild ass which also wore his one horn upon his forehead, and suggested Balzac’s awful allegory upon the saving and the spending of life.

My frieze should set forth the actual birds of the garden — the wee wren with its kingly names, regulus and roitelet, singing a thousand details of its family life; but near by the phœnix should spread its wings, —

Do you doubt the miracle of the phœnix? Keep your eye on a bit of bare earth where a label says ‘resurgam,’ and a splendid flame-colored tulip will in time purge you of heresy.

One panel, too, must show the halcyon bird, for whenever she nests ‘a law of nature brings around what is called halcyon weather,—days distinguishable from all others for their serenity though they sometimes come amid the storms of winter.’ And such my garden and its mistress need.

It was Prester John who had the phœnix thus versified; and a letter about him from Bishop Otto remains full of delightful extravagances. His domain contained also the fountain of youth, both the salamander and the unicorn, and the monstrous ants that dug gold. ‘Also there dare no man make a lye in our lande, for if he dyde he shoulde incontinent be sleyn.’

One panel of the frieze should be sacred to still smaller visitors: Bombus Americanus, onomatopœic name of the bumble bee whose frolicking I love to watch, stopping his mad flight by bumping head-first into a petunia cup, then scrambling over the edge to pierce in gluttonous haste the nectary of sweets; the Nile-green katydid of obstinate reiteration, who suddenly adopts the other side and vociferously denies her own statement; the cricket with traditions of good luck; the butterfly whose flaunting luxuriousness has as little in common with the caterpillar as my own mental butterflying has with the solid observations of naturalists; the tree toad, the honey bee, the dragonflies; the rosebugs and wasps which Emerson apostrophized as appearing best when flying—’They sail like little pinnaces of the air: I admire them most when flying away from my garden!’ and the locust, pure prestidigitator, who rips his own skin up the back and crawls out of it, emerging literally twice the size of his late self left sticking on the tree twig. It might have been this sight which suggested to McConnell his theory of the evolution of immortality: ‘This life is a time of gestation. The living human form may be regarded as a matrix in which another may be quickening and maturing.’

My frieze-to-be recalls Peale, who, after fighting in our Revolutionary War and becoming the leading portrait painter of Pennsylvania, began collecting animals and organized our first Museum of Natural History. Wishing to move his collection to Philadelphia Hall, he had the stuffed buffaloes, panthers, and tigers carried on men’s shoulders, followed by a long string of boys, who dearly love a parade and would have paid for the privilege. The living frieze brought everybody to their doors and was a great advertisement, while Peale was saved large expense and time in moving.

One of my foibles being the collection of garden beasts, my readers may wonder why I have omitted the dog. In truth he is as much out of place in a garden as a camel in a china shop. His sole use for a flower-bed is to bury bones in and to chase cats through, the terminal preposition emphasizing the gardener’s distress whilst. In my rôle of gardener all dogs are ‘Spot,’ and Macbeth’s three-worded anathema my own. Yet with equanimity can I hum Purcell’s lovely song, ‘ I ’ll sail upon the Dog star,’ nor do dog-days frighten me; and in winter when I garden in the imagination I lift up ravished eyes to Sirius and Procyon, the great and little hounds which follow Orion the mighty hunter. Nor in this connection can I forget the delectable smile with which Dr. Edward Everett Hale begged me, as I set sail for southern seas, to wander on to Cat Island and gather the spray of dog roses which Columbus found floating there.

Dog stars are not the only starry beasts that gambol over my garden: the lion and bears, the eagle and swan, the goat and the crab, the bull and the ram, scorpion, fishes, and dolphin all shed a benign influence. While by day, —

‘ Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? ’

‘ By the mass, and ’t is like a camel, indeed.’

' Methinks it is like a weasel.’

‘ It is backed like a weasel.’

‘ Or like a whale.’

‘ Very like a whale.’

Oh, diversity of the heavens! Yet few persons can distinguish one star or constellation from another; or picture camel, weasel, or whale in the clouds. I cannot draw the outline of a beast from mind or memory ; but I can find one in any cloud and from that draw a very recognizable creature.

In the folk-lore of Ireland there is a widespread belief in a fairy land of eternal hope and brightness and youth situated a little way below the roots of the grass. I seem to find it each time I stoop over an ant’s nest and watch these master-builders. They may not, like Prester John’s, dig gold; but La Fontaine, the only writer of the seventeenth century, by the way, sensible of the graces of the landscape, transcribed their talk. Once he arrived late at a dinner: he had been watching a procession of ants in a field and had found it was a funeral and had accompanied the cortège to the grave in the garden and then escorted the bereaved family back to its home.

Once, when I was leading a visitor through my little strawberry patch, she picked a berry of unusual symmetry and turning it slowly in her hand exclaimed, ‘Does n’t, it look like an emery!' I have often noticed, since, how people compare nature to art as though reducing them thereby to a common denominator. Who, visiting Lake Como, fails to compare its atmospheric effects with a stage curtain? We say a child looks like a picture, a moon like a great red ball. Yesterday, pulling weeds at dawn, I looked up for the bird I heard calling, and was suddenly impressed with the unreality of the scene, — there was no short-skirted woman with homely tool in hand, no bird a-singing, but only Jules Breton’s Song of the Lark,— a few square feet of canvas.

The song of the lark precipitates a Wordsworth, a Shelley, to write incomparably beautiful poems: the poems lure Americans to England to hear a skylark. The caged thrush seen by Poor Susan paints before her starved city eyes the home of her childhood: the poem sends us to find the plane tree in Wood Street. ‘It’s all truth and daylight,’ as Kitty Clive said of Mrs. Siddons’s acting, and each gardener in life is bound to interpret her bit of nature or art for somebody else, the value of the interpretation depending ultimately of course, upon the force and quality of the character behind it.

Some of the interpretations are humorous enough — our similes for instance: ‘Mad as a hornet,’ and ‘Mad as a march hare,’ expressing quite different states of madness. To parvenu gardeners talking learnedly of tree roses and tree hydrangeas I retort that I am not eager for abnormalities, but hope rather to make a tree bear. Give a chuckle to the little English streams called the Mole and the Ant. Recall Lowell’s ‘Beetles which drive home the beams’ — commonplace name enough for a wooden mallet when one remembers the old root‘to beat.’ And what is our expression ‘to mount on a high horse,’ but the social climbing in old Lorraine? Four families had the right to bear the names of the high horses; the second set of families bore the titles of the little horses, but many of the little horses pretended to equal the first, — and there you are.

III

I never feel important in the presence of the little furred and feathered visitors in my garden, but then they never humiliate me or nag me, and though they interpret much, they are not omniscient, forever trying to interpret it all. One of the wisest sayings uttered on this ancient earth was Josh Billings’s remark, ‘It ain’t so much men’s ignorance that does the harm as their knowing so many things that ain’t so.’ As Chesterton says, in comment, ‘ One sees vividly hundreds of well-informed, well-intentioned people trotting around about the streets knowing things.’

The birds know, perhaps, but they wear their knowledge lightly. One of Newbolt’s beautiful passages describes a bird rising and falling over a flower. ‘How long,’ asks the visitor to the Old Country, ‘has it been doing that on exactly the same spot?’ ‘Oh, from father to son for a thousand years!’ and he continues, ‘We are all contemporaries, but we live like figures in a tapestry, invisible to each other and fondly imagining that we are made of different thread from our neighbors whom we have never seen.'

If our neighbors wear fur and feathers, what difference? St. Francis talked to his little brothers the birds: the sleek otter crept up to warm the feet of St. Cuthbert: heavenly Una and her milk-white lamb understood each other. Bergson believes that instinct, not reason, brings us into closest touch with what is most real, ‘for matter and reason have a common origin, and the second was evolved to cope with the first.’ Was it reason that led little Aurore Dupin, ‘George Sand,’ who had been taught no religion, to invent a deity of her own, make him a little shrine in the garden and sacrifice to him by catching birds and butterflies and setting them free in his honor? Was it reason that caused Hohenlohe, when out chamois-driving, to pause and give his whole attention to a field mouse which, terrified by the shooting, had sought refuge with the great statesman? The vraie vérité, to use a serviceable French phrase, seems to be that it is not intricate reasoning that makes us wise, but a habit of brooding upon common experiences, the things of earth and skies and human relations, until knowledge becomes ‘instinctively’ ours.

I have heard in the little city where I live, that my garden sends forth an influence of itself. It would be worthless else, and ungrateful; for influences untold have fashioned it, — the stars and clouds bow down to do it reverence; waters from the depths of the earth rise up to refresh and sustain it; birds bring it tidings of Alaska and Mexico; its never ceasing orchestra is compounded of many-scented breezes. The spirit of great writers broods there: from Aristophanes, the first to discover that men listen more surely to the facts and follies of human life in the rôle of animals than in the guise of teacher or divine, through Æsop and Rabelais and La Fontaine to Rostand, and every poet who has sung divinely of little beast and bird. Truly, what Meredith calls our modern malady, the malady of sameness, has no hold in my garden. The oriole that sings to-day may be the same oriole that sang yesterday, but he sings from a different bough. Each book that I read in the garden introduces new visitors: Jonah, perhaps, and I lift my eyes from the fish to the God above the fish; and my thoughts drift back unconsciously across the æons to the time when my inland garden was one of the beaches of Lake Erie, in the waters of which sported fish to which Jonah’s was but commonplace.

Or sometimes, under the power of an enchanted grasshopper, ‘whose voice will run from hedge to hedge,’ Keats sits in my garden; or the glowing eyes of Bobby Burns peer down at a wee field mouse; or over the snail on the thorn leans the shade of Browning; and the age-old shells in the gravel at my feet set my own soul building more stately mansions. For I am not like the French peasant who would not take off his hat to a new wooden cross because he had known it as a pear tree. My humblest little visitors are latent influences to larger vision and quickened life; and like the griffin of old, which the old Etruscan settlers of Perugia captured thousands of years ago upon the hilltops and chose for their city arms, I could carve on my house frieze either a dinosaur or a ladybird, and from its mysterious origin and organism catch new inspiration to attack the monsters of the day.