Read Ebook: Pleasant Talk About Fruits Flowers and Farming by Beecher Henry Ward

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HAYING.

Alas for the poetry of farming! All the songs of milkmaids must be now listened for in the old English poets. The whetting of the mower's scythe is almost over--quite over on my farm! Instead of that, one hears the sharp rattle of the mower, and sees the driving-man quite at his ease riding round and round the meadow, for all the world as if he were out airing. Whereas, heretofore, two acres would be counted a large day's work, ten and twelve are easily accomplished now!

The only thing that remains to be made easy is pitching on and off the load. It is true that horse-forks have been invented, but I have never seen any that did their work well; and in my barn, at any rate, the old work of pitching and mowing remains; and if you wish to know what fun is, get on to the mow, under the slate roof of my barn, on a hot day, and let Tim pitch off hay as he will if I give him the wink. You will have to step lively, and even then you will often be seen emerging from heaps of hay thrown over you, like a rat from a bunch of oakum. And then it is so pleasant, when a man is all a-sweat, to have his shirt filled with hay-seed, each particular particle of which makes believe that it is a flea, and wiggles and tickles upon every square inch of his skin, until he is half desperate.

THE VALUE OF ROBINS.

The game-law has relaxed its authority. The gun is set free. I hear it in the woods, in the fields, on the hills, Sundays and week-days, bang! bang! bang! as if it could not express its joy, and even celebrating its own emancipation.

Well, let them fire, only so they keep off my hill. It is true that the birds have finished their service, and are now of little use, either as songsters or as worm-exterminators--more's the pity! But are their past services to be forgotten?

Let me speak of the robin.

He is an immense feeder, and omnivorous. Nothing seems to come amiss--fruit, worm, or seed. Glutton he is not, for he does not eat more than he really needs; but he needs more than most birds of his size.

It is a disputed question, among farmers, whether the robin is a profitable bird. Whether he does not damage the fruit crop out of all proportion to his services in the crusade against insects, I grieve to say, that my own household is divided, and that I am the only one that is openly and wholly a friend to the robin. He is an early riser, and no sooner has he sung his morning hymn than he begins breakfast. Now, in the month of June cherries ripen. I have a cherry orchard. When fully grown, there will be enough for robins and men. But at present my trees are like precocious children; they blossom enormously, but set little fruit. The question now is, Whose is that fruit? The people in the house declare that it belongs to us. The robins out of doors say little about it, but actions speak louder than words. Rising earlier than we do, they get their breakfast before the smoke rises from my chimneys. I will not permit them to be driven away, and still less to be shot. I plead their services. I recount their deeds of valor against insects; their service of song. But it is all in vain. I am voted down. All manner of threats are thrown out by the boys, "if I would only let them." But I won't let them!

There are two distinct grounds on which these birds are to be preserved and encouraged. The first ground is the refining pleasure which they give to every person of true susceptibility. Thousands there are who live in the country who will regard this as sheer sentimentality. They are robust people, who drive around all day with vigorous industry, and have always done so, until at length their very standard of manhood is made up of some kind of physical force. He is a man that can lift the largest weight, run the longest and fastest, cut the most grain, climb most lithely, wrestle the most dextrously. And if he can make a shrewd bargain, has an eye for the points in an ox or horse, has the knack of making money, and a good-natured way of pushing about among men, he is considered, and considers himself, to be a real up-and-down man!

But where are the finer traits? God made blossom bulbs in every nature, and if men do not blossom they are deficient in the higher elements.

To disregard qualities of beauty, in form, color, motion, and song, is so far to indicate a deformity of one's own nature. We never think one to be more manly who cares nothing for the unmarketable graces of the natural world, than he who makes them a part of his daily enjoyment.

The argument is conclusive to a fine nature, when one says, "Birds are too beautiful to be killed." It may be replied that noxious insects and animals are beautiful, too, and yet are destroyed by the humane and refined, because they are mischievous. We admit the statement, and are willing to apply it to birds. When they are really destructive to crops, or when they are, at proper seasons, needful for food, it is no inhumanity to take their lives. They must take their part and lot with the whole creation, which everywhere eats and is eaten.

But to return to our robin. There is no season of the year when the robin does not prevent more mischief than he accomplishes. He is an enormous eater, and, for the most part, he prefers a meat diet. No one who has not taken pains to observe and estimate can form any conception of the insects and worms devoured by the robin between March and August--that is, during the whole nesting period. One robin eats, in a single season, what, if built into a solid form, would be more than a whole ox. Fruit is but a small part of his diet; cherries, strawberries, and grapes, for a while, suffer from his depredations. Yet, if there were no birds these very things would suffer far more. Insects are more to be dreaded than birds. They elude our vigilance, they work secretly, they swarm in such numbers as to defy man's power. But birds keep them down. They destroy myriads of eggs, of grubs, of tender worms, and of fruit-loving insects. To destroy birds for the sake of saving fruit is like throwing down the fence about one's garden to keep the pigs out! Even admit, as some do and we do not, that blackbirds and crows deserve to be shot for destroying the planter's seed. We claim that the robin does not belong to their company. He preserves a hundred-fold more than he destroys.

On every ground, then, of humanity, of good taste, and of thrift, robins should be spared. They are our best friends. They are, beyond all question, the finest song-bird of the temperate zone. They are a watch and guard against insect depredations in orchard and garden, and, with other birds, they make possible the raising of fruit, which, without them, it is no exaggeration to say, would be utterly impossible. They are, next to the wren and sparrows, the most companionable of birds, hovering about the dwellings of man, and following him, step by step, as he subdues the wilderness, and singing the song of triumph for the axe and the plow.

The robin is an out-door bird. He lives in the sunshine. He attracts no sympathy by delicate ways. He is altogether robust, and full of dashing life. When twenty or thirty robins between three and four o'clock in a June morning are at full voice, it would be no exaggeration to compare it to a rain of music. It is no dainty thrumming,--no parceling out of a sweet note or two, with more rests than notes. It is a musical rush, the exultation of a healthy, hearty bird, that sings by the half-hour, without pause, and is ever ready to sing again.

The evening song of the robin I most love to hear. Heard from the top of some orchard tree, or of some meadow maple, while his note has the fire and brilliancy of his morning song, there is in it a slight undertone of sadness. Indeed, this evening song seems to be a mate-call. For ten or fifteen minutes the bird will send out its mellow call over all the region, if peradventure the truant mother may come home. A slight impatience mixes with its closing notes. He flies to a neighboring tree, utters two or three sharp single notes, and then, beginning again, swells out his long call louder than before, warbling five to ten minutes. He pauses. No bird returns. He sits silent.

Perhaps he remembers that there had been a little domestic quarrel during the day, and if his mate is dead, he may never be able to say to her, "I am sorry." A nest full of little birds needs the mother. The twilight is deepening. Once more, its brilliance now toned down by an unmistakable sadness, he sends out far and near through the dew-damp air a song which is more a lamentation than a call. If there be no response, he flies silently away, and the air rests.

But, sometimes, just as his song is ending, it breaks out into a sharp note of surprise. A flutter is heard, and two birds fly hastily away. The wanderer has come home again!

Can one, all summer long, follow birds with sympathy, and enter into their gentle life, throwing around it, by the imagination, the charm of the affections, and then consent to their destruction as if they had been mere birds from a coop? Shoot and eat my birds? It is but a step this side of cannibalism. The next step beyond, and one would hanker after Jenny Lind or Miss Kellogg.

SOUNDS OF TREES.

The sounds and motions of trees constitute subtle but important elements of pleasure. It is not enough that a tree have a comely form as a whole; that it cast a dense shade in the sultry days of summer; that, perhaps, it yield a nut or fruit; and that, finally, when it gives up its life to the inevitable ax, its prostrate trunk shall furnish good timber. Besides these uses of bodily comfort and of economy, a tree, like a rich-hearted person, has a hundred nameless ways which we hardly stop to analyze, but which, were they suddenly taken away, we should miss.

The murmuring of trees is profoundly affecting to a sensitive spirit. In some moods of imagination one cannot help feeling that trees have a low song, or a conversation of leaves. They whisper, or speak, or cry out, and even roar. No one knows this last quality so well as those who have been in old oak forests in a storm, with violent wind. A dense forest opposes such a resistance to the free passage of the air, that the sound is much deadened. But in a park or oak-opening, where spaces are left for the motion of the air, and among open-branched trees, a storm moves with such power and majesty, that not even the battles of thunder-clouds are more sublime, and, under certain circumstances, it becomes terrific. At the beginning of the tempest, the trees sway and toss as if seeking to escape; as the violence increases, the branches bounce back, the leaves, turning their white under sides to the light, fairly scream. The huge boughs creak and strain like a ship in a storm. Now and then some branches which have grown across each other are drawn back and forth, as if demons were scraping infernal bass-viols. Occasionally a branch breaks with a wild crash, or some infirm tree, caught unawares in a huge puff of the storm, goes down with crashing as it falls, and with a thunder-stroke when it reaches the ground. I would go farther to hear a storm-concert in an old forest, than any music that man ever made. No one who is familiar with forest sounds but is sure, when he hears Beethoven's music, that much of it was inspired by the sounds of winds among trees.

There are milder joys, however, in tree converse. Only this morning I awakened to hear it rain. That steady splash of drops which a northeast wind brings on is not easily mistaken. I flatter myself that my ear is too well trained to all the ordinary sounds of nature to be easily deceived. I rise, and throw back the blinds, when lo! not a drop is falling. It is the wind in my maple-trees. I had thought of that, and listened with the most discriminating attention, and was sure that it was rain!

Twice in our life we lived in houses built on the edge of the original forests. These had been thinned out, and recesses opened up. It happened in both cases that an ash and a hickory had been left, which shot up, without side branches, to a great height. The trunks were supple and tough. Whenever the winds moved gently, these long and lithe trees moved with singular grace and beauty. As there was no perceptible wind along the ground, their movements seemed voluntary. And yet there was in it that kind of irresolution which one sees in sleep-walking. But as soon as the breath became a breeze, the wide circles through which these rooted gymnasts moved was wonderful. They seemed going forth in every direction, and yet surely and quickly springing back to position again. And in every motion, such was their elasticity, they manifested the utmost grace. The sighing of winds in a pine forest has no parallel sound except upon the sea-shore. Of all sounds of leaves it is the sweetest and saddest, to certain moods of summer leisure.

The pine sings, like the poet, with no every-day voice, but in a tone apart from all common sounds. It has the power to change the associations, and to quicken the poetic sensibility, as no other singing tree can do. Every one should have this old harper, like a seer or a priest among trees, about his dwelling. Under an old pine would naturally be found the young maiden, whose new lover was far across the seas. In the sounds that would descend she could not fail to hear the voices of the sea,--the roar of winds, the plash of waves running in upon the shore. A young mother, whose first-born had returned to God who gave it, would go at twilight to the pines; for, to her ear, the whole air must needs seem full of spirit voices. They would sing to her thoughts in just such sad strains as soothe sorrow. Nor would it be strange if, in the rise and fall of these sylvan syllables, she should imagine that she heard her babe again, calling to her from the air.

Every country place should have that very coquette among trees, the aspen. It seems never to sleep. Its twinkling fingers are playing in the air at some arch fantasy almost without pause. If you sit at a window with a book, it will wink and blink, and beckon, and coax, till you cannot help speaking to it! That must be a still day that does not see the aspen quiver! A single leaf sometimes will begin to wag, and not another on the whole tree will move. Sometimes a hidden breath will catch at a lower branch, then, shifting, will leave that still, while it shakes a topmost twig. Though the air may move so gently that your cheek does not feel it, this sensitive tree will seem all a shiver, and turn its leaves upward with shuddering chill. It is the daintiest fairy of all the trees. One should have an aspen on every side of his house, that no window should be without a chance to look upon its nods and becks, and to rejoice in its innocent witcheries. I have seen such fair sprites, too, in human form. But one does not get off so easily, if he sports too much with them. The aspen leaf makes no wounds. Its frolics spin no silken threads which one cannot follow, and which will not break!

The musical qualities of trees have not been considered enough, in planting around our dwellings. The great-leaved magnolias have no fine sound. Willows have but little. Cedars, yew-trees, and Lombardy poplars are almost silent. It is said that the Lombardy poplar is the male tree, the female having never come over. It is very likely. It is stiff enough to be an old bachelor. It spreads out no side branches. Its top dies early. It casts a penurious shadow.

But my hand is tired. The winds move; all the leaves call me. Let me go forth.

This ocean above me is sure to cure trouble. The winds sound, the trees sing. My soul yearns. Its thoughts and moods below may roll like a disturbed sea; but, drawn up into the heavenly air, like the waters of the sea, they forget their wrath, and descend again in gentle dews and nourishing rains.

UNVEILED NONSENSE.

"Henry Ward Beecher says, 'The only way to exterminate the Canada thistle is to plant it for a crop, and propose to make money out of it. Then worms will gnaw it, bugs will bite it, beetles will bore it, aphides will suck it, birds will peck it, heat will scorch it, rains will drown it, and mildew and blight will cover it.'"

"Puritan" goes on:--

But there is more coming:--

"The charge of the reverend gentleman amounts to this,--that whenever he attempts to raise a crop of wheat, corn, flax, or grass, God sends beetles, bugs, aphides, heat, rain, and mildew, to blast his designs.

I may have been mistaken, but it has seemed to me that every crop that I have ever attempted to raise has had swarms of "messengers" sent upon it. But, until now, I never suspected that God sent them, in any other sense than that in which he sends diseases, famines, tyrants, literary "Puritans," and all other evils which afflict humanity.

But what is to be done about this matter? If it be "blasphemy" to speak against bugs, it can be little short of sacrilege to smash them. Here have I been, in the blindness of unrepented depravity, slaughtering millions of "the messengers of God" called aphides! I have ruthlessly slain those other angelic "messengers" called mosquitoes, who came singing to me with misplaced confidence. I have even railed at fleas, and spoken irreverently of gnats. I have gone further: on a sultry summer's day, after dinner, I have turned out of my room every one of those "messengers of God" which wicked boys call flies--every one but one, I mean; and, just as the sounds grew faint and sight dim, and I was sinking into that entrancing experience, the first virgin moments of slumber, an affectionate fly settled on my nose, ran down to kiss my lips, and, like a traveler on a new continent, set about exploring my whole face. Instead of greeting this "messenger" divine as "Puritan" would, I confess to a lively vexation. And if speaking of flies in a very disrespectful manner is blasphemous, I must confess to the charge!

But soberly, Mr. Bonner, is it not pitiable to have among us men pretending to intelligence, who bring religion into discredit by such hopeless stupidity?

NATURAL ORDER OF FLOWERS.

He must have an artist's eye for color and form who can arrange a hundred flowers as tastefully, in any other way, as by strolling through a garden, picking here one and there one, and adding them to the bouquet in the accidental order in which they chance to come. Thus we see every summer day the fair lady coming in from the breezy side-hill with gorgeous colors, and most witching effects. If only she could be changed to alabaster, was ever a finer show of flowers in so fine a vase? But instead, allowed to remain as they were gathered, the flowers are laid upon the table, divided and rearranged on some principle of taste, I know not what, but never regain that charming naturalness and grace which they first had.

As to the bouquets put up for market, the less said about them the better. They are mere pillories in which, like innocent children put into the stocks, flowers are punished! Squeezed, tied on sticks, formal and pedantic, the flowers lose their rare charms, their delicacy, their individuality, their exquisite variety of form, every element of floral beauty except color. They are used as mere pigments. They are poor studies in color. There are few who really know anything about flowers by their finer qualities. The elder Park--who committed the capital crime of leaving Brooklyn and going back to Scotland to live--loved flowers after the true sort. We remember one day going to his green-house in Amity Street, and after a world of talk about all sorts of things, and looking over all his azaleas, camellias, laurustinus, and what not, he drew us bashfully into a side apartment, and with the diffidence of a girl, said, pointing to an exquisite little fern hardly so large as our forefinger, growing in the border under some orange-plants, "There, I should not dare to tell anybody but you that I have taken more real pleasure in that one little thing than in all the whole establishment." We perfectly understood him. The fern was of the most delicate sort. It seemed to hover between form and spirit,--if there be such a thing as soul in plant-life. All around it were large and vigorous plants growing lush and stalwart. This dainty little fairy fern appealed to the child-loving side of human nature, to the unworldly and uncommercial faculties. We always respected Park the better for this weakness. No man can have such a sentiment for flowers, who has not in him feelings as fresh and delicate as the flowers which he admires.

But with what complacency can such a one look upon the merchandise of flowers which is exhibited at every party, every wedding, every vulgar jam of rich people, who torment themselves through untimely hours for the sake of tormenting their host?

A single blossom of carnation with a geranium leaf; an exquisite saffrano rosebud just beginning to open, with a fresh leaf from its own bush for company; a stem of mignonette, girt round with a dozen fragrant blue violets; a long sprig of mauvandia-vine, with its charming blue bells, hanging from a tall wineglass, or carelessly trailing round it,--these, and such little things, confer a pleasure on those who have a sensitive eye for grace and simplicity, which nothing else can.

But first, simplicity, naturalness, singleness, and individualism in flowers; afterward and inferior, though permissible, artificial structures and combinations.

ROSES.

June is the paradise of roses. In this month they break forth into unparalleled splendor. All Rosedom is out in holiday apparel; and roses white and black, green and pink, scarlet, crimson, and yellow, striped and mottled, double and single, in clusters and solitary, moss-roses, damask-roses, Noisette, perpetual, Bourbon, China, tea, musk, and all other tribes and names, hang in exuberant beauty. The air is full of their fragrance. The eye can turn nowhere that it is not attracted to a glowing bush of roses. At first one is exhilarated. He wanders from bush to bush and cuts the finest specimens, until there is no room or dish for more. So many roses, and so few to see them! What would not people shut up in cities give to see such luxuriance of beauty! How strange that those who have ground do not gather about them these favorites of every sense! The air and soil that nourish nettles and thistles, plantain and dock, would bring forth roses with equal kindness. There is enough ground wasted around country houses to furnish root-room for a hundred kinds of roses, without detriment either to fruit trees or ornamental shade trees. Men admire them when they see them in a friend's house; they are always pleased to receive a lapful as a present to their wife or mother or daughter; but it does not enter their head that they, too, might have roses to give away.

Roses are easy of culture, easy of propagation, requiring almost as little care as dandelions or daisies. The wonder is that every other man is not an enthusiast, and in the month of June a gentle fanatic. Floral insanity is one of the most charming inflictions to which man is heir! One never wishes to be cured, nor should any one wish to cure him. The garden is infectious. Flowers are "catching," or the love of them is. Men begin with one or two. In a few years they are struck through with floral zeal. Not bees are more sedulous in their researches into flowers than many a man is, and one finds, after the strife and heat and toil of his ambitious life, that there is more pure satisfaction in his garden than in all the other pursuits that promise so much of pleasure and yield so little.

It is pleasant to find in men whose hard and loveless side you see in society, so much that is gentle and beauty-loving in private. Hard capitalists, sharp politicians, grinding business men, will often be found, at home, in full sympathy with the gentlest aspects of nature. One is surprised to find how rich and sweet these monsters often turn out to be! Here is the man whom you have for years heard described, in all the newspapers, as a spectacle of wickedness or a monument of folly. You are, by some convulsion of nature, thrown into his company, and travel for days with him. To your surprise his manners are gentle, his conversation pleasing, his attentions to all about him considerate. This must be artifice. It is a veil to hide that hideous heart of which you have heard so much. You watch and wait. But watching and waiting only satisfy you that this supposed monster is a kind man, with a world of sympathy for beautiful things. And when, in after-months, you have been at his summer-house, and know him in his vineyard and his garden, you smile at yourself that you were ever subject to that illusion which is so often raised about public men.

A man is not always to be trusted because he loves fine horses, or because he follows the stream or hunts in the fields. But if a man that loves flowers, and loves them enough to labor for them, is not to be trusted, where in this wicked world shall we go for trust? A man that carries a garden in his heart has got back again a part of the Eden from which our great forefather was expelled.

CHESTNUTS.

I fancy that trees have dispositions. At any rate, they have those qualities which suggest dispositions to all who are in sympathy with nature, and who look upon facts as letters of an alphabet, by which one may spell out the hidden meanings of things. Some trees, like the apple, suggest goodness and humility. They put on no airs. They do not exalt themselves. They are patient of climate, full of beauty in blossom, and, in autumn, beautiful in fruit.

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