HOUSE AND GARDEN 
April. 1913 
269 
From the meadow comes the ceaseless, shrill chorus of the frogs, beating in waves upon the ear and making the air yet more warm and fragrant, 
the promise of spring more magical 
Then we know that spring indeed has come, and we begin to 
rake the lawns, wherever the frost is out, wheeling great crate 
loads of leaves and rubbish upon the garden, and filling our 
neighbors’ houses with pungent smoke! 
There is a certain spot between the thumb and first finger 
which neither ax nor golf club nor saw handle seems to callous. 
The spring raking finds it out, and gleefully starts to raise a 
blister. My hands are perpetually those of a day laborer, yet I 
expect that blister every spring. Indeed, I am rather disappointed 
now if I don’t get it, I feel as if I weren’t doing my share of 
work. The work is worth the blister. I know of few sensations 
more delightful than that of seeing the lawn emerging green and 
clean beneath your rake, the damp mould baring itself under the 
shrubbery, the paths, freshly edged, nicely scarrowed with tooth 
marks; then of feeling the tug of the barrow handles in your 
shoulder sockets; and finally, as the sun is sending long shadows 
over the ground, of standing beside the rubbish pile with your 
rake as a poker and hearing the red flames crackle and roar 
through the heap, while great pufifs of beautiful brown smoke go 
rolling away across the garden and the warmth is good to your 
tired body. Clearing up is such a delight, indeed, that I cannot 
now comprehend why I so intensely disliked to do it when I was 
half my present age. Perhaps it was because at that time clear¬ 
ing up was put to me in the light of a duty, not a pleasure! 
There is, alas, to"' often a tempering of sadness in the joy of 
taking the covers off the garden. One removes them, especially 
after an open winter like this season of 1912-1913, with much the 
•same anxious excitement that one opens a long-delayed letter from 
a dear friend who has been in danger. What signs of life will the 
peonies show under their four inches of rotted manure, and the 
Japanese irises by the pool, and the beds of Darwins, so confi¬ 
dently relied upon to ring the sundial in late May and early June, 
Ibefore the succeeding annuals are ready? How will the holly¬ 
hocks, so stately in midsummer all down the garden wall, have 
withstood the alternate thaws and freezes which characterized 
our abominable January and February ? Then there are those two 
long rows of foxgloves and Canterbury bells, across the rear of 
the vegetable garden, where they were set in the fall to make 
strong plants before being put in their permanent places—or 
rather their season's places, for these lovely flowers are perversely 
biennials, and at least seven times every spring I vow I will never 
bother with them again, and then make an even larger sowing 
when their stately stalks and sky blue bells are abloom in sum¬ 
mer! Tenderly you lift the pine boughs from them on a balmy 
April day (it was not until almost mid-April last year), when 
snow still lingers, perhaps, in dirty patches on the north side of 
the evergreens. Will they show frozen, flabby, withered leaves, 
or will their centers be bright with new promise? It is a moment 
to try the soul of the gardener, and no joy is quite like that of 
finding them all alive, nor any sorrow like that of finding them 
dead. At first I used to give up gardening forever when the 
perennials and biennials were winter killed, just as a beginner at 
golf gives up the game forever each time he makes a vile score. 
Then I began to compromise on a garden of annuals. Now I 
have learned philosophy—and also better methods of winter pro¬ 
tection. Likewise, I have learned that a good many of the peren¬ 
nials which were stone dead when the covers were removed have 
a trick of coming to life under the kiss of May, and struggling up 
to some sort of bloom, even if heroically spindly like lean soldiers 
after a hard campaign. The hollyhocks, especially, have a way of 
seeding themselves undetected, and presenting you in spring with 
a whole unsuspected family of children, some of whom wander 
far from the parent stem and suddenly begin to shoot up in the 
most unexpected places. An exquisite yellow hollyhock last sum¬ 
mer sprouted unnoted beneath our dining-room window, and we 
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