20 
House & Garden 
insight in the presence of such natural mani¬ 
festations; and he who does not feel, as he, 
that deity is present “in gardens when the eve 
is cool” profanes the sanctuary. 
A GARDEN is indeed a sanctuary of nat¬ 
ural religion. Upon it are concentrated 
the power and the glory and the tenderness of 
natural forces. From above and below there 
are focussed upon it the mysterious operations 
of sun and rain and dew, in unison with the 
chemic, one feels like saying the alchemic, 
properties of the soil itself. 
The man who looks after his own garden is 
continually in the presence of the inspiring 
strangeness, the ever new surprise and thrill of 
the creative marvel. He takes a bulb in his 
hand, dry and crackling and to all appearances 
dead as an Egyptian mummy. Somewhere 
within its tiny cerements hides the spark of 
life; though, should he unfold one layer after 
the other, he would seek in vain for its pres¬ 
ence. So the man of science seeks for the soul 
of man in his body, and not finding it, pro¬ 
nounces it non-existent. Who would believe 
that this dry and dusty relic when buried an 
inch or two in dark earth, seemingly as un-vital 
as itself, mere inert matter to all appearance, 
shall be met there in the darkness with warm 
awakening energies, immediately taking it into 
their care; that it and the earth alike are as 
ready to catch fire as phosphorus itself, vividly 
responsive one to the other; and that, after a 
while, thus subterraneously nourished, fed from 
above also by stealing rains and dews, and 
hotly kissed through its mask of earth by that 
mighty shining which has traveled millions of 
miles through ethereal space, to assist at this 
miniature marvel, it shall jet up into the April 
morning, a curiously carved cone of waxen 
petals pouring fragrance—a hyacinth. A hya¬ 
cinth—yes! But how much more to the man 
who has watched while it thus came into being. 
I sometimes wish that Adam—the first gar¬ 
dener, as Hamlet’s grave-digger remarked— 
had left the creation without names; for names 
have a curious way of robbing things of their 
proper value, and particularly of their first 
strangeness. Something arrests us either by its 
beauty or its unfamiliarity, and we immedi¬ 
ately ask what it is. While no one tells us, 
we remain curious, but from the moment we 
hear its name, its interest for us diminishes: 
it takes its place in the category of familiar 
things, though, of course, we know no more 
about it than ever. So one says “a hyacinth” 
or “a rose” thoughtlessly, as though we knew 
ail about them, almost indeed as though we 
could make them ourselves, had we a mind to. 
With too many of us it is as with Wordsworth’s 
philistine: 
“A primrose by the river’s brim 
A yellow primrose was to him— 
And it was nothing more.” 
Too often, indeed, as has been wittily re¬ 
marked, it is not even a primrose, but merely a 
dicotyledon. 
Yet the names of flowers have often, as in 
this case of the hyacinth, an associative value 
which gives a lift to the imagination. It cer¬ 
tainly adds to its magic for us to recall that 
this is the flower that the Greeks believed to 
have sprung from the grave of Hyacinthus, the 
beautiful youth accidentally killed by Apollo 
as they played at quoits together. Still one can 
read “Alas! Alas!” in Greek upon its petals. 
So long ago the flowers we love were in the 
world; and such associations, though they are 
but subsidiary to the natural inspiration of gar¬ 
dens, are poignant remembrancers of lovely 
half-forgotten things, romantic lives long since 
ended, beautiful faces that once bent over these 
very flowers, or those poets who have brought 
them the added enchantment of their songs. 
Who will deny what the daffodil owes to Her¬ 
rick, and all the flowers to Shakespeare? 
O F all flowers thus weighted with associa¬ 
tion, the lotus—“the holy lotus”-—makes 
for itself a sanctuary. With all the magnifi¬ 
cence of its beauty, one thinks first, as we come 
upon its great cup, open with startling calm 
in the morning sun, of all it has meant to the 
religious sense of mankind. All Egypt and 
all India, their hierophants and tranced 
Buddhas, are before us in this commanding, 
awe-inspiring flower; with its great leaves 
floating circle-wide on the water—thus sym¬ 
bolizing, said the old Greek mystic Jambli- 
chus, “the motion of intellect”—or rising from 
the rich procreative mud in unfolding scrolls, 
which seem to symbolize the sacred books of 
all the ages. Surely it is one of the loveliest of 
created things, yet to think only of its beauty, 
to regard it merely as one more decorative 
flower in the garden, is not only a form of 
sacrilege, but is to lose all that its beauty has 
gained by the accumulated reverence of untold 
generations and myriads of men, all the hal¬ 
lowed romance of its prodigious history. So, 
at all events, the present writer feels every 
summer as this divine flower unfolds its awe- 
full blossom in his little garden, islanded 
among Connecticut salt-marshes, blooming 
even among the sweep of perigee tides. What 
more natural than to prostrate one’s self be¬ 
fore it, like a pious Hindoo, with the sacred 
words on one’s lips: “Ora mane padme Om.” 
T O descend, like Lucifer, from these lofty 
meditative heights—did you ever, gentle 
reader, grow calabash pipes in your garden? 
You should. For fifty cents, you cover a cor¬ 
ner of your garden with a tapestry of the most 
energetic and decorative of vines, and, as the 
gourds shape themselves out of sun and dew 
into perfectly shaped pipes of all sizes, you 
have once more the feeling of being “in at 
the creation.” Then, as you sit with an old 
friend by the log-fire in the Fall, each of you 
with one of these home-grown pipes in the 
hand, its bowl already colored like a meer¬ 
schaum, as the companionable tobacco-clouds 
rise towards the rafters, you smile across at 
each other as you recall that these pipes you 
are smoking came out of no cold-blooded city 
store, but were the good God’s gift to two good 
smokers, come direct from the warm-hearted 
earth—once two little white spring blossoms 
on a green vine. 
Even though you grow neither lotuses nor 
calabash pipes in your garden, though indeed 
you ask of it nothing for the soul, but merely 
vegetables for the sustenance of the body, yet 
you can hardly escape, if you live with it con¬ 
stantly, the same lessons of wonder. The cab¬ 
bage and the squash and the turnip are in the 
care of the same divine democratic powers as 
the lily and the rose. Even though you utterly 
neglect your garden, it will flame in a glory 
of weeds; for, first and last, it is a mystic piece 
of God’s earth, potential with all those magical 
energies that of their very strength bring forth 
beauty. Every foot of it conceals buried treas¬ 
ures of untold value—gold and silver, ivory 
and myrrh, fretted imageries, carved chalices, 
cabalistic symbols; a hoard of inevitable, shin¬ 
ing, fragrant things as of the sacred vessels 
of divine mysteries, or those gems and jeweled 
toys with which princesses make their fairness 
still more fair. 
But the best and most inspiring thing to 
remember about our garden is that it is a mir¬ 
acle. However we love it, whatever we do for 
it, in the end, as my friend said, it humbles us 
with the sense of invisible and inscrutable 
powers. In the words of the Apostle: Paul 
may have planted it, Apollos watered it, but 
from God—or if you prefer, the gods—comes 
the increase. 
