14 
SUMMER THOUGHTS in WINTER 
House & Carden 
Now Thoughts oj Flowers Must Replace the Actual Blossoms; the Imagined Gardens, Whether Faint 
or Bright, Must be One’s Winter Consolation 
MRS. FRANCIS KING 
L ET him who will de- 
j clare there is no 
color in winter land¬ 
scape—that is, in a 
landscape whitened by 
snow. I point this man 
to the January scene in 
a part of our country 
not generally consid¬ 
ered to have beauty; a 
gently rolling country 
with here and there a 
woodlot and sometimes 
a cedar swamp. And 
I ask him to look in 
early morning sunlight 
at the pale and delicate 
blue of the sky above 
these fields and woods; 
at the rich browns of 
oak foliage, at the pale 
tans of the little ghost¬ 
ly beeches with their 
leaves which are a rem¬ 
iniscence; at the grays 
of trunk and bough, 
and at the bluish shad¬ 
ows cast by these gray 
drawings upon the soft, 
deep whiteness of the 
ground. An austerity 
of beauty lies in the 
pale, cold winter color 
seen here; and when by 
chance the dark mass of 
a white pine or the 
pointed tops of cedar 
groups come into the forefront of the picture, 
their rich hues are almost too startling for the 
pallid yet lovely background. 
The subject of the garden in winter is not 
a new one. Long, long ago Addison put his 
delight in his winter garden into words of 
beauty. To the true gardener the very breath 
of life is in that essay. Today Katherine Ty¬ 
nan in a charming lyric, The Winter Garden, 
sings the theme as only an Irish singer can. I 
look out of window at my own bit of ground 
and am not only comforted, consoled, but stim¬ 
ulated by all that others have written con¬ 
cerning gardens in winter. I begin to think of 
the value of winter to the gardener as well as to 
the garden. Now it is that the mind turns 
back upon itself. Now thoughts of flowers 
must replace the actual flowers. The real gar¬ 
dens, those imagined, whether faint or bright, 
must be one’s consolation now. And the very 
contrast between the real garden of a summer 
past and the fancied garden of a summer to 
come is, must be, a spur to better and more 
perfect following of the dear pursuit. 
Hydrangea peti- 
olaris, at the left 
of the arch, is 
said to climb to 
80 ' in Japan 
April Colors 
Days there are in April possessed of a blue 
and green splendor not surpassed by those of 
June. These are the days when the very glass 
in one’s window seems more crystalline for the 
glories seen though it. Such greens, such deli¬ 
cate shadows of trees upon turf, blurred just a 
bit by the soft outlines of bud along bough. 
And then across the glory of this newest, earli¬ 
est grass, tight bouquets of color, long, loose 
garlands of color, crocuses flung down upon the 
brown earth, rimming the green as with enamel. 
Who among living writers can paint the Spring 
with so incomparable a brush as Mrs. Hum¬ 
phry Ward? “They left the garden and wan¬ 
dered through some rocky fields on the side of 
the fell, till they came to one where Linnaeus 
or any other pious soul might well have gone 
upon his knees for joy. Some loving hand had 
plants! it with daffodils—the wild Lent Lily 
of the district though not now very plentiful 
about the actual lakes. And the daffodils had 
come back rejoicing to their kingdom and made 
it their own again. They ran in lines and 
floods, in troops and skirmishers all through 
the silky grass and round the trunks of the old 
knotted oaks that hung as though by one foot 
from the emerging rocks and screes. Above, 
the bloom of the wild cherries made a wavering 
screen of silver between the daffodils and the 
May sky; amid the blossoms the golden-green 
of the oaks struck a strong, riotous note; and 
far below, at their feet, the lake lay blue with 
all the sky within it, and the softness of the 
larch-woods on its banks.” 
The time is the twenty- 
third of March. A 
robin has come—a song 
sparrow has been heard 
—we wander to the 
south boundary of our 
two acres in search of 
snowdrops. And here, 
on a little slope where 
the garland thorn and 
the red cedar grow to 
a height of some twelve 
feet, is a little but de¬ 
licious spectacle of 
spring snowdrops, 
white bells ringing in 
the spring wind, and 
down the tiny hillside, 
the delicate lavender of 
Crocus Tommasinianus 
running here and there 
among the snowdrops. 
How I have longed to 
see the flora of the Al¬ 
pine meadows—to see 
the crocus fields of the 
Alpine slopes. Flem- 
well’s lovely pictures as 
well as many pens be¬ 
side his have given me 
this desire. Yet in that 
absurdly wild imagina¬ 
tion which I fear is 
mine I see a hint of 
these longed-for sights 
as I gaze now upon my 
white and palest violet 
flowers of March. Did not these snowdrops 
a week ago raise their buds and green leaves 
through a sheet of ice? Is not the effect of 
little tree and little flower so scaled as to sug¬ 
gest a much larger and more important picture ? 
The least animate object coming into it dis¬ 
turbs that scale, of course—just as they say 
a robin perching upon the miniature Matter¬ 
horn ruins so tragically the effect of the re¬ 
nowned rock-garden of Sir Frank Crisp at 
Friar Park, his place upon the Thames. 
Viburnum Car- 
lesii is one of the 
best among the 
less known flow¬ 
ering shrubs 
The Year’s Renaissance 
And here before Spring has fairly opened I 
begin planning for another year. “On this 
earth,” says Margaret Symonds in that rare 
book of hers, Days Spent on a Doge’s Farm, 
“one season is usually spent in looking for 
signs of the next.” More planting of the 
crocus is needed here, to give an even more 
natural-looking picture, a little cross-current, 
so to say, of the lavender; and the introduction 
perhaps of loose groups of Iris reticulata for 
the sake of its green spears alone as the snow¬ 
drops and this species of crocus bloom much 
earlier than the iris. A few feet away from my 
Alpine valley the iris leaves are in plenty and 
a more determined plant I never hope to see. 
Its green leaves have pierced as with needle¬ 
points thick, wet masses of last year’s fallen 
leaves, and as the irises are here in rounding 
groups the effect is of brown pincushions 
studded with green pins. 
(Continued on page 58) 
