Seed-Vessel Time

This is seed-vessel time, and the garden is a great refuge from politics.

Do I believe in a league of nations? In Wilson’s League? Should we ratify with reservations? Ratify with explanations? Not ratify at all? — What are my views on the Gulick scheme for restricting immigration? — Do I approve of the Plumb Plan? — So far as I know, my opinion on such topics is of no earthly importance. I am an obscure woman without influence, and it would seem that I might be excused from racking my brains. But no: suffrage is imminent, and I must be in training. Bitterly I reflect on the folly of people who suppose self-government to be a synonym for freedom: ardently I covet the irresponsibility of the slave. How I would hug my chains, play with my mind, read the classics, if I did not have to help run the universe!

But the universe is there, and oh! what a mess it is in! I think and think, I read and read. The New Republic is my bedside companion, in competition with the Nation, the World Tomorrow, the Liberator (carefully concealed beneath the Imitation of Christ), the Survey, the Manchester Guardian, two religious weeklies, not to speak of the Atlantic, — blessings be on it! — three other monthlies, and the relentless Transcript. Friends in England,France, and Italy, send me periodicals. Associations, new every morning, invite attention to prospectuses; pamphleteers with panaceas pursue my dreams.

Dreams? — I toss and meditate. How escape the thought of starving babies in Austria, murdered Jews in Poland, restless miners in England? Fourteen points, however thoroughly buried, can haunt a person. I wake unrefreshed. I need my garden, badly.

All is cool and dewy there, and adventure waits. Precious garden! It is about as big as a giant’s pocket-handkerchief, but there is no limit to its marvels. I shall not envy the excitements of the aviator if I may gather seeds.

Seeds are, presumably, useful. They have something to do, more directly than flowers, with the continuance of life on the globe. Ruskin puts well — apropos of cherries, I think — the searching question whether the seed is the object of the flower or the flower of the seed; and Nippon, with its cherryblossom festival, would agree with him in scorning the people who claim that the white radiance of the orchard is to the end of rosy succulence. The pleasant controversy will never be settled; but for my part I deny that the Goddess Utilitaria had her dull way in the making of seeds. Nature did not delegate the job, but attended to it herself, and, lady of excellent taste that she is, she refuses to make useful things ugly, just as she refrains from making them conspicuous. She arranges for her seeds a beauty of their own; not the obvious beauty of flowers, with their charms of color and fragrance, showy curve, and mass. Seed-vessels shall have another delightsomeness: the more recondite, more intellectual beauty of sheer design. The ingenuity and diversity of her patterns passes belief; to investigate them is to forget politics altogether. Here, as in her work on the backs of lizards or the wings of butterflies, but with more evident mathematical exactness, she shows triumphantly that she can beat us mortals at our own game of conventional forms, and hints in myriad shy silences at the deep geometrical laws which underlie the seeming helter-skelter opulence of creation.

Consider Fraxinella, for instance. Not an especially beautiful blossom, I think, though agreeable from its nice lemony smell, and its quaint trick of burning like a torch, without being consumed, if touched by a match. Its seed-vessel is perfect in symmetry: a shaggy, aromatic, five-pointed star, which opens to disclose a curled translucent pod with a kink at the end like a shell. At the proper moment — I have caught it — this pod explodes, and pops out the seeds, black pearshaped seeds, polished like jewels; then, its work done, it curls itself up in an enchanting spiral, a sort of mystic ladder of bliss, while the containing vessel spreads wide and flat its graceful points, suggestive of snowflakes.

Campanula seeds, a fine mist, repose in a Greek-vase effect, exquisite in line and angle, with most delicately modeled sides. I thought I had learned all there was to know about these tiny sixsided urns; but just now, strolling in the garden, I picked one at a late stage; and behold! on every other side of the urn, placed exactly half-way down, a minute puncture, through which the seed escapes — an entertaining variant on the method of the poppy. Everybody knows the poppy pepperpot, with its little lid so neatly crimped at the edges, lifting to reveal a circle of pinpoint holes, through which the seed is shaken; though how it gets itself up and out has never been clear to me. Poppy, like campanula, conforms to the vase-model: and this model is one of Nature’s favorites. Chunky or slender, rounded or planned in perfectly proportioned segments, sometimes reticently touched with color, sometimes richly embossed, these small containing vessels would afford suggestions for all the potters in the world. Surely, Greeks and Etruscans had studied them. In these sculptured tombs of rare design, the seeds, little miracles of life-in-death, await their resurrection at the appointed hour.

Sometimes, however, the suggestion of the seed-vessel is decidedly frivolous. That is the way with mallow. Mallow dies into a five-pointed cup which rests in or on another pedestal-cup, three-lobed, dried to a fibrous weave like Filipino cloth. This cup has a cover, — pistil, the Impertinent botanist might call it, — a black concave disk like a mushroom, etched in drying with a very pretty design; and beneath the cover cling the fat kidney-shaped seeds. The cup is too small for any but the littlest dolls — best fitted for a fairy ice-cream party. With its pedestal, it exactly reproduces a bit of Tiffany glass on my mantel, which we like to call the Holy Grail.

Nigella, or love-in-a-mist, has one of the most striking of these vase-containers — a large balloon or gourdshaped vase, rather like the copper pots Italian women carry on their heads. It is flushed with crimson, and more showy by far than the flower. This balloon, again, falls into five sections, each tipped with something like the antennæ of an insect; each, when dissected, shows a partition down the middle marked by a groove outside, up the central pillar of which the seeds are grouped. Nigella is a strange plant. It is the wild passion-flower of Italy, growing freely through the wheat-fields there: here, I have heard it called the flower of the Resurrection. It is hard to understand just why these religious associations should gather round its misty green foliage and faint bluewhite stars. But it is a flower more beautiful in death than in its life.

There are plenty of designs besides those that suggest vases. Hollyhock seeds are packed tight, edge to edge, in a round, an amazing number to each flower-heart. Bachelors’ buttons have wings, for Shelley’s West Wind to chariot to their wintry bed. Argemone — we call it popple, because its blue, prickly thistle-foliage bears a poppylike blossom, of crumpled silk, white or yellow — has a big irregular seed-vessel all over spines: I have not yet found what is within. In a big golden daisy that ciots through my garden, the clumsy lump which survives the flower hides a cone of scales arranged like an artichoke — each scale a pinky wingcradle in which nestles the round black seed.

One could go on describing for pages; but not all seed-vessels are interesting. I do not care for phlox-seed, which is entirely unimaginative. The threepointed larkspur pod is rather obvious, though pretty; Escholtzia has expended all its invention on its dainty foliage and glowing blooms, and can do no better than die into a tediously elongated point. By and large, however, seeds are original creations, in which the lavish and exquisite detail inevitably suggests conscious art on the part of the designer.

I cannot close without talking of the most wonderful of all — the sunflower. Let one who desires mystic contemplation sit cross-legged beneath it for an hour; the majesty of it will overwhelm him like the majesty of an Alp, and the mystery of the world may be made plain.

In most of the compositæ, one feels the crowd: seeds are tight-packed in a plebeian fashion; and although the question of housing a large community has been cleverly solved, quite too much attention has been given to efficiency. But the sunflower has solved the democratic problem. It has achieved distinction, which depends on the perfect union of order with freedom. As the insignificant flowers fall off from the great disk, and the yellow fringe outside withers, there is disclosed a — civilization — of large, firm seeds, placed edgewise; enough, it would seem, in each enormous circle to supply the gardens of the world or feed a starving peasantry. They are arranged in interwoven curves, concentric, which, viewed from any angle or in any relation, present a perfect harmony. Vedder or Blake never invented such whorls and spirals; they comfort as a symphony comforts, they satisfy our deep demand for symmetry untrammeled and alive. There is something final about the marvelous pattern; the plant looks as if it had attained eternity. But eternity will break before long, and the seeds be scattered. Each is a completed individual, a fruitful entity which has fulfilled its being and holds rich promise of future life; yet each is a happy part of a larger whole, and every sunflower is a universe.

Well, why not? Nobody knows the arrangement of the starry systems as a whole. Why may they not conform to sunflower pattern as well as to any other? There might be worse thoughts than that of creation as a vast sunflower, forever growing new disks of starry planet-seeds for ever new, expanding eternal gardens. Fantasy apart, the ultimate fascination in studying seedvessels, as all other natural forms, is in gaining fresh recognition of the lovely laws which govern nature.

says Browning. Plato is right; and Pythagoras. There are not only laws of process, which govern change, but laws of abiding form; defy the first if you will — you can never break the second, which are basic to plant, to planet, and to soul. No one can observe in a garden and fear lest we insignificant mortals succeed in imposing chaos on the world. The sepulchres of death hold the secrets of life, and are themselves sweetly modeled by its profoundest laws; we escape nowhere the hidden, intimate rhythms, shaping each minutest created atom, which are the pulsing of the breath of God. I return indoors from my flower-beds refreshed, enlarged, and reassured. I feel sufficient mental energy and self-confidence to tackle the Plumb Plan. The sunflower has given me a lot of hints about it which I will spare the reader; but if he is bewildered about politics, I do strongly recommend him to study seeds.