An Exile's Garden

THOUGH my garden is but a dwarf plot, it should be used for vegetable growing, so frugal housewives told me on my arrival: was I not, they argued, in a city where small cabbages cost ten cents apiece? But I, then as now hard pressed by nostalgia, could heed no such suggestion; for a flower garden I knew I must have — a garden where with mute though none the less acceptable speech sweet blooms would endure, to speak to me of beloved, far-off England.

I filled my garden with well-tried friends; they are all there: massed rockets and campanulas oft-blooming, radiant sun-kissed marigolds, wideeyed Shasta daisies, and, in the central place of honor, clustered sweet peas which race skyward. Not so their tendrils: these claspers, escaping from their legitimate supports, fling right and left slender fingers, to the embarrassment of the dignified poppy and blushing lychnis round whose necks they coyly twine. Shy violas adjoin edging rocks from which drip creeping plants; hard by them are pink, blue, and white Canterbury bells, which, with finger stalls outstretched, offer resting-places to wearied, toil-worn insects. Here in exile I find scant leisure for dalliance during the hot hours; but in England I have often counted minutes while a bee slept secure within some velvet fastness.

Now, the day’s toil at an end, I sit on my verandah and look down upon my garden. I see the hollyhocks straining to reach the top of the fence: they doubtless remember that the foxgloves gained that height and saw a larger world; why, they ask, should not they, also? Beneath me, the iridescent humming bird is darting pointed beak into the multicolored nasturtiums fringing the lavender bush, which sends up to me a faint perfume. For remembrance, as the rosemary? In England I had a lavender hedge.

As wingèd flowers, the Swallowtail butterfly, the Camberwell Beauty, the gallantly attired Admirals flit from border to border: and there is a Painted Lady gliding like a ship with furled sails over the flat whorls of the sedums and sweet Williams. Ah! she is away, and with gorgeous wings outspread sits flaunting herself in the face of the departing sun. He, unperturbed, pursues his decorous trend, and she, suddenly realizing that she has established herself too close to the bird-bath round which a crowd is twittering all agog for prey, is up and off. It was in England I last saw a Painted Lady.

The rooks are cawing in the oaks beyond my garden, and from off the trees’ densely covered branches come canaries to swing to and fro on the stalwart stalks of my perennials. By a company of stocks, where are crumbs, sparrows quarrel, to disperse with alacrity as down a hawk suddenly swoops. All but one: he is dazed, and recovers only to creep feebly under the shelter offered by a bushy chrysanthemum. A hawk never ventured into my English garden. . . .

The long day is closing. Comes Evening in company with Twilight, who, having extinguished the last lamp of the afterglow, descends into my garden, in her train a wailing wind. I watch the antirrhinums sway toward the godetias, the godetias toward the drooping flax, the flax toward the mignonette. The wind — the East Wind, which also has made the long journey from England — wafts toward me the scent, in passing, and then hurries on. Is she, too, exiled? I fear so, for listening I can hear her moan as she sighs and sobs out her loneliness in the dark spaces of the neighboring firs.