USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester county; a narrative history, Volume I > Part 40
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The local tanner allowed us to run among his vats, and see the hides salted, pickled, washed and limed, and, best of all, skived over the big beam. This tanner told me he believed his eighteen months in tanning an ox hide and the six weeks required by modern chemical methods, represented about the relative durability of the two leathers. His trade has lasted on, despite such competition, because his townsmen have something the same idea. Within boy-range, too, was a cooper's shop, a gunsmith, a family who made baskets, a small carding mill, turning shops where wooden spoons, bowls, sieve rims, pen handles, plain broom handles, etc., were made, a general tinker and solderer, besides carpenters, blacksmiths, shoe and harness makers. Some farmers specialized, more or less, in sheep; others in young cattle, or pigs and horses. Some were always lucky with corn, others with rye or wheat, buckwheat, potatoes, grass, etc., to which they had mainly settled after much experiment, or to which the traditions of the farm or fam- ily inclined them. Thus, in fine, there were many grades of progress and versatility.
I have alluded to but few of the occupations of these people. Their com- monest industries (in 1890)-planting, fertilizing, gathering each crop-have been revolutionized by machinery and artificial fertilization, within twenty- five years. These, and their religion and beliefs, and domestic social customs, methods of doing their small business, are all fast changing. The women are haggard and worn with their work, the men are sometimes shiftless, and children are very rare. The heart of these communities has left it, and only
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the shell remains. The quaint, eccentric characters that abound in these towns, types of which may be found faithfully depicted in Mary E. Wilkins' A Humble Romance, to which Senator Hoar kindly called my attention, or, in Mary B. Claflin's Brampton Sketches, kindly sent me by Col. Stoddard, or, in a few of the sketches in Profitable Tales, by Eugene Field, are for the most part types of degeneration well recognized by alienists and charac- terized by Morel. These are quite different from the no less rustic char- acters in De Gaspe's Old Canadians, or the Work of Du Pray's School. Did the earlier generations work too hard in digging stumps and stones, and laying the hundreds of miles of heavy stonewall and clearing the timber? Were the conditions of life too severe? Is our race not adapted to the new conditions of climate, soil, water, and, as Dr. Jarvis said, is it still a problem whether the Anglo-Saxon race can thrive in its new American home, or is this but an incident, an eddy in the great onward current of progress? I have no answer, but I know nothing more sad in our American life than the decay of these townlets.
Nowhere has the great middle class been so all-controlling, furnished so large a proportion of scientific and business leaders, been so respectable, so well combined industry with wealth, bred patriotism, conservatism and independence. The farm was a great laboratory, tending, perhaps, rather more to develop scientific than literary tastes, cultivating persistency, in which country boys excel, if at the expense of versatility. It is, says Prof. Brewer, the question with city parents what useful thing the children can do, while in the country, where they are in great demand on the farm, they are, in a sense, members of the firm. Evenings are not dangerous to morality, but are turned to good account, while during the rowdy or adolescent age the boy tendency to revert to savagery can find harmless vent in hunting, trap- ping and other ways less injurious to morals than the customs of city life.
Some such training the heroes of '76 had; the independent conditions of communities like this was just the reverse of that of the South at the out- break of the Rebellion; such a people cannot be conquered, for war and blockade would only drive them back to more primitive conditions, and restore the old independence of foreign and even domestic markets. Again, should we ever have occasion to educate colonists, as England is now attempt- ing, we could not do so better than by reviving conditions of life like these.
CHAPTER XXX.
The Old Worcester County Gardens
Gardens and the flowers which grow in them have a place in history that is far from trivial. They offer an index of the character and tastes and senti- mentalities of a people. Civilized folk love their flowers, and each race has a garden flora all its own, overlapping, of course, but in its entirety strictly national. The simple, even pitiful little flower beds of the early settlers, and the lovely colorful and fragrant gardens which evolved from them, were naturally a transplanting from Old England. The thoughts of homesick English women, and, we may not doubt, homesick English men who sternly concealed their yearnings, turned to the gardens of the homes they had abandoned, where, perhaps, generations of their kinfolk had loved and tended the flowers. So the immigrants, in the midst of the struggle to make homes for their families and themselves, were quick to plant the seeds and roots of their old garden intimates. No one can gainsay that the Colonial gardens played their own little part in the creation of these United States of America.
Alice Morse Earle, whose youth was passed in her native city of Worces- ter, gave much of her lifetime to research into the manner of living of the early American generations, and the writing of books which constitute one of the most important contributions that have been made to the literature of the subject. In her volume Home Life in Colonial Days, published in 1898, is a chapter entitled Old-Fashioned Flower Gardens, which is delightfully descriptive as well as filled with detailed information of the gardens of our long-gone grandmothers. We are reprinting, with permission, large portions of the chapter, with the thought that it is distinctly a bit of Worcester County history, as follows :
Adjoining the street through which I always, in my childhood, walked slowly each Sunday, on my way to and from church, was a spot to detain lingering footsteps-a beautiful garden laid out and tenanted like the gardens
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of colonial days, and serene with the atmosphere of a worthy old age; a garden which had been tended for over half a century by a withered old man and his wife, whose golden wedding was spent in the house they had built, and in the garden they had planted when they were bride and groom. His back was permanently bowed with constant weeding and pruning and planting and hoeing, and his hands and face were brown as the soil he culti- vated. The "hot-glowing" crimson peonies, seedlings which the wife had sown in her youth, had become great shrubs, fifteen or twenty feet in cir- cumference. The flowering shrubs were trees. Vigorous borders of box crowded across the paths and towered on either side, till one could scarcely
walk through them. There were beautiful fairy groves of fox-gloves "gloriously freckled, purple, and white," and tall Canterbury bells; and at stiffly regular intervals were set flowering almonds, St. Peter's wreath, Per- sian lilacs, "Moses in the burning bush," which shrub was rare in our town, and "laburnums rich in streaming gold, syringas ivory pure." At the lower ends of the flower borders were rows of "honey-blob" gooseberries, and aged currant bushes, gray with years, overhung by a few patriarchal quince and crab-apple trees, in whose low-spreading gnarled branches I spent many a summer afternoon, a happy visitor, though my own home garden was just as beautiful, old-fashioned, and flower-filled.
The varying grades of city streets had gradually risen around the garden until it lay depressed several feet below the level of the adjoining streets, a pleasant valley,-like Avalon,-
"Deep-meadowed, happy, fair, with orchard lawns, And bowery hollows crown'd with summer seas."
A flight of stone steps led down to it,-steps very steep, narrow, and slippery with green moss, and ladies'-delights that crowded and blossomed in every crack and crevice of the stones. On each side arose terraces to the street, and in the spring these terraces flushed a mass of vivid, glowing rose- color from blooming moss-pink, forming such a glory that pious church- going folk from the other end of the town did not think it wicked to walk thither, on a Sunday morn in May, to look at the rosy banks that sloped to the valleyed garden, as they had walked there in February or March to see
"Winter, slumbering in the open air, Wear on his smiling face a dream of spring,"
in the shape of the first crocuses and snowdrops that opened beside a snow- drift still lingering on a shaded bank ; and to watch the first benumbed honey- bees who greeted every flower that bloomed in that cherished spot, and who buzzed in bleak March winds over the purple crocus and "blue flushing"
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grape-hyacinth as cheerfully as though they were sipping the scarlet poppies in sunny August.
The garden edges and the street were overhung by graceful larches and by thorny honey-locust trees that bore on their trunks great clusters of pow- erful spines and sheltered in their branches an exceedingly unpleasant species of fat, fuzzy caterpillars, which always chose Sunday to drop on my gar- ments as I walked to church, and to go with me to meeting, and in the middle of the long prayer to parade on my neck, to my startled disgust and agitated whisking away, and consequent reproof for being noisy in meeting.
What fragrances arose from that old garden, and were wafted out to passers-by! The ever-present, pungent, dry aroma of box was overcome or tempered, through the summer months, by a succession of delicate flower- scents that hung over the garden-vale like an imperceptible mist ; perhaps the most perfect and clear among memory's retrospective treasures was that of the pale fringed "snow-pink," and later, "sweet william with its homely cot- tage smell." Phlox and ten-weeks stock were there, as everywhere, the last sweet-scented flowers of autumn.
At no time was this old garden sweeter than in the twilight, the eventide, when all the great clumps of snowy phlox, night-rockets, and luminous eve- ning primrose, and all the tangles of pale yellow and white honeysuckle shone irradiated; when,
"In puffs of balm the night air blows The burden which the day foregoes,"
and scents far richer than any of the day-the "spiced air of night"-floated out in the dusky gloaming.
Though the old garden had many fragrant leaves and flowers, their deli- cate perfume was sometimes fairly deadened by an almost mephitic aroma that came from an ancient blossom, a favorite in Shakespeare's day-the jewelled bell of the noxious crown-imperial. This stately flower, with its rich color and pearly drops, has through its evil scent been firmly banished from our garden borders.
One of the most cheerful flowers of this and of my mother's garden was the happy-faced little pansy that under various fanciful folk-names has ever been loved. Like Montgomery's daisy, it "blossomed everywhere." Its Italian name means "idle thoughts"; the German, "little stepmother." Spenser called it "pawnce." Shakespeare said maidens called it "love-in-idleness," and Drayton named it "heartsease." Dr. Prior gives these names-"Herb Trinity, Three Faces under a Hood, Fancy Flamy, Kiss Me, Pull Me, Cuddle Me unto You, Tickle my Fancy, Kiss Me ere I Rise, Jump Up and Kiss Me, Kiss Me at the Garden Gate, Pink of my Joan." To these let me add the
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New England folk-names-bird's-eye, garden gate, johnny-jump-up, kit-run- about, none-so-pretty, and ladies'-delight. All these testify to the affectionate and intimate friendship felt for this laughing and fairly speaking little garden face, not the least of whose endearing qualities was that, after a half-warm, snow-melting week in January or February, this brightsome little "delight" often opened a tiny blossom to greet and cheer us-a true "jump-up-and- kiss-me," and proved by its blooming the truth of the graceful Chinese verse,-
"Ere man is aware That the spring is here The plants have found it out."
Another dearly loved spring flower was the daffodil, the favorite also of old English dramatists and poets, and of modern authors as well, when we find that Keats names a daffodil as the thing of beauty that is a joy forever. Perhaps the happiest and most poetic picture of daffodils is that of Dora Wordsworth, when she speaks of them as "gay and glancing, and laughing with the wind." Perdita, in The Winter's Tale, thus describes them in her ever-quoted list : "Daffodils that come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty." Most cheerful and sunny of all our spring flowers, they have never lost their old-time popularity, and they still laugh at our bleak March winds.
Bouncing-bet and her comely hearty cousins of the pink family made delightsome many a corner of our home garden. The pinks were Jove's own flowers, and the carthusian pink, china pink, clove pink, snow pink, plumed pink, mullein pink, sweet william, maltese cross, ragged robin, catch-fly, and campion, all made gay and sweet the summer. The clove pink was the ances- tor of all the carnations.
The richest autumnal glory came from the cheerful marigold, the "golde" of Chaucer, and "marybud" of Shakespeare. This flower, beloved of all the old writers, as deeply suggestive and emblematic, has been coldly neglected by modern poets, as for a while it was banished from modern town gardens ; but it may regain its popularity in verse as it has in cultivation. In the farm gardens it has always flourished, and every autumn has "gone to bed with the sun and with him risen weeping," and has given forth in the autumn air its acrid odor, which to me is not disagreeable, though my old herbal calls its "a very naughty smell."
A favorite shrub in our garden, as in every country dooryard, was south- ernwood, or lad's-love. A sprig of it was carried to meeting each summer Sunday by many old ladies, and with its finely dissected, bluish-green foliage, and clean pungent scent, it was pleasant to see in the meetinghouse, and
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pleasant to sniff at. The "virtues of flowers" took a prominent place in the descriptions in old-time botanies. The southernwood had strong medicinal qualities, and was used to cure "vanityes of the head."
"Take a quantitye of Suthernwood and put it upon kindled coales to burn and being made into powder mix it with the oyle of radishes and anoynt a balde place and you shall see great experiences."
It was of power as a love charm. If you placed a sprig in each shoe and wore it through the day when you were in love, you would then also in some way "see great experiences."
In the tender glamour of happy association, all flowers in the old garden seem to have been loved save the garish petunias, whose sickish odor grew more offensive and more powerful at nightfall and made me long to tear them away from their dainty garden-fellows, and the portulaca with its fleshy, worm-like stems and leaves, and its aggressively pushing habits, "never would be missed." Perhaps its close relation to the "pusley," most hated of weeds, makes us eye it askance.
There was one attribute of the old-time garden, one part of nature's economy, which added much to its charm-it was the crowding abundance, the over-fulness of leaf, bud, and blossom. Nature there displayed no bare expanses of naked soil, as in some too-carefully-kept modern parterres; the dull earth was covered with a tangle of ready-growing, self-sowing, lowly flowers, that filled every space left unoccupied by statelier garden favorites, and crowded every corner with cheerful, though unostentatious, bloom. And the close juxtaposition, and even intermingling, of flowers with herbs, vegetables, and fruits gave a sense of homely simplicity and usefulness, as well as of beauty. The soft, purple eyes of the mourning-bride were no less lovely to us in "our garden" because they opened under the shade of currant and gooseberry bushes; and the sweet alyssum and candytuft were no less honey-sweet. The delicate, pinky-purple hues of the sweet peas were not dimmed by their vivid neighbors at the end of the row of poles-the scarlet runners. The adlumia, or mountain fringe, was a special vine of our own and known by a special name-virgin's bower. With its delicate leaves, almost as beautiful as a maidenhair fern, and its dainty pink flower, it fes- tooned the ripening corn as wantonly and luxuriantly as it encircled the snow- ball and lilac bushes.
Though "colored herbs" were cultivated in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as carefully as were flowers,-striped hollies, varie- gated myrtles, and bays being the gardener's pride,-yet in our old American gardens few plants were grown for their variegated or odd-colored foliage. The familiar and ever-present ribbon-grass, also called striped grass, canary
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grass, and gardener's garters,-whose pretty expanded panicles formed an almost tropical effect at the base of the garden hedge ; the variegated wander- ing jew, the striped leaves of some varieties of day-lilies ; the dusty-miller, with its "frosty pow" (which was properly a house plant), fill the short list. The box was the sole evergreen.
Our mothers and grandmothers came honestly by their love of gardens. They inherited this affection from their Puritan, Quaker, or Dutch forebears, perhaps from the days when the famous hanging gardens of Babylon were made for a woman. Bacon says: "A garden is the purest of human pleas- ures, it is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man." A garden was certainly the greatest refreshment to the spirits of a woman in the early colonial days, and the purest of her pleasures-too often her only pleasure.
Quickly, in tender memory of her fair English home, the homesick good- wife, trying to create a semblance of the birthplace she still loved, planted the seeds and roots of homely English flowers and herbs that grew and blos- somed under bleak New England skies, and on rocky New England shores, as sturdily and cheerfully as they had sprung up and bloomed by the green hedgerows and door-sides in the home beyond the sea.
In the year 1638, and again in 1663, an English gentleman named John Josselyn came to New England. He published, in 1672, an account of these two visits. He was a man of polite reading and of culture, and as was the high fashion for gentlemen of his day, had a taste for gardening and botany. He made interesting lists of plants which he noted in America under these heads :-
"I. Such plants as are common with us in England.
"2. Such plants as are proper to the country.
"3. Such plants as are proper to the country and have no names.
"4. Such plants as have sprung up since the English planted and kept cattle in New England.
"5. Such Garden-Herbs among us as do thrive there and of such as do not."
This last division is the one that specially interests us, since it is the earliest and the fullest account of the gardens of our forefathers, after they had tamed the rugged shores of the New World, and made them obey the rule of English husbandry. They had "good store of garden vegetables and herbs ; lettuce, sorrel, parsley, mallows, chevril, burnet, summer savory, win- ter savory, thyme, sage, carrots, parsnips, beets, radishes, purslain, beans"; "cabbidge growing exceeding well; pease of all sorts and the best in the world ; sparagus thrives exceedingly, musk mellons, cucumbers, and pom- pions." For grains there were wheat, rye, barley, and oats. There were other garden herbs and garden flowers: spearmint, pennyroyal, ground-ivy,
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corander, dill, tansy; "feverfew prospereth exceedingly ; white sattin grow- eth pretty will, and so doth lavender-cotton; gilly flowers will continue two years ; horseleek prospereth notably; hollyhocks; comferie with white flow- ers ; clary lasts but one summer; sweetbryer or eglantine; celandine but slowly; bloodwort but sorrily, but patience and English roses very pleas- antly."
Patience and English roses very pleasantly in truth must have shown their fair English faces to English women in the strange land. Dearly loved had these brier-roses or dog-roses been in England, where, says the old herb- alist, Gerard, "children with delight make chains and pretty gegawes of the fruit ; and cookes and gentlewomen make tarts and suchlike dishes for pleas- ure thereof." Hollyhocks, feverfew, and gillyflowers must have made a sun- shine in the shady places in the new home. Many of these garden herbs are now common weeds or roadside blossoms. Celandine, even a century ago, was "common by fences and among rubbish." Tansy and elecampane grow everywhere. Sweetbrier is at home in New England pastures and roadsides. Spearmint edges our brooks. Ground-ivy is a naturalized citizen. It is easy to note that the flowers and herbs beloved in gardens and medicinal waters and kitchens "at home" were the ones transplanted here. "Clary-water" was a favorite tonic of Englishmen of that day.
The list of "such plants as have sprung up since the English planted" should be of interest to every one who has any sense of the sentiment of association, or interest in laws of succession. The Spanish proverb says :-
"More in the garden grows Than the gardener sows."
The plantain has a history full of romance; its old Northern names- Wegetritt in German, Weegbree in Dutch, Viebred in Danish, and Weybred in Old English, all indicating its presence in the much-trodden paths of man -were not lost in its new home, nor were its characteristics overlooked by the nature-noting and plant-knowing red man. It was called by the Indian "the Englishman's foot," says Josselyn, and by Kalm also, a later traveller in 1740; "for they say where an Englishman trod, there grew a plantain in each footstep." Not less closely did such old garden weeds as motherwort, groundsel, chickweed, and wild mustard cling to the white man. They are old colonists, brought over by the first settlers, and still thrive and triumph in every kitchen garden and back yard in the land. Mullein and nettle, hen- bane and wormwood, all are English emigrants.
A trade in flower and vegetable seeds formed a lucrative and popular means by which women could earn a livelihood in colonial days. I have seen
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in one of the dingy little newspaper sheets of those days, in the large total of nine advertisements, contained therein, the announcements, by five Boston seedswomen, of lists of their wares.
The earliest list of names of flower-seeds which I have chanced to note was in the Boston Evening Post of March, 1760, and is of much interest as showing to us with exactness the flowers beloved and sought for at that time. They were "hollyhook, purple Stock, white Lewpins, Africans, blew Lew- pins, candy-tuff, cyanus, pink, wall-flower, double larkin-spur, venus navel- wort, brompton flock, princess feather, balsam, sweet-scented pease, carna- tion, sweet williams, annual stock, sweet feabus, yellow lewpins, sunflower, convolus minor, catch-fly, ten week stock, globe thistle, globe amaranthus, nigella, love-lies-bleeding, casent hamen, polianthus, canterbury bells, carna- tion poppy, india pink, convolus major, Queen Margrets." This is certainly a very pretty list of flowers, nearly all of which are still loved, though some- times under other names-thus the Queen Margrets are our asters. And the homely old English names seem to bring the flowers to our very sight, for we do not seem to be on very friendly intimacy, on very sociable terms with flowers, unless they have what Miss Mitford calls "decent, well-wearing English names"; we can have no flower memories, no affections that cling to botanical nomenclature. Yet nothing is more fatal to an exact flower knowledge, to an acquaintance that shall ever be more than local, than a too confident dependence on the folk-names of flowers. Our bachelor's-buttons are ragged sailors in a neighboring state; they are corn-pinks in Plymouth, ragged ladies in another town, blue bottles in England, but cyanus every- where. Ragged robin is, in the garden of one friend, a pink, in another it flaunts as London-pride, while the true glowing London-pride has half a dozen pseudonyms in as many different localities, and only really recognizes itself in the botany. An American cowslip is not an English cowslip, an American primrose is no English primrose, and the English daisy is no coun- try friend of ours in America.
What cheerful and appropriate furnishings the old-time gardens had ; benches full of straw beeskepes and wooden beehives, those homelike and busy dwelling-places ; frequently, also, a well-filled dovecote. Sometimes was seen a sun-dial-once the every-day friend and suggestive monitor of all who wandered among the flowers of an hour; now known, alas! only to the antiquary. Sentiment and even spirituality seem suggested by the sun-dial, yet few remain to cast their instructive shadow before our sight.
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