A WILD GARDEN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20716, 8 November 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

A WILD GARDEN.

BY ELSIE K. MORTON.

SUNSET—AND A SECRET.

I said nothing about the garden to my new friend as we walked homeward from the tram. It is the kind of garden you keep as a surprise for people you don't know very well. If I were to tell them, as I am telling you now, that rows of potatoes and broad beans go marching right up to the front gate, that a whole regiment of shameless young onions wave their green banners in full view of every passer-by, they might get quito a wrong idea about the garden and the Mother of the Garden, who, with her own hands, on her bended knees, planted every single little bean and onion and potato. So we eamo slowly up the road at sunset, when all gardens arc fragrant and full of wistful beauty, and my friend looked over the low hedge and stopped short with a cry. " Oh, look at the garden!" she cried. " Oh, wait, 1 must look!" So we waited there, outside the front gate, and I showed her the shameless young onions, the sprightly beans and potatoes, and she clapped her hands and laughed in sheer delight. "Whose is it?" she exclaimed. "I've never seen anything liko it! Look at those masses of escholtzias and marigolds, and the larkspurs and forget-me-nots everywhere. And 100k —there is an arch with wisteria all over it, down there by the pepper trees." " Come inside," I said, opening the gate. "We have carrots and turnips and green peas just inside that row of scarlet poppies." And, as she cried out in surprise and delight, I was glad I had not told her about the garden. It was no trouble at all getting her into it, but it was very hard indeed getting her out. Perhaps my efforts were rather halfhearted. For, after all,* who cares a snail-shell whether dinner is getting cold on the table or not when the fight of sunset lies over a garden, and all the marigolds are ablaze and the wisteiia turns rosy pink in a beam that comes slanting down through the green lace curtains of the pepper trees? It was the riot of colour, the scarlet and gold like a fanfare of trumpets, the lovely soft tones of pink and blue, the little vivid, unexpected pictures to be seen only in a wild garden, that held my friend enchanted. In the midst of a little round clump of forget-me-nots swayed a lovely pink poppy, a tall spire of larkspur rose from a golden cluster of marigolds, scarlet geraniums flared against a background of dark green hedge, and red-gold wall-flowers, bronzen ixias, pink and mauve stocks, Sweet-william, verbenas. *and creamy daisies formed a mosaic of colour that stood massed in tho garden beds, then overflowed and v rippled out into odd corners and green nooks everywhere. The Floral Upstarts.

Down the garden paths we wandered, with apple-blossoms showering down on our heads as we pushed the laden branches aside, stepping carefully over odd sprouting of scarlet poppies and marigolds in the middle of track. Order of a sort must be maintained, even in a floral wilderness, but the Mother of the Gar den is very tender with her children, and very seldom has she the heart to uproot anv of these upstarts once they have eluded her vigilant eye and hoisted their gay little banners of independence! Rut though indulgent, she is firm, and down at the bottom of the garden, past the apple-trees and the young green peas, was a sad, sad heap of wilting poppies, forget-me-nots and escholtzias, scarlet and blue and gold, all faded and drooping, banners of the defeated, their swift, short day of glory ended Down by the arum lilies we turned and looked back over the sea of flowers ; the flare and riot was over, in the twilight there was only softness and a harmonious blending of all the bright, gay colours. "This garden has a soul," said my friend slowly. "It isn't just an ordinary garden. It's wild, but everywhere you can see the love and care. You don't get a garden like this from an ordinary gardener, nor even from an ordinary lover of flowers." Where Memories Wake.

She had discovered the secret of the garden, but she did not know how truly she spoke, nor how the Mother of the Garden had given it part of her own soul, how she had gone out into it in the black days of war and prayed there among the flowers, how she had found ease there later from the anguish that came into the hearts of the world's mothers, when there, before her dimming eyes, beneath her patient hands, was wrought the miracle of rebirth, everlasting hope, unfailing realisation, in the swing of the seasons that marked the slow passing of the years. . . . And then the solace of beauty and peace, flower and bird-song, when strength began to fail and the outer world and all its allure became part of a fading dream. Those are the things that give soul to a garden—and memories. Here in mv wild garden is a blush-rose that I have known since childhood. It came, a little wizened slip, with my grandparents, from a garden in Kent over sixty years ago; it has bloomed in gardens wherever we have made our home, and its fragile blooms and exquisite old-world perfume have been with me every springtide. These lovely wall-flowers, bronze and gold and velvet-brown, have bloomed in their corner year by year since they were given, as tiny plants, by hands now quietly at rest; from gardens of happy memory far and wide havo come the slips and seeds and cuttings that have given us our wild garden of to-day, so that love, friendship and memories walk softly with us down every aisle of bloom.

The Fellowship of the Garden. The fellowship of the garden includes more than the Mother and myself, the idler whose joy it is to loiter and pick the blooms those tireless hands have tended and grown. There are those two beloved arch-enemies of tho young plants and the birds, Mr. Skip and young liptop, a small half-Persian, with golden, owl-eyes and fur as soft as down. The fellowship of the garden includes a silent, but useful member, Herbert the hedgehog, introduced for the purpose of keeping down the snails. Herbert carries the good principle of selfeffacemeht to quite unnecessary lengths; never once, since he rolled spilaly out of his cardboard box one evening two months ago has he been seen by mortal rye. liut proof that he remains is contained irt the rising snail-mortality rate, and in tho fact that young delphiniums and sweet peas arc sprouting sturdily where never they have sprouted before. Bird-song there should always be in a garden, and music there always is in ours, the bird-chorus opened each morning at dawn by a valiant thrush that perches on the tip-top of the aerial mast. From my sleeping porch I f>ea him high up in the sky at sunrise, a tiny dark speck breasting the first waves of golden light that come flooding down upon the garden, his song a joy and an inspiration, in grey or golden dawns alike. Chaffinches, goldfinches, fantails, blackbirds and little white-eyes, once or twice even a shining cuckoo, nre also members of our garden fellowship, but never has any bird in a cage added the piercing swept sadness of the captive's song to the bird chorus of joy and thanksgiving for that free gift of God, a. wild and lovely garden.