Spring in a Shropshire Abbey

At last I tore myself away from the red-walled garden, and went and looked at the tubs full of geraniums and at the beds on the east side. How cool and happy they looked, and how grateful for the bountiful moisture they had received from hose and water-can. Drops glistened faintly on the stems, and the plants seemed to be drinking in the water with avidity. How good it was, accomplished work, and how sweet the stillness of a summer evening.

I stole back into the house and looked on the little table for the letters that had come by the second post. I found one from Mrs. Stanley. “I think,” she wrote “after all, that you and Bess have the best of it. For poor little Hals ever since he has been here has been poorly and ailing. Oh! why cannot children be well in London?”

I asked Bess the question, for she stood by me, about to say “good night” before going off to the little white cot upstairs.

“Why should poor children?” she answered, with a pout. “London is so dull.”

I kissed my little maid and said, “Then we must get Hals down here.”

At this Bess clapped her hands. “Of course we must,” she cried. “If people want to be happy, they should live at Wenlock.”

I sat down that evening and asked Mrs. Stanley to send her little boy down to us. “The country just now is so sweet and fresh that it must do him good,” I wrote. “We will take the greatest care of him; and here he has all the world to play in.” The next morning I told Bess what I had done.

“Yes,” repeated Bess, gravely, “all the world to play in, and that is what a poor boy can never have in London. There is no place there, excepting for motors and policemen.”

AFTER THE RAIN

All through the night sweet summer rain fell. How delightful a morning is after such rain. How happy every plant and leaf looked, how greedily all seemed to have drunk their fill – trees, shrubs, grass, and flowers. What an aspect of deep refreshment everything had, as if an elixir of life had been poured into the veins of every tree and herb.

Speckled thrushes hopped about and caught earthworms as they peered up through the lawns. On the stone steps leading up to the red-walled garden lay the broken remains of many dusky shells of the monks’ snails, or as the children call them here, “snail housen.” Beside these lay also broken fragments of beautiful yellow, and pale pink ones. A little later I walked into the garden to look at my great bed of roses. What a wonderful change one night of rain had made! How the shoots had lengthened, how “the blows,” as Burbidge calls them, had expanded. What a difference in the fat buds! The aphides, which seemed such a pest a week before, had vanished, while the leaves were refreshed and glittered with dew-drops.

Henricus Stephanus’ old lines came back to me —

“The rose, is the care and the love of the spring,
The rose is the pleasure of th’ heavenly Pow’rs;
The boy of fair Venus, Cyther’s darling,
Doth wrap his head round with garlands of rose
When to the dance of the graces he goes.”

Amongst my beautiful modern roses, I noted that La France was opening two delicious buds. What a beautiful rose it is; and what an exquisite perfume it possesses! Then I found a gorgeous Fisher Holmes, a General Jacqueminot, and a Captain Christy. All these had been born, as Bess calls it, in the night. Besides these modern joys, I paused to notice my old-world friends. I could not pass by without casting a glance upon the loves of Gerard and Parkinson. The pimpernel rose, little Scotch briars of different sorts, the little single rose without thorns, the damask, the yellow cabbage, and the splendid vermilion, the musk, the single cinnamon and the great Holland, all these have their places in different parts of my garden.

Parkinson tells us how at Longleete in his time people said that a rose tree then bore white roses on one side, and red on the other; but the old writer looked upon this as a fable, and declared, “This may be as true as the old story that a white hen visited Livia Augusta with a sprig of bays, and foretold, Augusta believed, by so doing empire to Augusta’s posterity, and extinction to the race when the brood of the hen failed.” Be this as it may, I have a standard rose with a Gloire de Dijon and a General Jacqueminot budded on the same tree. Burbidge was much pleased with the combination of colours and called it Christian and Heathen – names, I fancy, first bestowed by his old wife Hester.

THE GREY MARE AND ROSEMARY

Before I left the red-walled garden, I stopped before a bush of rosemary. I pinched a leaf and picked a little spray on which were some minute blossoms just coming into flower. Farmers’ wives of Shropshire use the leaves for flavouring their lard, and a bush or two is to be found in every farmhouse border.

I remembered the great bushes of this plant that I saw in the Riviera above Mentone, and near the Italian frontier on the road to Bordighera. I recalled Evelyn’s affection for this fragrant plant, and I recollected what he tells us in his delightful diary, after a night at Loumas in 1644, about this delightful aromatic shrub.

After passing the Durance, he wrote, “We came upon a tract of country covered with rosemary, lavender, lentiscs and the like sweet shrubs, for many miles together, which to me was very pleasant.”

Yes, I said to myself, the scent is very pleasant, health and sweetness combined, in which is nothing cloying or sickly. I laughed for the old Shropshire proverb came back to me of “Where the grey mare is stalled, rosemary grows apace.” I have heard it said that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was the fashion to put rosemary on and round the corpses of the old. “Vors for maids, rosemary and lavender for those as die old in God,” an old cottager once said to me; and the same old body told me that in her mother’s time “’twas thought a mark of respect to put a bunch of sweet-smelling herbs round a dear dead face, such as the sage tree, a sprig of thyme, a bunch of lavender, or a branch of rosemary.” What a pretty offering such must have been! One can imagine dim figures in the gloaming going up to the chamber of death some summer evening – old friends and gossips in smocks, or with countryside chintz bonnets, and each guest placing a spray of some sweet herb, as a tribute of affection, by the dear dead face that would never wake up, or speak to them again.

A few steps from the rosemary bush is my plant of fraxinella. Its stalk glistened with sweet stickiness. It was of the white variety, far more beautiful than the one generally known as the pink.

Years ago in an old Hampshire garden I loved as a child, I was taken out by my father’s old gardener with my sister to see his “Burning Bush.” I recollected, as if it had been only yesterday, that as little girls we had been allowed to sit up once till nine, to see the bush set on fire. I thought then this harmless bonfire the most wonderful and mystic thing that I had ever seen. We went out with our old nurse and saw it lighted at a distance, our old nurse holding both our hands. How wonderful it seemed in the stillness of the summer’s evening, with no sound but the distant singing of the birds. I remember how the old gardener, who had lived with father, grandfather and great-uncle, told us the story of the burning bush and bade us read our Bibles, and how we believed for years afterwards that we two had seen a miracle and had stood on holy ground that summer night.

For many years I lost sight of the fraxinella as a border plant. The good old gardener of my old home died, and the burning bush was dug up, I heard, under an evil successor, and thrown on the midgeon heap, and alone the memory of the mystic plant and the still summer’s evening remained with me.

But after my marriage, I remembered spending a June in France, and one day in the first week in June I saw the altar of the cathedral at Laon decked with great sprays of lovely white fraxinella. The scent was intense – heavier than the heaviest incense. I am sensitive to the perfume of flowers, and therefore could not remain long in the edifice, but the odour brought back the memory of the burning bush of my childhood, and I went off to a florist in the market-place and bought two packets of seeds for my Shropshire home. One was a packet of the pink variety, and the other was of the white. When I returned to the Abbey the seeds were sown by Burbidge, but, to quote the old man, “they was as shy of coming up as blows be in snow.” We waited and we waited for any sign of life.

All through the late summer and autumn there was no symptom of vegetation. The seeds, which were like little black shot, remained dormant. For many months there was no change.

“THE FOREIGNERS” CONDEMNED

At last Burbidge lost all patience. “Put they,” and he pointed to the boxes in which the fraxinella seeds were sown, “put they on the midgeon heap, and let the foreigners get their deserts.”

Happily I stood by when this order was given, and pleaded that they should be left a little longer. One chilly day in February, when the only sign of the return of life seemed the gilding of the willows, I peered into the frame, and I saw, as gardeners say, “my seeds on the move,” and in due time my old gardener reared me some half-dozen plants. After some abuse, Burbidge has taken kindly to the “foreigners,” and now graciously allows “that yer might do worse than grow fraxinella in a garden.”

I leant over and smelt the long white spikes, and thought of the old plant in the Hampshire garden. I noticed that the sticky stem was a perfect fly-trap, and that hundreds of little insects were caught and drowned in it like in the leaves of the sun-dew on Scotch moors. It is this sticky fluid, I am told, that burns without injuring the plant, when set on fire on a summer’s night. Every part of the fraxinella is redolent of fragrance – leaf, stalk, and petals – later, even the husk of the seed pod. All are exquisitely perfumed; and the husks, if gathered, will retain their sweetness for long months together.

A little further off, I stood before my clumps of pinks. I have a great many sorts, and all are deliciously sweet – the sweetest of all flowers I have heard them called.

In Chaucer’s time it was the fashion, it seems, to talk of the “parwenke of prowesse;” in Sir Philip Sidney’s age, writers spoke of “the pink of courtesy.” We no longer compare a high and noble spirit to a flower. Do we love flowers less?

I walked up and down before my lines of pinks and wondered. I have the lovely Amoor pink, the pretty Maiden, the chocolate brown and white, the delicate little Cheddar, peeping up between stones and rocks, and a lovely little Norwegian variety that a friend brought me back from a fishing-lodge. My little Scandinavian friend has a low habit of growth, in fact, only rears its pink head a few inches from the soil, but its blossoms are of a radiant rose, and deliciously sweet.

Later in the day I went down a quiet path in the kitchen garden, that faces east. There were no bright colours there, only sober-tinted old-world herbs. Every monastic garden in the days of the Plantagenets had its herbularis, or physic garden.

THE HERB GARDEN

Here there were little square beds of rosemary, of rue, fennel, linseed, rye, hemp, thyme, woodruff, camomile, mallow, clove, and basil. Of the clove basil Parkinson wrote, that “it was a restorative for a weak heart, and was known to cast out melancholy and sadness.”

Burbidge still cuts and dries these herbs, and village folks and cottagers from the neighbourhood come for others.

“Fennel tea,” he tells me, “is good to purify the blood, mallow is excellent for rheumatism, whilst thyme, pounded fine, serves in cases of colic.” Boiled lily bulbs for healing wounds, I am told, are also good. Then, in the corner against the wall, there is a patch of the old single violet, which I have heard is very soothing for inflammation, and now often advocated for curing cancer. Also a clump of borage, which Gerard declares, “comforteth the heart, purgeth melancholy, and quieteth the phrantick.” A few steps away I saw a patch of crane’s-bill, the old geranium of the Middle Ages, which the same writer recommended to be prepared with red snails and to be taken internally.

Besides these, nestling against the wall, I noted a plant of golden mouse-ear just coming into blossom. Here they call it “grin the collar.” It is a wild plant which the Elizabethan herbalist speaks of with affection, and which he says he found growing in dame Bridget Kingsmill’s ground, on distant downs, “not far from Newberry.”

I saw also bursting into blossom roots of the old single peony. It was of the sort that I have been told must be gathered in the night, or else the ill-fated gatherer may be struck blind.

Some years ago, I remembered once asking for a blossom of this sort in a cottage garden to copy in my embroidery. But the old woman to whom the plant belonged would not hear of picking a flower.

“Best leave it – best leave it,” she had said. I thought her churlish for the moment, and then thought no more about it; but the same evening, whilst we were at dinner, a blossom of the single peony was brought in to me on a salver, and I was told that little Betty, old widow Hodgkis’s granddaughter, had run up from below the Edge “to pleasure me.”

Granny, said the child, had told her that “you’re welcome to it, and that, bein’ as it is there, was no ill-luck.”

On being pressed to explain, the child had answered, “Us dursn’t pick that blow early, but granny says, picked at night, peonies be as safe as Job Orton in his shop, but in noontime ’tis only suckin’ gulleys as wud pick ’em.” For some moments I could not get the reason out of the little maid, but at last, when we were alone, she whispered to me. “’Tis along of the ecalls. If one war to see yer in the day, madder yer’d be than a tup at Bridgenorth fair, and blind, behappen.”

There is also in Shropshire a lingering belief that the seed of the single peony has magic powers to soothe and quiet women. A young widow, who had lost her husband in an accident connected with the blasting of the lime rock, obtained sleep by drinking a tea made from the seeds, I was assured.

THE PHYSICIAN OF THE GODS

“My Jane,” her mother said, “couldn’t sleep nohow before. It was rocks, and falls in darkness, and screams all the time with her, let her do what she would. Her got fair tired of physic, nothing the doctor gave her seemed to bring peace, or to padlock her tongue. Then came Jill Shore,” I was told, “as lives halfway up the heights of Tickwood. A witch some counted her, and her made my Jane lie down, and her charmed her with verses and made her drink a draught of peonina seed. And Jane her fell asleep, like a lamb beside its dam, and her slept, and slept, and woke up reasonable and quiet, and for all she was mortal sad, she was a decent soul again, and gave up screeching and tearing out her hair, and screaming out things not fit for a decent body to say.”

Then there was, at the end of the garden, a plant of goat’s rue, and a patch of mustard seed. An old writer declared that mustard would take away the black and blue marks that come from bruises. How that may be, I know not, but later on we shall take up the crop, root and blossom, and dig in the plants as manure into the fresh ground where we hope to grow our tulips for next year. It is the best manure that can be given to tulips, and an old secret amongst the tulip growers of past centuries. Just beyond the crop of mustard I saw a root of wild clary. In some of the old herbals this plant was accounted an excellent remedy for weak eyes, and Gerard tells us that it was a common practice in his day to put the seeds into poor folks’ eyes, to cure disease.

Just by the door that led into the paddock, there was a plant of woodruff. Very delicate and sweet is the scent of this little flower. It grows in great patches under the hazel trees of the Edge Wood. Formerly woodruff was used in church decoration, and was deftly woven into many garlands. In the north of Europe woodruff is still used as a herb to flavour drinks. I never heard of this being done in England, but in Shropshire it is often culled in the farmhouses to put in muslin bags, in the place of lavender. It has a sweet scent, which remains with letters and kerchiefs like a memory of the past.