The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864

WET-WEATHER WORK

BY A FARMER

V

It is a pelting November rain. No leaves are left upon the branches but a few yellow flutterers on the tips of the willows and poplars, and the bleached company that will be clinging to the beeches and the white oaks for a month to come. All others are whipped away by the night-winds into the angles of old walls, or are packed under low-limbed shrubberies, there to swelter and keep warm the rootlets of the newly planted weigelias and spruces, until the snows and February suns and April mists and May heats shall have transmuted them into fat and unctuous mould. A close, pelting, unceasing rain, trying all the leaks of the mossy roof, testing all the newly laid drains, pressing the fountain at my door to an exuberant gush,—a rain that makes outside work an impossibility; and as I sit turning over the leaves of an old book of engravings, wondering what drift my rainy-day's task shall take, I come upon a pleasant view of Dovedale in Derbyshire, a little exaggerated, perhaps, in the luxuriance of its trees and the depth of its shadows, but recalling vividly the cloudy April morning on which, fifteen years agone, I left the inn of the "Green Man and Black Head," in the pretty town of Ashbourne, and strolled away by the same road on which Mr. Charles Cotton opens his discourse of fishing with Master "Viator," and plunged down the steep valley-side near to Thorpe, and wandered for three miles and more, under towering crags, and on soft, spongy bits of meadow, beside the blithe river where Walton had cast, in other days, a gray palmer-fly, past the hospitable hall of the worshipful Mr. Cotton, and the wreck of the old fishing-house, over whose lintel was graven in the stone the interlaced initials of "Piscator, Junior," and his great master of the rod. As the rain began to patter on the sedges and the pools, I climbed out of the valley, on the northward or Derbyshire side, and striding away through the heather, which belongs to the rolling heights of this region, I presently found myself upon the great London and Manchester highway. A broad and stately thoroughfare it had been in the old days of coaching, but now a close, fine turf invested it all, save one narrow strip of Macadam in the middle. The mile-stones, which had been showy, painted affairs of iron, were now deeply bitten and blotched with rust. Two of them I had passed, without sight of house, or of other traveller, save one belated drover, who was hurrying to the fair at Ashbourne; as I neared the third, a great hulk of building appeared upon my left, with a crowd of aspiring chimneys, from which only one timid little pennant of smoke coiled into the harsh sky.

The gray, inhospitable-looking pile proved to be one of the old coach-inns, which, with its score of vacant chambers and huge stable-court, was left stranded upon the deserted highway of travel. It stood a little space back from the road, so that a coach and four, or, indeed, a half-dozen together, might have come up to the door-way in dashing style. But it must have been many years since such a demand had been made upon the resources of bustling landlord and of attendant grooms and waiters. The doors were tightly closed; even the sign-board creaked uneasily in the wind, and a rampant growth of ivy that clambered over the porch so covered it with leaves and berries that I could not at all make out its burden. I gave a sharp ring to the bell, and heard the echo repeated from the deserted stable-court; there was the yelp of a hound somewhere within, and presently a slatternly-dressed woman received me, and, conducting me down a bare hall, showed me into a great dingy parlor, where a murky fire was struggling in the grate. A score of roistering travellers might have made the stately parlor gay; and I dare say they did, in years gone; but now I had only for company their heavy old arm-chairs, a few prints of "fast coaches" upon the wall, and a superannuated greyhound, who seemed to scent the little meal I had ordered, and presently stalked in and laid his thin nose, with an appealing look, in my hands. His days of coursing—if he ever had them—were fairly over; and I took a charitable pride in bestowing upon him certain tough morsels of the rump-steak, garnished with horse-radish, with which I was favored for dinner.

I had intended to push on to Buxton the same afternoon; but the deliberate sprinkling of the morning by two o'clock had quickened into a swift, pelting rain, the very counterpart of that which is beating on my windows to-day. There was nothing to be done but to make my home of the old coach-inn for the night; and for my amusement—besides the slumberous hound, who, after dinner, had taken up position upon the faded rug lying before the grate—there was a "Bell's Messenger" of the month past, and, as good luck would have it, a much-bethumbed copy of a work on horticulture and kindred subjects, first printed somewhere about the beginning of the eighteenth century, and entitled "The Clergyman's Recreation, showing the Pleasure and Profit of the Art of Gardening," by the Reverend John Laurence.

It was a queer book to be found in this pretentious old coach-inn, with its silken bell-pulls and stately parlors; and I thought how the roisterers who came thundering over the road years ago, and chucked the bar-maids under the chin, must have turned up their noses, after their pint of crusted Port, at the "Clergyman's Recreation." Yet, for all that, the book had a rare interest for me, detailing, as it did, the methods of fruit-culture in England a hundred and forty years ago, and showing with nice particularity how the espaliers could be best trained, and how a strong infusion of walnut-leaf tea will destroy all noxious worms.

And now, when, upon this other wet day, and in the quietude of my own library, I come to measure the claims of this ancient horticulturist to consideration, I find that he was the author of some six or seven distinct works on kindred subjects, showing good knowledge of the best current practice; and although he incurred the sneers of Mr. Tull, who hoped "he preached better than he ploughed," there is abundant evidence that his books were held in esteem.

Contemporary with the Rev. Mr. Laurence were London and Wise, the famous horticulturists of Brompton, (whose nursery, says Evelyn, "was the greatest work of the kind ever seen or heard of, either in books or travels,") also Switzer, a pupil of the latter, and Professor Richard Bradley.

Mr. London was the director of the royal gardens under William and Mary, and at one time had in his charge some three or four hundred of the most considerable landed estates in England. He was in the habit of riding some fifty miles a day to confer with his subordinate gardeners, and at least two or three times in a season traversed the whole length and breadth of England,—and this at a period, it must be remembered, when travelling was no holiday-affair, as is evident from the mishaps which befell those well-known contemporaneous travellers of Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Parson Adams. Traces of the work of Mr. London are to be seen even now in the older parts of the grounds of Blenheim and of Castle Howard in Yorkshire.

Stephen Switzer was an accomplished gardener, well known by a great many horticultural and agricultural works, which in his day were "on sale at his seed-shop in Westminster Hall." Chiefest among these was the "Ichnographia Rustica," which gave general directions for the management of country-estates, while it indulged in some prefatory magniloquence upon the dignity and antiquity of the art of gardening. It is the first of all arts, he claims; for "tho' Chirurgery may plead high, inasmuch as in the second chapter of Genesis that operation is recorded of taking the rib from Adam, wherewith woman was made, yet the very current of the Scriptures determines in favor of Gardening." It surprises us to find that so radical an investigator should entertain the belief, as he clearly did, that certain plants were produced without seed by the vegetative power of the sun acting upon the earth. He is particularly severe upon those Scotch gardeners, "Northern lads," who, with "a little learning and a great deal of impudence, know, or pretend to know, more in one twelvemonth than a laborious, honest South-country man does in seven years."

His agricultural observations are of no special value, nor do they indicate any advance from the practice of Worlidge. He deprecates paring and burning as exhaustive of the vegetable juices, advises winter fallowing and marling, and affirms that "there is no superficies of earth, how poor soever it may be, but has in its own bowels something or other for its own improvement."

In gardening, he expresses great contempt for the clipped trees and other excesses of the Dutch school, yet advises the construction of terraces, lays out his ponds by geometric formulæ, and is so far devoted to out-of-door sculpture as to urge the establishment of a royal institution for the instruction of ingenious young men, who, on being taken into the service of noblemen and gentlemen, would straightway people their grounds with statues. And this notwithstanding Addison had published his famous papers on the "Pleasures of the Imagination" three years before.[5 - The "Spectators" 414 and 477, which urge particularly a better taste in gardening, are dated 1712; and the first volume of the "Ichnographia" (under a different name, indeed) appeared in 1715.]

Richard Bradley was the Dr. Lardner of his day,—a man of general scientific acquirement, an indefatigable worker, venturing hazardous predictions, writing some fifteen or twenty volumes upon subjects connected with agriculture, foisting himself into the chair of Botany at Cambridge by noisy reclamation, selling his name to the booksellers for attachment to other men's wares,[6 - This is averred of the translation of the "Œconomics" of Xenophon, before cited in these papers, and published under Professor Bradley's name.] and, finally, only escaping the indignity of a removal from his professor's chair by sudden death, in 1732. Yet this gentleman's botanical dictionary ("Historia Plantarum," etc.) was quoted respectfully by Linnæus, and his account of British cattle, their races, proper treatment, etc., was, by all odds, the best which had appeared up to his time. The same gentleman, in his "New Improvements of Planting and Gardening," lays great stress upon a novel "invention for the more speedy designing of garden-plats," which is nothing more than an adaptation of the principle of the kaleidoscope. The latter book is the sole representative of this author's voluminous agricultural works in the Astor collection; and, strange to say, there are only two in the library of the British Museum.

I take, on this dreary November day, (with my Catawbas blighted,) a rather ill-natured pleasure in reading how the Duke of Rutland, in the beginning of the last century, was compelled to "keep up fires from Lady-day to Michaelmas behind his sloped walls," in order to insure the ripening of his grapes; yet winter grapes he had, and it was a great boast in that time. The quiet country squires—such as Sir Roger de Coverley—had to content themselves with those old-fashioned fruits which would struggle successfully with out-of-door fogs. Fielding tells us that the garden of Mr. Wilson, where Parson Adams and the divine Fanny were guests, showed nothing more rare than an alley bordered with filbert-bushes.[7 - Joseph Andrews, Bk. III. Ch. 4, where Fielding, thief that he was, appropriates the story that Xenophon tells of Cyrus.]

In London and its neighborhood the gourmands fared better. Cucumbers, which in Charles's time never came in till the close of May, were ready in the shops of Westminster (in the time of George I.) in early March. Melons were on sale, for those who could pay roundly, at the end of April; and the season of cauliflowers, which used to be limited to a single month, now reached over a term of six months.

Mr. Pope, writing to Dr. Swift, somewhere about 1730, says,—"I have more fruit-trees and kitchen-garden than you have any thought of; nay, I have good melons and pine-apples of my own growth." Nor was this a small boast; for Lady Wortley Montague, describing her entertainment at the table of the Elector of Hanover, in 1716, speaks of "pines" as a fruit she had never seen before.

Ornamental gardening, too, was now changing its complexion. Dutch William was dead and buried. Addison had written in praise of the natural disposition of the gardens of Fontainebleau, and, at his place near Rugby, was carrying out, so far as a citizen might, the suggestions of those papers to which I have already alluded. Milton was in better odor than he had been, and people had begun to realize that an arch-Puritan might have exquisite taste. Possibly, too, cultivated landholders had seen that charming garden-picture where the luxurious Tasso makes the pretty sorceress Armida spread her nets.

Pope affected a respect for the views of Addison; but his Twickenham garden was a very stiff affair. Bridgman was the first practical landscape-gardener who ventured to ignore old rules; and he was followed closely by William Kent, a broken-down and unsuccessful landscape-painter, who came into such vogue as a man of taste, that he was employed to fashion the furniture of scores of country-villas; and Walpole[8 - Works of Earl of Orford, Vol. III. p. 490.] tells us that he was even beset by certain fine ladies to design Birthday gowns for them:—"The one he dressed in a petticoat decorated with columns of the five orders; the other, like a bronze, in a copper-colored satin, with ornaments of gold."

Clermont, the charming home of the exiled Orléans family, shows vestiges of the taste of Kent, who always accredited very much of his love for the picturesque to the reading of Spenser. It is not often that the poet of the "Faerie Queene" is mentioned as an educator.

And now let us leave gardens for a while, to discuss Mr. Jethro Tull, the great English cultivator of the early half of the eighteenth century. I suspect that most of the gentry of his time, and cultivated people, ignored Mr. Tull, he was so rash and so headstrong and so noisy. It is certain, too, that the educated farmers, or, more strictly, the writing farmers, opened battle upon him, and used all their art to ward off his radical tilts upon their old methods of culture. And he fought back bravely; I really do not think that an editor of a partisan paper to-day could improve upon him,—in vigor, in personality, or in coarseness.

Unfortunately, the biographers and encyclopædists who followed upon his period have treated his name with a neglect that leaves but scanty gleanings for his personal history. His father owned landed property in Oxfordshire, and Jethro was a University-man; he studied for the law, (which will account for his address in a wordy quarrel,) made the tour of Europe, returned to Oxfordshire, married, took the paternal homestead, and proceeded to carry out the new notions which he had gained in his Southern travels. Ill health drove him to France a second time, from which he returned once more, to occupy the famous "Prosperous Farm" in Berkshire; and here he opened his batteries afresh upon the existing methods of farming. The gist of his proposed reform is expressed in the title of his book, "The Horse-hoeing Husbandry." He believed in the thorough tillage, at frequent intervals, of all field-crops, from wheat to turnips. To make this feasible, drilling was, of course, essential; and to make it economical, horse labor was requisite: the drill and the horse-hoe were only subsidiary to the main end of thorough tillage.

Sir Hugh Platt, as we have seen, had before suggested dibbling, and Worlidge had contrived a drill; but Tull gave force and point and practical efficacy to their suggestions. He gives no credit, indeed, to these old gentlemen; and it is quite possible that his theory may have been worked out from his own observations. He certainly gives a clear account of the growth of his belief, and sustains it by a great many droll notions about the physiology of plants, which would hardly be admissible in the botanies of to-day.

Shall I give a sample?

"Leaves," he says, "are the parts, or bowels of a plant, which perform the same office to sap as the lungs of an animal do to blood; that is, they purify or cleanse it of the recrements, or fuliginous steams, received in the circulation, being the unfit parts of the food, and perhaps some decayed particles which fly off the vessels through which blood and sap do pass respectively."

It does not appear that the success of Tull upon "Prosperous Farm" was such as to give a large warrant for its name. His enemies, indeed, alleged that he came near to sinking two estates on his system; this, however, he stoutly denies, and says, "I propose no more than to keep out of debt, and leave my estate behind me better than I found it. Yet, owned it must be, that, had I, when I first began to make trials, known as much of the system as I do now, the practice of it would have been more profitable to me." Farmers in other parts of England, with lands better adapted to the new husbandry, certainly availed themselves of it, very much to their advantage. Tull, like a great many earnest reformers, was almost always in difficulty with those immediately dependent on him; over and over he insists upon the "inconveniency and slavery attending the exorbitant power of husbandry servants and laborers over their masters." He quarrels with their wages, and with the short period of their labor. Pray, what would Mr. Tull have thought, if he had dealt with the Drogheda gentlemen in black satin waistcoats, who are to be conciliated by the farmers of to-day?

I think I can fancy such an encounter for the querulous old reformer. "Mike! blast you, you booby, you've broken my drill!" And Mike, (putting his thumb deliberately in the armlet of his waistcoat,) "Meester Tull, it's not the loikes o' me'll be leestening to insoolting worrds. I'll take me money, if ye plase." And with what a fury "Meester" Tull would have slashed away, after this, at "Equivocus," and all his newspaper-antagonists!

I wish I could believe that Tull always told the exact truth; but he gives some accounts of the perfection to which he had brought his drill to which I can lend only a most meagre trust; and it is unquestionable that his theory so fevered his brain at last as to make him utterly contemptuous of all old-fashioned methods of procedure. In this respect he was not alone among reformers. He stoutly affirmed that tillage would supply the lack of manure, and his neighbors currently reported that he was in the habit of dumping his manure carts in the river. This charge Mr. Tull firmly denied, and I dare say justly. But I can readily believe that the rumors were current; country-neighborhoods offer good starting-points for such lively scandal. The writer of this paper has heard, on the best possible authority, that he is in the habit of planting shrubs with their roots in the air.

In his loose, disputative way, and to magnify the importance of his own special doctrine, Tull affirms that the ancients, and Virgil particularly, urged tillage for the simple purpose of destroying weeds.[9 - Chap. IX. p. 136, Cobbett's edition.] In this it seems to me that he does great injustice to our old friend Maro. Will the reader excuse a moment's dalliance with the Georgics again?

"Multum adeo, rastris glebas qui frangit inertes,
Vimineasque trahit crates, juvat arva;…
Et qui proscisso quæ suscitat æquore terga
Rursus in obliquum verso perrumpit aratro,
Exercetque frequens tellurem, atque imperat arvis."

That "imperat" looks like something more than weed-killing; it looks like subjugation; it looks like pulverization at the hands of an imperious master.

But behind all of Tull's exaggerated pretension, and unaffected by the noisy exacerbation of his speech, there lay a sterling good sense, and a clear comprehension of the existing shortcomings in agriculture, which gave to his teachings prodigious force, and an influence measured only by half a century of years. There were few, indeed, who adopted literally and fully his plans, or who had the hardihood to acknowledge the irate Jethro as a teacher; yet his hints and his example gave a stimulus to root-culture, and an attention to the benefits arising from thorough and repeated tillage, that added vastly to the annual harvests of England. Bating the exaggerations I have alluded to, his views are still reckoned sound; and though a hoed crop of wheat is somewhat exceptional, the drill is now almost universal in the best cultivated districts; and a large share of the forage-crops owe their extraordinary burden to horse-hoeing husbandry.

Even the exaggerated claims of Tull have had their advocates in these last days; and the energetic farmer of Lois-Weedon, in Northamptonshire, is reported to be growing heavy crops of wheat for a succession of years, without any supply of outside fertilizers, and relying wholly upon repeated and perfect pulverization of the soil.[10 - It is to be remarked, however, that the Rev. Mr. Smith, (farmer of Lois-Weedon,) by the distribution of his crop, avails himself virtually of a clean fallow, every alternate year.] And Mr. Way, the distinguished chemist of the Royal Society, in a paper on "The Power of Soils to absorb Manure,"[11 - Transactions, Vol. XXX p. 140.] propounds the question as follows:—"Is it likely, on theoretical considerations, that the air and the soil together can by any means be made to yield, without the application of manure, and year after year continuously, a crop of wheat of from thirty to thirty-five bushels per acre?" And his reply is this:—"I confess I do not see why they should not do so." A practical farmer, however, (who spends only his wet days in-doors,) would be very apt to suggest here, that the validity of this dictum must depend very much on the original constituents of the soil.

Under the lee of the Coombe Hills, on the extreme southern edge of Berkshire, and not far removed from the great highway leading from Bath to London, lies the farmery where this restless, petulant, suffering, earnest, clear-sighted Tull put down the burden of life, a hundred and twenty years ago. The house is unfortunately largely modernized, but many of the out-buildings remain unchanged; and not a man thereabout, or in any other quarter, could tell me where the former occupant, who fought so bravely his fierce battle of the drill, lies buried.

About the middle of the last century, there lived in the south of Leicestershire, in the parish of Church-Langton, an eccentric and benevolent clergyman by the name of William Hanbury, who conceived the idea of establishing a great charity which was to be supported by a vast plantation of trees. To this end, he imported a great variety of seeds and plants from the Continent and America, established a nursery of fifty acres in extent, and published "An Essay on Planting, and a Scheme to make it Conducive to the Glory of God and the Advantage of Society."

But the Reverend Hanbury was beset by aggressive and cold-hearted neighbors, among them two strange old "gentlewomen," Mistress Pickering and Mistress Byrd, who malevolently ordered their cattle to be turned loose into his first plantation of twenty thousand young and thrifty trees. And not content with this, they served twenty-seven different copies of writs upon him in one day, for trespass. Of all this he gives detailed account in his curious history of the "Charitable Foundations at Church-Langton." He tells us that the "venomous rage" of these old ladies (who died shortly after, worth a million of dollars) did not even spare his dogs; but that his pet spaniel and greyhound were cruelly killed by a table-fork thrust into their entrails. Nay, their game-keeper even buried two dogs alive, which belonged to his neighbor, Mr. Wade, a substantial grazier. His story of it is very Defoe-like and pitiful:—"I myself heard them," he says, "ten days after they had been buried, and, seeing some people at a distance, inquired what dogs they were. 'They are some dogs that are lost, Sir,' said they; 'they have been lost some time.' I concluded only some poachers had been there early in the morning, and by a precipitate flight had left their dogs behind them. In short, the howling and barking of these dogs was heard for near three weeks, when it ceased. Mr. Wade's dogs were missing, but he could not suspect those dogs to be his; and the noise ceasing, the thoughts, wonder, and talking about them soon also ceased. Some time after, a person, being amongst the bushes where the howling was heard, discovered some disturbed earth, and the print of men's heels ramming it down again very close, and, seeing Mr. Wade's servant, told him he thought something had been buried there. 'Then,' said the man, 'it is our dogs, and they have been buried alive. I will go and fetch a spade, and will find them, if I dig all Caudle over.' He soon brought a spade, and, upon removing the top earth, came to the blackthorns, and then to the dogs, the biggest of which had eat the loins, and greatest share of the hind parts, of the little one."

The strange ladies who were guilty of this slaughter of innocents showed "a dying blaze of goodness" by bequeathing twelve thousand pounds to charitable societies; and "thus ended," says Hanbury, "these two poor, unhappy, uncharitable, charitable old gentlewomen."

The good old man describes the beauty of plants and trees with the same delightful particularity which he spent on his neighbors and the buried dogs.

I cannot anywhere learn whether or not the charity-plantation of Church-Langton is still thriving.

About this very time, Lancelot Brown, who was for a long period the kitchen-gardener at Stowe, came into sudden notoriety by his disposition of the waters in Blenheim Park, where, in the short period of one week, he created perhaps the finest artificial lake in the world. Its indentations of shore, its bordering declivities of wood, and the graceful swells of land dipping to its margin, remain now in very nearly the same condition in which Brown left them more than a hundred years ago. All over England the new man was sent for; all over England he rooted out the mossy avenues, and the sharp rectangularities, and laid down his flowing lines of walks, and of trees. He (wisely) never contracted to execute his own designs, and—from lack of facility, perhaps—he always employed assistants to draw his plans. But the quick eye which at first sight recognized the "capabilities" of a place, and which leaped to the recognition of its matured graces, was all his own. He was accused of sameness; but the man who at one time held a thousand lovely landscapes unfolding in his thought could hardly give a series of contrasts without startling affectations.

I mention the name of Lancelot Brown, however, not to discuss his merits, but as the principal and largest illustrator of that taste in landscape-gardening which just now grew up in England, out of a new reading of Milton, out of the admirable essays of Addison, out of the hints of Pope, out of the designs of Kent, and which was stimulated by Gilpin, by Horace Walpole, and, still more, by the delightful little landscapes of Gainsborough.

Enough will be found of Mr. Brown, and of his style, in the professional treatises, upon whose province I do not now infringe. I choose rather, for the entertainment of my readers, if they will kindly find it, to speak of that sad, exceptional man, William Shenstone, who, by the beauties which he made to appear on his paternal farm of Leasowes, fairly rivalled the best of the landscape-gardeners,—and who, by the graces and the tenderness which he lavished on his verse, made no mean rank for himself at a time when people were reading the "Elegy" of Gray, the Homer of Pope, and the "Cato" of Addison.

I think there can hardly be any doubt, however, that poor Shenstone was a wretched farmer; yet the Leasowes was a capital grazing farm, when he took it in charge, within fair marketable distance of both Worcester and Birmingham. I suspect that he never put his fine hands to the plough-tail; and his plaintive elegy, that dates from an April day of 1743, tells, I am sure, only the unmitigated truth:—

"Again the laboring hind inverts the soil;
Again the merchant ploughs the tumid wave;
Another spring renews the soldier's toil,
And finds me vacant in the rural cave."

Shenstone, like many another of the lesser poets, was unfortunate in having Dr. Johnson for his biographer. It is hard to conceive of a man who would show less of tenderness for an elaborate parterre of flowers, or for a poet who affectedly parted his gray locks on one side of his head, wore a crimson waistcoat, and warbled in anapæstics about kids and shepherds' crooks. Only fancy the great, snuffy, wheezing Doctor, with his hair-powder whitening half his shoulders, led up before some charming little extravaganza of Boucher, wherein all the nymphs are simpering marchionesses, with rosettes on their high-heeled slippers that out-color the sky! With what a "Faugh!" the great gerund-grinder would thump his cane upon the floor, and go lumbering away! And Shenstone, or rather his memory, caught the besom of just such a sneer.

But other critics were more kindly and appreciative; among them, Dodsley the bookselling author, who wrote "The Economy of Human Life," (the "Proverbial Philosophy" of its day,) and Whately, who gave to the public the most elegant and tasteful discussion of artificial scenery that was perhaps ever written.