Old Time Gardens Part 29

The Michigan Rose which covered the arches in Mr. Seward's garden, has cl.u.s.ters of deep pink, single, odorless flowers, that fade out nearly white after they open. It is our only native Rose that has pa.s.sed into cultivation. From it come many fine double-flowered Roses, among them the beautiful Baltimore Belle and Queen of the Prairies, which were named about 1836 by a Baltimore florist called Feast. All its vigorous and hardy descendants are scentless save the Gem of the Prairies. It is one of the ironies of plant-nomenclature when we have so few plant names saved to us from the picturesque and often musical speech of the American Indians, that the lovely Cherokee Rose, Indian of name, is a Chinese Rose. It ought to be a native, for everywhere throughout our Southern states its pure white flowers and glossy evergreen leaves love to grow till they form dense thickets.

People who own fine gardens are nowadays unwilling to plant the old "Summer Roses" which bloom cheerfully in their own Rose-month and then have no more blossoming till the next year; they want a Remontant Rose, which will bloom a second time in the autumn, or a Perpetual Rose, which will give flowers from June till cut off by the frost. But these latter-named Roses are not only of fine gardens but of fine gardeners; and folk who wish the old simple flower garden which needs no highly-skilled care, still are happy in the old Summer Roses I have named.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cottage Garden with Roses.]

A Rose hedge is the most beautiful of all garden walls and the most ancient. Professor Koch says that long before men customarily surrounded their gardens with walls, that they had Rose hedges. He tells us that each of the four great peoples of Asia owned its own beloved Rose, carried in all wanderings, until at last the four became common to all races of men. Indo-Germanic stock chose the hundred-leaved red Rose, _Rosa gallica_ (the best Rose for conserves). _Rosa damascena_, which blooms twice a year, and the Musk Rose were cherished by the Semitic people; these were preferred for attar of Roses and Rose water. The yellow Rose, _Rosa lutea_, or Persian Rose, was the flower of the Turkish Mongolian people. Eastern Asia is the fatherland of the Indian and Tea Roses. The Rose has now become as universal as sunlight. Even in Iceland and Lapland grows the lovely _Rosa nitida_.

We say these Roses are common to all peoples, but we have never in America been able to grow yellow Roses in ample bloom in our gardens.

Many that thrive in English gardens are unknown here. The only yellow garden Rose common in old gardens was known simply as the "old yellow Rose," or Scotch Rose, but it came from the far East. In a few localities the yellow Eglantine was seen.

The picturesque old custom of paying a Rose for rent was known here. In Manheim, Pennsylvania, stands the Zion Lutheran Church, which was gathered together by Baron William Stiegel, who was the first gla.s.s and iron manufacturer of note in this country. He came to America in 1750, with a fortune which would be equal to-day to a million dollars, and founded and built and named Manheim. He was a man of deep spiritual and religious belief, and of profound sentiment, and when in 1771 he gave the land to the church, this clause was in the indenture:--

"Yielding and paying therefor unto the said Henry William Stiegel, his heirs or a.s.signs, at the said town of Manheim, in the Month of June Yearly, forever hereafter, the rent of _One Red Rose_, if the same shall be lawfully demanded."

Nothing more touching can be imagined than the fulfilment each year of this beautiful and symbolic ceremony of payment. The little town is rich in Roses, and these are gathered freely for the church service, when One Red Rose is still paid to the heirs of the sainted old baron, who died in 1778, broken in health and fortunes, even having languished in jail some time for debt. A new church was erected on the site of the old one in 1892, and in a beautiful memorial window the decoration of the Red Rose commemorates the sentiment of its benefactor.

The Rose Tavern, in the neighboring town of Bethlehem, stands on land granted for the site of a tavern by William Penn, for the yearly rental of One Red Rose.

In England the payment of a Rose as rent was often known. The Bishop of Ely leased Ely house in 1576 to Sir Christopher Hatton, Queen Elizabeth's handsome Lord Chancellor, for a Red Rose to be paid on Midsummer Day, ten loads of hay and ten pounds per annum, and he and his Episcopal successors reserved the right of walking in the gardens and gathering twenty bushels of Roses yearly. In France there was a feudal right to demand a payment of Roses for the making of Rose water.

Two of our great historians, George Bancroft and Francis Parkman, were great rose-growers and rose-lovers. I never saw Mr. Parkman's Rose Garden, but I remember Mr. Bancroft's well; the Tea Roses were especially beautiful. Mr. Bancroft's Rose Garden in its earliest days had no rivals in America.

The making of potpourri was common in my childhood. While the petals of the Cabbage Rose were preferred, all were used. Recipes for making potpourri exist in great number; I have seen several in ma.n.u.script in old recipe books, one dated 1690. The old ones are much simpler than the modern ones, and have no strong spices such as cinnamon and clove, and no bergamot or mints or strongly scented essences or leaves. The best rules gave ambergris as one of the ingredients; this is not really a perfume, but gives the potpourri its staying power. There is something very pleasant in opening an old China jar to find it filled with potpourri, even if the scent has wholly faded. It tells a story of a day when people had time for such things. I read in a letter a century and a half old of a happy group of people riding out to the house of the provincial governor of New York; all gathered Rose leaves in the governor's garden, and the governor's wife started the distilling of these Rose leaves, in her new still, into Rose water, while all drank syllabubs and junkets--a pretty Watteau-ish scene.

The hips of wild Roses are a harvest--one unused in America in modern days, but in olden times they were stewed with sugar and spices, as were other fruits. Sauce Saracen, or Sarzyn, was made of Rose hips and Almonds pounded together, cooked in wine and sweetened. I believe they are still cooked by some folks in England, but I never heard of their use in America save by one person, an elderly Irish woman on a farm in Narragansett. Plentiful are the references and rules in old cookbooks for cooking Rose hips. Parkinson says: "Hippes are made into a conserve, also a paste like licoris. Cooks and their Mistresses know how to prepare from them many fine dishes for the Table." Gerarde writes characteristically of the Sweetbrier, "The fruit when it is ripe maketh most pleasant meats and banqueting dishes, as tarts and such-like; the making whereof I commit to the cunning cooke, and teeth to eat them in the rich man's mouth."

Children have ever nibbled Rose hips:--

"I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws-- Hard fare, but such as boyish appet.i.te Disdains not."

The Rose bush furnished another comestible for the children's larder, the red succulent shoots of common garden and wild Roses. These were known by the dainty name of "brier candy," a name appropriate and characteristic, as the folk-names devised by children frequently are.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Madame Plantier Rose.]

On the post-road in southern New Hamps.h.i.+re stands an old house, which according to its license was once "improved" as a tavern, and was famous for its ghost and its Roses. The tavern was owned by a family of two brothers and two sisters, all unmarried, as was rather a habit in the Mason family; though when any of the tribe did marry, a vast throng of children quickly sprung up to propagate the name and st.u.r.dy qualities of the race. The men were giants, and both men and women were hard-working folk of vast endurance and great thrift, and, like all of that ilk in New England, they prospered and grew well-to-do; great barns and out-buildings, all well filled, stretched down along the roadside below the house. Joseph Mason could lay more feet of stone wall in a day, could plough more land, chop down more trees, pull more stumps, than any other man in New Hamps.h.i.+re. His sisters could bake and brew, make soap, weed the garden, spin and weave, unceasingly and untiringly. Their garden was a source of purest pleasure to them, as well as of hard work; its borders were so stocked with medicinal herbs that it could supply a towns.h.i.+p; and its old-time flowers furnished seeds and slips and bulbs to every other garden within a day's driving distance; but its glory was a garden side to gladden the heart of Omar Khayyam, where two or three acres of ground were grown over heavily with old-fas.h.i.+oned Roses. These were only the common Cinnamon Rose, the beloved Cabbage Rose, and a pale pink, spicily scented, large-petalled, scarcely double Rose, known to them as the Apothecaries' Rose. Farmer-neighbors wondered at this waste of the Masons' good land in this unprofitable Rose crop, but it had a certain use. There came every June to this Rose garden all the children of the vicinity, bearing milk-pails, homespun bags, birch baskets, to gather Rose petals. They nearly all had Roses at their homes, but not the Mason Roses. These Rose leaves were carried carefully to each home, and were packed in stone jars with alternate layers of brown or scant maple sugar. Soon all conglomerated into a gummy, brown, close-grained, not over alluring substance to the vision, which was known among the children by the unromantic name of "Rose tobacco." This cloying confection was in high repute. It was chipped off and eaten in tiny bits, and much treasured--as a love token, or reward of good behavior.

The Mason house was a tavern. It was not one of the regular stopping-places on the turnpike road, being rather too near the town to gather any travel of teamsters or coaches; but pa.s.sers-by who knew the house and the Masons loved to stop there. Everything in the well-kept, well-filled house and barns contributed to the comfort of guests, and it was known that the Masons cared more for the company of the traveller than for his pay.

There was a shadow on this house. The youngest of the family, Hannah, had been jilted in her youth, "shabbed" as said the country folks. After several years of "constant company-keeping" with the son of a neighbor, during which time many a linen sheet and tablecloth, many a fine blanket, had been spun and woven, and laid aside with the tacit understanding that it was part of her wedding outfit, the man had fallen suddenly and violently in love with a girl who came from a neighboring town to sing a single Sunday in the church choir. He had driven to her home the following week, carried her off to a parson in a third town, married her, and brought her to his home in a triumph of enthusiasm and romance, which quickly fled before the open dislike and reprehension of his upright neighbors, who abhorred his fickleness, and before the years of ill health and ill temper of the hard-worked, faded wife. Many children were born to them; two lived, sickly little souls, who, unconscious of the blemish on their parents' past, came with the other children every June, and gathered Rose leaves under Hannah Mason's window.

Hannah Mason was called crazy. After her desertion she never entered any door save that of her own home, never went to a neighbor's house either in time of joy or sorrow; queerer still, never went to church. All her life, her thoughts, her vast strength, went into hard work. No labor was too heavy or too formidable for her. She would hetchel flax for weeks, spin unceasingly, and weave on a hand loom, most wearing of women's work, without thought of rest. No single household could supply work for such an untiring machine, especially when all labored industriously--so work was brought to her from the neighbors. Not a wedding outfit for miles around was complete without one of Hannah Mason's fine tablecloths. Every corpse was buried in one of her linen shrouds.

Sailmakers and boat-owners in Portsmouth sent up to her for strong duck for their sails. Lads went up to Dartmouth College in suits of her homespun. Many a teamster on the road slept under Hannah Mason's heavy gray woollen blankets, and his wagon tilts were covered with her canvas.

Her bank account grew rapidly--she became rich as fast as her old lover became poor. But all this cast a shadow on the house. Sojourners would waken and hear throughout the night some steady sound, a scratching of the cards, a whirring of the spinning-wheel, the thump-thump of the loom. Some said she never slept, and could well grow rich when she worked all night.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sun-dial and Roses at Van Cortlandt Manor.]

At last the woman who had stolen her lover--the poor, sickly wife--died.

The widower, burdened hopelessly with debts, of course put up in her memory a fine headstone extolling her virtues. One wakeful night, with a sentiment often found in such natures, he went to the graveyard to view his proud but unpaid-for possession. The gra.s.s deadened his footsteps, and not till he reached the grave did there rise up from the ground a tall, ghostly figure dressed all in undyed gray wool of her own weaving.

It was Hannah Mason. "Hannah," whimpered the widower, trying to take her hand,--with equal thought of her long bank account and his unpaid-for headstone,--"I never really loved any one but you." She broke away from him with an indescribable gesture of contempt and dignity, and went home. She died suddenly four days later of pneumonia, either from the shock or the damp midnight chill of the graveyard.

As months pa.s.sed on travellers still came to the tavern, and the story began to be whispered from one to another that the house was haunted by the ghost of Hannah Mason. Strange sounds were heard at night from the garret where she had always worked; most plainly of all could be heard the whirring of her great wool wheel. When this rumor reached the brothers' ears, they determined to investigate the story and end it forever. That night their vigil began, and soon the sound of the wheel was heard. They entered the garret, and to their surprise found the wheel spinning round. Then Joseph Mason went to the garret and seated himself for closer and more determined watch. He sat in the dark till the wheel began to revolve, then struck a sudden light and found the ghost. A great rat had run out on the spoke of the wheel and when he reached the broad rim had started a treadmill of his own--which made the ghostly sound as it whirred around. Soon this rat grew so tame that he would come out on the spinning-wheel in the daytime, and several others were seen to run around in the wheel as if it were a pleasant recreation.

The old brick house still stands with its great grove of Sugar Maples, but it is silent, for the Masons all sleep in the graveyard behind the church high up on the hillside; no travellers stop within the doors, the ghost rats are dead, the spinning-wheel is gone, but the garden still blossoms with eternal youth. Though children no longer gather rose leaves for Rose tobacco, the "Roses of Yesterday" bloom every year; and each June morn, "a thousand blossoms with the day awake," and fling their spicy fragrance on the air.