Chapter XIX
THE NICE OTHER THINGS
A pool of water twenty feet long shining in the sun, or glimmering deeplyin the twilight, that and nothing else save a few straggling annualswrongly placed about it--yet it made Twin Fires over, it caused us weeksof toil, it got into our dreams, it got into our pockets, too.
"Now I know why sunken gardens are so called," said Stella, as shefigured out the cost of the fall bulb planting we had already planned."It's because you sink so much money in 'em!"
Of course there was little that we could do to the margin of the poolthat summer, but there was plenty to do beyond the margin. The firstthing of all was to place the flower beds differently. This tookconsiderable experimenting, and Stella, being ingenious, hit upon ascheme for testing various possible arrangements. She filled all sortsof receptacles, from tumblers to pitchers, with cut flowers, low andhigh, and stood them in masses here and there, till the spot was foundwhere they looked the best. As the pool centred on the line between thefront door of the house and the yet-to-be-built garden bench against thestone wall, and as the orchard came down to within forty feet of thebrook on the slope from the house, it was something of a problem tolead naturally from a grassy orchard slope into a water feature and abit of almost formal gardening, without making the transition stiff andabrupt. We finally solved it with the aid of a lawn mower, flower beds,and imagination.
Going over the grass between the last apple trees and the brook againand again with the mower, I finally reduced that section to somethinglike a lawn, and also kept mowed a straight path from the pool up to thefront door. Then, beginning just beyond the last shadows, we cut abed, thirty inches wide, on each side of the line of the path, runningparallel with it to within ten feet of the pool; then they swung toleft and right, following the curve of the bank until they flanked thepool. By planting low flowers at the beginning, and gradually increasingtheir height till we had larkspur and hollyhocks and mallow in theflanking beds, we could both make the transition from orchard to waterfeature, and also screen off the pool, increasing its intimacy, without,however, hiding it from the front door, where it was glimpsed down apath of trees and flowers. Of course we had no flowers now in mid-Julyto put into those beds, save what few we could dig up from elsewhere,setting poor little annual phloxes two feet apart; but we could, anddid, use them for seed beds for next year's perennials, and to the eyeof faith they were beautiful.
Now we were confronted by the problem of the other side of the pool,which included the problem of how to get to the other side! Stellasuggested tentatively a tiny Japanese moon bridge above the pool, but Iwould have none of it.
"The only way to build a Japanese garden in New England is to utilizeNew England features," I insisted. "We won't copy anybody."
"All right," she answered, "then we want stepping-stones above thepool, and some more down below the dam, where we can see the waterfall."
"More suitable--and much easier," I agreed.
Once more we robbed the stone wall, building our two flanking paths ofstepping-stones to the other side of the brook.
On the other side we decided to eliminate all flower beds in the open,merely planting iris and forget-me-not on the rim of the pool. We wouldclear out a wide semicircle of lawn, with the bench at the centre ofthe circumference, and plant our remaining flowers against the shrubberyon the sides, which was chiefly the wild red osier dogwood (_cornusstolonifera_). I got a brush scythe, a hatchet, a spade, a grub hoe,and a rake, and we went to work.
Work is certainly the word. It was not difficult to clear the brush andthe tall, rank weeds and grasses away from our semicircle, which washardly more than thirty feet in diameter, but to spade up the blacksoil thereafter, to eliminate the long, tenacious roots of the witchgrass and the weeds, to clear out the stubborn stumps of innumerablelittle trees and wild shrubs which had overrun the place, to spreadevenly the big pile of soil we had excavated from the pool, to reduceit all to a clean, level condition for sowing grass, was more than I hadbargained for. Stella gave up helping, for it was beyond her strength;but I kept on, through the long, hot July afternoons, and at last had itready. The time of year was anything but propitious for sowing grassseed, but we planted it, none the less, trusting that in such a low,moist spot it might make a catch. Then we turned to the bench.
"Gracious, you have to be everything to be a gardener, don't you?"Stella laughed, as we tried to draw a sketch first, which should satisfyus. "The bench ought to balance the old Governor Winthrop highboy top ofthe front door. But I'm sure I don't know how we're going to make it."
"Patience," said I, turning the leaves of a catalogue of expensivemarble garden furniture. "Just a simple design of the classic periodwill do. Colonial furniture was based on the Greek orders."
We found at last the picture of a marble bench which could be duplicatedin general outline with wooden planking, so I telephoned to the lumberdealer in the next town for two twenty-four-inch wide chestnut planks,and was fairly staggered by the bill when it came. It appears that atwenty-four-inch wide plank nowadays has to come from North Carolina, orsome other distant point, and is rarer than charity, at least that iswhat they told me.
"I think it would be cheaper in marble," said Stella. "And it looks tome as if you could make the bench out of one plank."
"We want another bench on the sundial lawn," said I, wisely.
"You do _now_," said she.
"But if I hadn't got two planks," said I, "and had spoiled the firstone, then we'd have had to wait two or three days again."
"Oh, that was the reason!" she smiled.
I sawed one of the planks into one six-foot and two two-foot lengths,and rounded the edges of the long piece for the top. Then, on the twoshort lengths, we carefully drew from the picture the outline of thesupports on the marble original, and went to work with rip saw, hatchet,and draw knife to carve them out. The seasoned chestnut worked hard,and we were half a day about our task. The next day we put the threepieces together with braces and long screws, planed and sandpaperedthe wood till we had it smooth, and then painted it with white enamelpaint. While the first coat was drying, we made a deep foundation ofcoal ashes and flat stones for the bench to rest on, and the nextafternoon, when the second coat, which Stella had applied beforebreakfast, was nearly dry, I hove the heavy thing on a wheelbarrow, andcarted it around the road to the point where it was to go. We put alittle fresh cement on the foundation stones to hold the two legs, andwith Mike's aid the bench was lifted over the stone wall, through thehedge of ash-leaf maples, put in place, and levelled. Stella hoverednear, with the can of paint, to cover our fingermarks and give the topa final glistening coat.
"There," I cried, as the job was done, "we have our pool and ourgarden bench! We have some of our flowers already planted for next year!We have our bit of lawn! Let's go up the orchard to the front doorand see how it looks."
I left the wheelbarrow forgotten in the road, and we ran up the slopetogether, turned at the door, and gazed back. The pool shimmered in theafternoon sun. We could hear the water tinkling over the dam. Beyondthe pool was the dark semicircle of fresh mould that was to be greengrass backed by blossoms against the shrubbery, and finally, at the veryrear, now stood the white bench, from this distance gleaming like marble.
"Fine! It looks fine!" I cried.
Stella's eyes were squinted judicially. "Oh, dear," she said, "I wishthere was a cedar, a tall, slender, dark cedar, just behind the benchat either end. And, John, do you know we ought to have some goldfish inthe pool?"
I sighed profoundly. "You are a real gardener," said I. "Nothing isever finished!"
"I'm afraid I am," she answered. "But we will have the goldfish,won't we?"
"Yes, and the cedars, too," I replied. "I'll ask Mike when is thebest time to put 'em in."
Mike was sure that spring was the best time, and there were some goodones up in our pasture.
"Oh, dear, spring is the best time for _everything_, it seems to me,and here it's
only July!" cried Stella. "Well, anyhow, I'm going todraw a plan of the pool garden, and hang it over my desk."
She got paper and pencil and drew the plan, while I lay under an orchardtree listening to the tinkle of the waterfall and watching her whileBuster came and licked my face.
The plan appears on the following page:
"I think your arrangement of iris on the edge is rather formal," I wassaying, "and it would be rather more decorous, if not decorative, foryou to sit upon the bench, and----" when we heard a motor rumble overthe bridge at the brook, and the engine stop by our side door.
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The Idyl of Twin Fires Page 19