In a Green Shade | Page 7

is not lost
yet--because as well as water to drink I like water to look upon. Lastly,
I will build a hermitage of puddled chalk and straw, and thatch it with
reeds, if I can get them. It will consist of a single room thirty feet long.
It will have a gallery at each end, attained by a ladder. In each gallery
shall be a bed, and the appurtenance thereof, one for use and one for a
co-hermit or hermitess, if such there be. I leave that open. There must
be a stoop, of course. Nothing enclosed. No flowers, by request. The
sheep shall nibble to the very threshold. I don't forget that there is a
fox-earth in the spinney attached. I saw a vixen and her cubs there one
morning as clearly as I see this paper. She barked at me once or twice,
sitting high on her haunches, but the children played on without a
glance at me. They were playing at catch-as-catch-can--with a
full-grown hare. Sheer fun. No after-thoughts. I watched them for
twenty minutes.
If I grow anything there at all I shall confine my part of the business to
planting, and let Nature do the rest. It may be absolutely necessary to
keep the sheep off for a year or two, and the rabbits--but that is all. And
what I do plant shall be deciduous, so that I may have the yearly
miracle to expect. It is a mighty eater of time--and there won't be much
of that left probably; yet a joy which no man who has ever begotten
anything, baby or poem, can deny himself.
If anybody wants to see what Nature can do in the way of a season's

growth, I can tell him how to go to work. Let him plant on the bank of
a running water a root of Gunnera manicata. Let him then wait ten
years, observing these directions faithfully. Every fall, after the first
frost--that frost which blackens his dahlias--let him cover the crown of
his Gunnera with one of its own leaves. Pile some stable-stuff over that,
and then heap upon all the leaf-sweepings of that part of the garden.
Growth starts in mid-April and proceeds by feet a week. Mine, which is
about ten years old now, is thirty-five feet in circumference, nearly
twelve feet high, has flowers two-feet-six in length, and in a hot
summer has grown leaves seven feet across. You can go under one of
them in a shower of rain and be as dry as in church. And all that done
in five months. The plant is a rhubarb of sorts and comes from Chili. I
should like to see it over there on the marge of some monstrous great
river. In another order, the Ipomoea (Morning Glory), which comes
from East Africa, runs it close. I had one seed in Sussex which
completely overflowed a garden wall, smothering everything upon it. A
kind of Jack's beanstalk, and every morning starred with turquoise blue
trumpet mouths of ravishing beauty, which were dead at noon. The
poor thing was constrained to be a hierodule, gave no seed. Nature is
the prodigal's foster-mother.
I have a plant whose seed is much more beautiful than its flower. By
the way, I have two, for the Spindle Tree is in seed, which has a quite
insignificant blossom. But the plant I mean is a wild peony, which I
dug up in a brake on the slopes of Helikon. It is a single white whose
flower lasts, perhaps, three days. It makes a large seed-pod, which burst
a short time ago, and revealed blue-black seeds sheathed in coralline
forms of the most absolute vermilion. You could see them fifty yards
away. It seems to have no purpose in life but to pack the seeds--or
perhaps, they are beacons for the birds. I took pains to be beforehand
with the birds, having no desire to see Greek peonies in my neighbours'
gardens. The seeds are safely bestowed, though their fate has not been
Jonah's. There's a spinney of elder-trees in the combe of my hermitage,
which, I am told, was planted entirely by magpies. And I suppose it
was wood-pigeons who planted two ilex trees on the top of the Guinigi
tower in Lucca; and some bird or other, once more, which is
answerable for a fine fig-tree growing in the parapet of the bridge at
Cordova, in no soil whatsoever. It was loaded with fruit when I saw it.

But fig-trees are like poets; if you want them to sing you must torture
their roots. The parallel wobbles, but will be understood.

DORIAN MODES
Being known in these parts for a friendly soul, and trusted, moreover, I
have fallen into the position among the peasantry which the