This Hill, This Valley

by Hal

  The first flush of pride in harvest is over. The asparagus is all cut. The first crop of strawberries is picked and eaten, by the gardener or the birds. The early lettuce and radishes were bountiful, as always, and so were the scallions. But now comes the work for the real harvest, and most of it must be done either on the knees or with a bent back. Why, I can spot a gardener now, even at the supermarket in the village, by the bow in his back and the stains on his weeding-hand!

  If the gardener can keep up the pace till the middle of July he probably can carry on through the Summer. Fortunately, lawn grass slows up somewhat by now, demanding fewer mowings. The flower gardens, except for weeding, should be pretty well in hand. But the vegetable garden—huh! Did you ever see a hammock slung beside a vegetable garden? Or a vegetable gardener in one? No. If he rests, it’s leaning on a hoe. Particularly now.

  A letter came today from a friend in Bermuda, a man who worked for years as an editor in New York and retired a few years ago to return to the island of his birth and upbringing. He had been planting trees. In recent years a blight struck Bermuda’s trees and Walter has undertaken a reforestation job. “I hope,” he writes, “to have a thousand trees in the ground by the end of the year.”

  Walter is a gardener, a lover of growing things. The trees he is planting will not come to maturity in his lifetime. It will be another ten or twenty years before they provide benevolent shade and make a cool, green pleasure for the human eye. But in time there will be birds nesting in them and the whole land will be a pleasanter place. That is his hope and purpose.

  This seems important to me, more important than much of the day-to-day news. The man who plants a tree, or even a perennial flower, has his eye on tomorrow. He believes that tomorrow there will still be men and women who look for beauty and tranquillity. His hopes exceed his own survival. He expects a future that will include the major satisfactions of today, and he is aware of such satisfactions here and now. It is quite possible that foreign ministers and national leaders the world over should be reminded, from time to time, that there are quiet tree-planters at work all over this world.

  There was a heavy dew last night and I suspect that I wakened at five this morning simply to see the world all a-glint and a-gleam. I wakened and got up and pulled on a shirt and khaki pants and went downstairs barefoot, and out to see the world. The world was on the verge of sunrise—we have daylight saving time—and it was that breathless moment when the sky is bursting with the sun’s brilliance though the sun is still below the horizon.

  I walked out onto the lawn. The grass was drenched and the droplets shimmered like frost. The whole lawn was white, and the pasture behind the house was a vast white pool. The air was warm, but the dew was icy on my feet; it was like standing ankle deep in a pool of Millstone Brook in April.

  Fat heard me and came bounding from his house, the old brooder house with the climbing roses, leaving a trail as clear as if he had dashed through a light fall of snow. Every blade of grass he touched turned from white to green. Pat sniffed the air, then plunged headlong and rolled in the dewy grass, shivering sensuously and leaving a green wallow, then leaped up and shook himself and showered me.

  We walked out toward the barn, and suddenly the sun came up and the gleaming world shimmered. A spider web between two boards on the fence was a web of silver and diamonds. The maples along the river bank shivered in a breeze and the dew showered from their leaves, and just for a few flashes there was a rainbow. A sunrise rainbow. That’s why I got up at five, to see that sunrise rainbow among the trees!

  I watched a kingbird go after a crow today and marveled, as always, at the kingbird’s skill a-wing and his tremendous audacity. He will attack a crow or a hawk without hesitation, and he is almost as adept in the air as a swallow. Let a crow come near and the kingbird is off like a black-and-white jet fighter, screaming for reinforcements. Other kingbirds join him and the crow takes off for far places, the kingbirds harrying him. I have never seen it done, but some say a kingbird can kill a crow.

  A friend in Florida tells me that one Summer he watched a pair of kingbirds kill seven buzzards near Tampa. The attack, as he described it, was much like that on a crow, but because the buzzard is less agile than a crow the battle was briefer. In several of the battles, he says, little Southern shrikes, “butcher birds,” joined the kingbirds. My friend says he examined two of the buzzards when they fell and found that the kingbirds had pierced their skulls with blows of their beaks at the base of the brain.

  A member of an ornithological group insists to me that this couldn’t have happened. The kingbird, he says, has neither the beak nor the strength to pierce a buzzard’s skull. Who is right in this matter, I do not know. I do know that the kingbird is a truculent and hard-hitting fighter. Until last Summer I would have said the kingbird has more courage per ounce than any other bird alive. Then I saw a ruby-throated hummingbird take after a kingbird and put him completely to rout. He swarmed all over that kingbird, like a swarm of angry bumblebees, and the kingbird didn’t stay to argue.

  The big sugar maples, typical of all maples, now begin their second phase of the season’s growth. In late April they put forth blossoms in an amber glow. The blossoms passed through their cycle, first showering down their bud scales, then stretching their stamens and luring the bees, then fading to a yellowish green, finally maturing into tiny winged seeds that hung in clusters of pairs as the first green leaves unfolded. The leaves opened and spread and the trees took color, the deep leaf-green displacing the filmy yellow-green of the seed vanes.

  Now the seeds begin to spiral down, one-bladed miniature helicopters that spin away from the parent tree. And at the twig-ends another set of new leaves appears. These are the growth leaves. With them comes the season’s extension of new twig, still soft and green. It thrusts out from last year’s twig-ends, widening the tree and heightening it. At the tip of this new growth are small new leaves, a younger, fresher green, so the whole tree is now mottled as with dancing sunlight.

  Thus the outer growth. Meanwhile, unseen in the trunk, other processes are at work fashioning a new layer of fiber beneath the bark, a new season’s growth ring that I shall never see unless the trunk itself is felled by ax or saw or storm.

  The growth of the conifer is much the same, but in its own precise manner. The white pine puts forth its tufts of needles, soft as kitten fur at first as they burst the bud-sheath. Five needles in a tuft, five branches in each year’s whorl, for the white pines count as the old Romans did, by fives.

  The daisies are at their peak along the roadsides and at the edge of my pastures. I’ve heard some people call them Farmer’s Curse, but I like them, in their place; which is, of course, not in a corn field or a garden. I came back from the fence row a little while ago with a handful of them, common field daisies, Chrysanthemum leucanthemum. Some people call them oxeye daisies, though that is a redundancy, for daisy is nothing more than day’s eye, in the Old English. The English daisy, however, is different from these, having a fleshy stem and colored petals. We sometimes grow English daisies in the flower garden, a pretty but unpretentious flower.

  It is always worth five minutes or so to study a daisy with a magnifying glass. I carry a ten-power pocket glass, which is about the right size. Through the glass one can see that the center of a daisy, like a sunflower, is made up of a mass of tiny florets, each one a flower and perfect in itself, with petals and stamens and pistils. None of them is much bigger in diameter than the head of a common pin. Yet each of these tiny florets, when the daisy matures, produces its own seed. The fringe of white petals around this composite center apparently was put there only to attract the bees, though each of those white petals is itself a pistillate flower and, if properly fertilized, will produce a seed. Tansy, a close relative, has in the process of evolution eliminated the border petals completely.

  Each of these daisies here on my desk is not a white and yellow flower at all; each one is a massed bouquet of miniature yellow bloss
oms, the whole bouquet edged with white blooms.

  The day lilies, the common Hemerocallis fulva, are in full bloom along the roadside fence of my pastures, and in the big bed on the river bank where they are fighting for possession with the scouring rushes. That river-bank lily bed, I suspect, was started when someone dug up a clump of unwanted day lilies and tossed them there to die, for I have seen discarded clumps take root on an ash heap and in a gravel bed. It is amazing the way they spread and persist. They are almost as tough as chicory, another immigrant, which now begins to spread its blue at the roadside.

  Another immigrant of the lily family, and also one which came here first from Europe as a garden flower, is the star-of-Bethlehem, with its six-petaled white flowers striped with green on the outside. Star-of-Bethlehem also runs wild in many places, though I find little around here. It is established in our flower garden, probably brought there long ago as a gift from some farm wife.

  And over in the corner of the vegetable garden where we tried to segregate the rhubarb are yellow meadow lilies and Canada wood lilies, wildlings and native. The wood lily holds its orange-red blossoms upward, one of the few wild lilies to do so, and its petals are not joined at the base as are those of the pendant meadow lily.

  Still another lily, though seldom thought of as such, is the Solomon’s seal which grows with the day lilies at the roadside. It is almost through blooming, and green berries are beginning to form, berries that will be blue-black as a fox grape by October.

  JULY

  I SUSPECT THAT IT wasn’t wholly coincidence that the Declaration was proclaimed in early July, for in that day everyone lived much closer to the land than now. And man with his footing in the soil has little patience with outside interference in July. He’s too busy with natural problems to be very tolerant with man-made ones.

  Corn has to be laid by, cultivated the last time, cleaned of weeds before it begins to “tawsel” out and shoot up eight feet high. Hay, the second cutting, has to be taken care of, and if rain comes while it’s drying there’s more trouble than a whole political convention can think up. Wheat has to be harvested when it’s ripe. Oats demand attention. A harvest too early finds the grain not properly filled; a few days too late and the grain shatters and is lost. Harvest time happens also to be hail time, thunderstorm time; and even a high wind can level a ripe field of small grain.

  Meanwhile, silos must be filled, and there are the daily chores. There’s the kitchen garden to tend—a farmer can’t leave all the gardening to his wife, no matter how willing; she, too, has other things to do, what with young chickens and canning and freezing for next Winter and daily cooking and the farmhouse routine. But the garden, too, is a part of the independence.

  The Declaration is a document well remembered. But there is another declaration, unwritten except on sweaty faces, to be read by anyone who looks, in July. It says the same thing as the written one, and it says it year after year, on farm after farm. I see it every day, now.

  “Flowers,” Helens said, “say their own thanks.”

  That was some years ago, but we remember each time we look at our flower garden. We had driven up to see Helene and Frank, in another state, and when we admired their flowers Frank got a spade and began digging. They would have given us a truckload of plants if we hadn’t called a halt. Finally, with the car loaded to the gunwales, we tried to say our thanks, but Helene said, “Please, no thanks. When we moved here a dear old lady gave us loads, and when I tried to thank her she said, ‘You never say thanks for flowers. You plant them and care for them and when the time comes you share them with others. Flowers say their own thanks.’”

  So we brought them home and planted them and gave them care, and we, too, have shared them. Others gave us flowers, many others, since gardeners are by nature generous. Thus our garden has grown and spread to other gardens all over the countryside. And the primroses, the primula, the iris, the tulips, the anthemus, the many-colored violets, the clematis, the grape hyacinths—the whole garden, which is so full of beauty today and so spilling, over with fragrance, says thanks over and over again to our friends.

  There is a breeze and the bees are very busy. Lorus and Margery, who are imaginative biologists as well as husband and wife, first pointed out to me that bees are always busiest on windy days, and why.

  Investigating insect vision, they did a series of experiments with honeybees. The bee’s eye is large and many-faceted. Each facet is a kind of individual eye, and each of those facets seems to be acutely sensitive to light, shade and motion. Investigating that sensitivity, my biologist friends prepared cards of plain white and checkered black and white and held them in front of captive bees. The bees responded to the plain white card with a normal motion of the feelers and seemed to follow the card’s movement. When a checkered card was held in front of the bees, the feelers waved in a frenzy; apparently the checks affected one eye facet after another, giving a series of exciting stimuli. When the checkered card was moved from side to side the bees were so excited they could scarcely contain themselves.

  These experiments seemed to indicate that bees were more interested in clusters of small flowers than in one large flower. Field experiments proved that theory. They also showed that on a windy day, when many small flowers were in motion, the bees were out in great numbers and busy all day long.

  If I kept a hive of bees I should specialize in small flowers, such as candytuft and phlox and clover, and on still, quiet days I should be tempted to set an electric fan going among the blossoms. Then I should quickly get a hiveful of honey!

  Independence seems to me to be a very personal quality, a matter of the mind and the emotions and the whole approach to life. It is a positive matter, rather than a refusal to knuckle down to some outside force. And it involves many of the broad, indefinable generalities—liberty, justice, honor, integrity. It is more than a matter of politics or even of social organization.

  Independence means to me the right to make what I can of myself, to think as clearly as my brain will allow, to be as much of an individual, an entity, as I can. It means my right to make a place for myself in human society, but it doesn’t mean that society is somehow obliged to make a place for me. It means that I shall face the consequences of my own folly and not that some town or state or nation shall shield me from them. This is somewhat old-fashioned; I know that. But the pendulum of fashion, in human behavior as well as dress, has its swings, and it returns again and again to the point where individual responsibility is again in good repute.

  Independence means obligations as well as rights. The right to work, and the obligation to work at my full capacity. The right to earn, the obligation to save. The right to worship as I please, and the obligation to abide by my best beliefs and instincts. The right to justice, and the obligation to recognize right and truth. The right to hope, to dream, to plan, and the obligation to serve my own kind.

  These are not new ideas. They are so old they are worn smooth with repetitions. They stem from ancient tribal days. They happen also to be embedded in the Declaration of Independence, which most of us remember, one way or another, today.

  Our tomatoes are doing splendidly. We shall have the first ripe one within another two weeks. And speaking of tomatoes, I grow weary of that old nonsense about their being so long considered poisonous. The tale has been knocked down many times, most effectively by Lewis Gannett in his book, Cream Hill, published in 1949, but it persists. Only the other day I heard a man on the radio say tomatoes were considered poisonous “only fifty or sixty years ago.” And one of my encyclopedias says they weren’t considered edible until “within the last century.” Nonsense! Tomatoes were being canned and sold commercially on Long Island, in Baltimore, in Cincinnati, and probably elsewhere, as early as 1855. Nobody cans and sells a food product generally considered poisonous.

  The tomato is a native American. Aztecs and Incas grew and ate tomatoes in prehistoric times. The name comes from the Aztec word tomatl. Spaniards took toma
to seeds from Mexico to Spain early in the sixteenth century and they were grown, eaten, and improved uninterruptedly there for two hundred years. From Spain they went to England, and from England and Spain they came to America. Thomas Jefferson’s own records speak of growing tomatoes, both the Spanish tomato and others. The Spanish variety was “much larger than the common kind,” so there was a “common kind” grown at that time. And they were considered a vegetable, not a garden decoration.

  So let’s be through with at least a little of this “poisonous tomato” nonsense.

  The elderberries are in bloom, the big clumps at the river bank, the bushes beside the barn, the big one just across the brook from the garden. For several years I tried to grub out the one by the garden, then gave up. Besides, when it’s in bloom that bush is as pretty as any shrub on the lawn.

  Time was when the elderberry was highly respected. The white flower heads which now cover the bushes and are a lure for bees by the hundred mature into lush panicles of purplish black berries, and these berries are full of juice so sweet it will not turn into jelly without the help of alien pectin. But that juice, properly handled, makes elderberry wine; and there was a time when most rural cellars had at least a jug and often a keg of elderberry wine. Elderberry wine had certain medicinal qualities, and it was surprising how many countrymen felt a bit puny as long as the elderberry wine lasted, puny enough to need a glass of it every day.

  Elderberries also made many a tasty pie in country kitchens. Professor Jim, an upstate New Yorker who became a city man and a teacher, tells me that in his boyhood they gathered elderberries and dried them so they might have elderberry pies all Winter. Jim gave Barbara a recipe for elderberry pie just the other day, the one his mother used many years ago.

  But most of the pleasures of the elderberry are past and forgotten. Most farmers hereabout grub them out, though they do leave a few along the fence rows for the birds. The birds love the berries, and the bees love the blossoms. And as I said, the bushes just now are pretty as any shrub on the lawn.