This column originally appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on April 6, 1940.
Daffodils and crocuses are thronging the roadway now, pushing their way up through the grass in all their golden glory. The yellow crocus is the earliest but the purple and white are here now too, and the striped purple and white looking as demur as the gingham in a little girl鈥檚 sunbonnet. The heather is out in its bright pink, magenta and purple; and the Japanese plum trees would make your heart turn over in their bridal loveliness.
On the bus, now the war in Europe no longer gets the attention it has enjoyed; for the talk has turned to seeds and fertilizers and cold frames. Even soilless horticulture has a place. However, that innovation has not been accepted yet by the best gardeners of Gordon Head. It is against nature. This thing of putting seeds in water with something out of a bottle, something made by man, seems like an insult to the good earth which has served us so well these mean years. Gardening will lose half of its charm when there is no soil to crumble in your hand, no digging in the spring with the warm earth steaming 鈥� no, it will never replace the old ways.
This is the extreme right opinion, but the younger ones are more hospitable to the idea of hydroponics, and one bright young woman, aged 12, reproved her mother for her unwillingness to accept the advance of science by reminding her that she had said the same thing about having a permanent wave in her hair.
Experiments will be carried on in cut-down gasoline cans and big glass coffee jars standing on window sills, where the whole operation of growth will be revealed.
We do a bit of forcing these days with anemone buds, set in their prim little green cups, in pattern resembling a carrot top. I have a pitcher filled with them now before me on my desk and two flowers have already come out. One is an American Beauty red, the other a smoky purple with black velvet stamens and pistils. The buds look like jaded little things at first but the heat and water soon stimulate them. These flowers ship well, and some of them on a bed of Oregon grape have already gone to a little sick girl in Regina where they will be beautiful for a week after they arrive.
Violets, long-stemmed and beautiful, give a dusky glow in shaded corners; purple and rose aubretia are dressing up the grey rocks, helped by the white arabis.
Our green peas are making a fine showing down the rows and when the spring warms up will make rapid progress. They should be ready to use early in May. I heard a radio speaker recommend that carrot and radish seed be mixed to save garden space; the radishes will come on first and be out of the way before the carrots come, and that is a good idea for the people who have to think about room.
The primroses are a feature of the spring gardens, ranging in color from flaming purple and orange red through all the shades to creamy white. At Mr. Butchart鈥檚 gardens now they make a carpet of colour, giving an Arabian night鈥檚 atmosphere to splendour that hushes conversation. I often wonder about the beauty of flowers, which really does constrict the heart. Is it only those of us who have not know this prodigality who feel it so lonely? Will we lose it if we live long enough in this country where flowers outlive the calendar?
I remember once travelling through the mountains, reading Patrick Campbell鈥檚 book called The Rat Pit, which is a story of the sordid poverty in certain parts of Ireland. His portrayal of the struggle for the bare necessities of life would wring any heart.
Suddenly I realized the train had stopped, and looking up from my book, I found myself looking in a window of the station house 鈥� a beautiful red geranium was in full bloom. I鈥檒l never forget the sudden thrill of delight that beautiful flower gave me, with its reminder that there is still beauty for everyone, even in this hard world. It made me think of Siegried Sassoon鈥檚 poem, which begins:
听
Everyone suddenly burst out singing
And I was filled with such delight
As prison birds must find in freedom.
听
In this poem everyone was a bird, but the red geranium had done the same for me.
This strange power of flowers, to keep people sane and happy even in the midst of pain and distress, has in any interpreters. I know a milliner in an eastern city who grows sweet peas in a corner behind her shop, and she tells me that just the memory of these carries her over the winter. She writes poems, too, about her flowers with tenderness and grace. I couldn鈥檛 say that she is a great poet, and she has no illusions, on that score herself, but I am sure that any woman who will carry earth and water so that she may have a dozen sweet peas climbing up a brick wall must be a good milliner and when I am in that city I am going to have her make me a hat 鈥� a flowered hat 鈥� one that will beat back the encroaching years!
鈥� 鈥� 鈥�
I have before me on my desk a letter from a woman who lives in Deloraine, Manitoba. She is an English woman who early in life let the quiet security of her English home and came to the prairie. She has been very busy with family cares, suffered from dry years, hail, frost 鈥� has fought against all the forces of depression and has triumphed gloriously. She has never lost her sense of wonder at the tender ways of Providence, who does not leave is people comfortless. She give me an instance of this which I will quote:
鈥淚 was listening on a bitterly cold January morning in 1936, with temperature 42 below outside, to the solemn words of the burial service of King George V. It was a dark morning with the frost thick on the windows. The night before I had taken my two precious flowers out of the window for safety and put them on the radio. It comforted me to think that my people in the Old Country would be listening to the same service, and so you can understand I was in a responsive mood and thinking of the Land Beyond where there is neither sorrow or sighing. The deep reverberations of the minute guns sounding forth the mourning of the British nation, vibrated in my heart, too, and I was strangely drawn into that fellowship of grief which I know was binding together every part of the Empire.
鈥淎s the gun boomed, the blossoms on my two nicotine plants quivered, and I tell you true, just as the archbishop, spoke the words 鈥楢shes to ashes, dust to dust,鈥� the blossoms of my two plants loosened their hold and fell 鈥� first the white and then the red; and I sat and cried my fill there in the cold, dark morning, half a world away from my home and kindred, but my tears were not wholly of grief for the falling flowers had given me a strange elation that I too had been able to pay tribute to the passing of a beloved sovereign.鈥�
