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Perhaps the attention paid the doings of the American Philosophical Society, and the number of scientists living near Philadelphia, may account for the many sun-dials set up in the vicinity of the town. Godfrey, the maker of Godfrey's Quadrant, was one of those scientific investigators, and must have been a famous "dialler."

On page 373 is shown an ancient sun-dial in the garden of Charles F. Jenkins, Esq., in Germantown, Pennsylvania. This sun-dial originally belonged to Nathan Spencer, who lived in Germantown prior to and during the Revolutionary War. Hepzibah Spencer, his daughter, married, and took the sun-dial to Byberry. Her daughter carried the sun-dial to Gwynedd when her name was changed to Jenkins; and their grandson, the present owner, rescued it from the chicken house with the gnomon missing, which was afterward found. Its inscription, "Time waits for No Man," is an old punning device on the word gnomon.

At one time dialling was taught by many a country schoolmaster, and excellent and accurate sun-dials were made and set up by country workmen, usually masons of slight education. In Scotland the making of sun-dials has never died out. In America many pewter sun-dials were cast in moulds of steatite or other material. A few dial-makers still remain; one in lower New York makes very interesting-looking sun-dials of brass, which, properly discolored and stained, find a ready sale in uptown shops. I doubt if these are ever made for any special geographical point, but there is in a small Pennsylvania town an old Quaker who makes carefully calculated and accurate sun-dials, computed by logarithms for special places. I should like to see him "sit like a shepherd carving out dials, quaintly point by point." I have a very pretty circular brass dial of his making, about eight inches in diameter. He writes me that "the dial sent thee is a good students' dial, fit to set outside the window for a young man to use and study by in college," which would indicate to me that my Quaker dialler knows another type of collegian from those of my acquaintance, who would find the time set by a sun-dial rather slow.

There have been those who truly loved sun-dials. Sir William Temple ordered that after his death his heart should be buried under the sun-dial in his garden – where his heart had been in life. 'Tis not unusual to see a sun-dial over the gate to a burial ground, and a noble emblem it is in that place; one at Mount Auburn Cemetery, near Boston, bears a pleasing motto written originally by John G. Whittier for his friend, Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, and inscribed on a beautiful silver sun-dial now owned by Dr. Vincent Y. Bowditch of Boston, Massachusetts. A facsimile of this dial was also placed before the Manor House on the island of Naushon by Mr. John M. Forbes in memory of Dr. Bowditch. The lines run thus: —

 
WITH WARNING HAND I MARK TIME'S RAPID FLIGHT
FROM LIFE'S GLAD MORNING TO ITS SOLEMN NIGHT.
YET, THROUGH THE DEAR GOD'S LOVE I ALSO SHOW
THERE'S LIGHT ABOVE ME, BY THE SHADE BELOW.
 

A sun-dial is to me, in many places, a far more inspiring memorial than a monument or tablet. Let me give as an example the fine sun-dial, designed by W. Gedney Beatty, Esq., and shown on page 359, which was erected on the grounds of the Memorial Hospital at Morristown, New Jersey, by the Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, to mark the spot where Washington partook of the Communion.

What dignified and appropriate church appointments sun-dials are. A simple and impressive bronze vertical dial on the wall of the Dutch Reformed Church on West End Avenue, New York, is shown on page 346. The sun-dial standing before the rectory of Grace Church on Broadway, New York, is on page 364.

There is ever much question as to a suitable pedestal for garden sun-dials: it must not stand so high that the dial-face cannot be looked down upon by grown persons; it must not be so light as to seem rickety, nor so heavy as to be clumsy. A very good rule is to err on the side of simplicity in sun-dials for ordinary gardens. What I regard as a very satisfactory pedestal and mounting in every particular may be seen in the illustration facing page 80, showing the sun-dial in the garden of Charles E. Mather, Esq., at Avonwood Court, Haverford, Pennsylvania. Sometimes the pillars of old balustrades, old fence posts, and even parts of old tombs and monuments, have been used as pedestals for sun-dials. How pleasantly Sylvana in her Letters to an Unknown Friend, tells us and shows to us her cheerful sun-dial mounted on the four corners of an old tombstone with this fine motto cut into the upper step, Lux et umbra vicissim sed semper amor. I mean to search the stone-cutters' waste heap this summer and see whether I cannot rob the grave to mark the hours of my life. Charles Dickens had at Gadshill a sun-dial set on one of the pillars of the balustrade of Old Rochester Bridge. From Italy and Greece marble pillars have been sent from ancient ruins to be set up as dial pedestals.

If possible, the pedestal as well as the dial-face of a handsome sun-dial should have some significance through association, suggestion, or history. At Ophir Farm, White Plains, New York, the country-seat of Hon. Whitelaw Reid, may be seen a sun-dial full of exquisite significance. It is shown on page 375. The signs of the Zodiac in finely designed bronze are set on the symmetrical marble pedestal, and seem wonderfully harmonious and appropriate. This sun-dial is a literal exemplification of the words of Emerson: —

 
"A calendar
Exact to days, exact to hours,
Counted on the spacious dial
Yon broidered Zodiac girds."
 

The dial-face is upheld by a carefully modelled tortoise in bronze, which is an equally suggestive emblem, connected with the tradition, folk-lore, and religious beliefs of both primitive and cultured peoples; it is specially full of meaning in this place. The whole sun-dial shows much thought and æsthetic perception in the designer and owner, and cannot fail to prove gratifying to all observers having either sensibility or judgment.

Occasionally a very unusual and beautiful sun-dial standard may be seen, like the one in the Rose garden at Yaddo, Saratoga, New York, a copy of rarely beautiful Pompeian carvings. A representation of this is shown on page 86. Copies of simpler antique carvings make excellent sun-dial pedestals; a safe rule to follow is to have a reproduction made of some well-proportioned English or Scotch pedestal. The latter are well suited to small gardens. I have drawings of several Scotch sun-dials and pedestals which would be charming in American gardens. In the gardens at Hillside, by the side of the Shakespeare Border is a sun-dial (page 378) which is an exact reproduction of the one in the garden at Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott. This pedestal is suited to its surroundings, is well proportioned; and has historic interest. It forms an excellent example of Charles Lamb's "garden-altar."

On a lawn or in any suitable spot the dial-face can be mounted on a boulder; one is here shown. I prefer a pedestal. For gardens of limited size, much simplicity of design is more pleasing and more fitting than any elaborate carving. In an Italian garden, or in any formal garden whose work in stone or marble is costly and artistic, the sun-dial pedestal should be the climax in richness of carving of all the garden furnishing. I like the pedestal set on a little platform, so two or three steps may be taken up to it from the garden level; but after all, no rules can be given for the dial's setting. It may be planted with vines, or stand unornamented; it may be set low, and be looked down upon, or it may be raised high up on a side wall; but wherever it is, it must not be for a single minute in shadow; no trees or overhanging shrubs should be near it; it is a child of the sun, and lives only in the sun's full rays.

In the lovely old garden at the home of Frederick J. Kingsbury, Esq., at Waterbury, Conn., is a sun-dial bearing the motto, "Horas non numero nisi serenas," and the dates 1739-1751, – the dates of the building of the old and new houses on land that has been in the immediate family since 1739. Around this dial is a crescent-shaped bed of Zinnias, and very satisfactory do they prove. This garden has fine Box edgings; one is shown on page 173, a Box walk, set in 1851 with ancient Box brought from the garden of Mr. Kingsbury's great-great-grandfather.

The gnomon of a sun-dial is usually a simple plate of metal in the general shape of a right-angled triangle, cut often in some pierced design, and occasionally inscribed with a motto, name, or date. Sometimes the dial-maker placed on the gnomon various Masonic symbols – the compass, square, and triangle, or the coat of arms of the dial owner.

One old English dial fitting we have never copied in America. It was the taste of the days of the Stuart kings, days of constant jesting and amusement and practical jokes. Concealed water jets were placed which wet the clothing of the unwary one who lingered to consult the dial-face.

The significance of the sun-dial, as well as its classicism, was sure to be felt by artists. In the paintings of Holbein, of Albert Dürer, dials may be seen, not idly painted, but with symbolic meaning. The mystic import of a sun-dial is shown in full effect in that perfect picture, Beata Beatrix, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I have chosen to show here (facing page 380) the Beata Beatrix owned by Charles L. Hutchinson, Esq., of Chicago, as being less photographed and known than the one of the British Gallery, from which it varies slightly and also because it has the beautiful predella. In this picture, in the words of its poet-painter: —

 
"Love's Hour stands.
Its eyes invisible
Watch till the dial's thin brown shade
Be born – yea, till the journeying line be laid
Upon the point."
 

Andrew Marvell wrote two centuries ago of the floral sun-dials which were the height of the gardening mode of his day: —

 
"How well the skilful gardener drew
Of flowers and herbs this dial new.
When from above the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
And as it works the industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we!
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers!"
 

These were sometimes set of diverse flowers, sometimes of Mallows. Two of growing Box are described and displayed in the chapter on Box edgings.

Linnæus made a list of forty-six flowers which constituted what he termed the Horologe or Watch of Flora, and he gave what he called their exact hours of rising and setting. He divided them into three classes: Meteoric, Tropical, and Equinoctial flowers. Among those which he named are: —

Of course these hours would vary in this country. And I must say very frankly that I think we should always be behind time if we trusted to Flora's Horologe. This floral clock of Linnæus was calculated for Upsala, Sweden; De Candolle gave another for Paris, and one has been arranged for our Eastern states.

CHAPTER XVIII
GARDEN FURNISHINGS

"Furnished with whatever may make the place agreeable, melancholy, and country-like."

– Forest Trees, John Evelyn, 1670.

Quaint old books of garden designers show us that much more was contained in a garden two centuries ago, than now; it had many more adjuncts, more furnishings; a very full list of them has been given by Batty Langley in his New Principles of Gardening, etc., 1728. Some seem amusing – as haystacks and woodpiles, which he terms "rural enrichments." Of water adornments there were to be purling streams, basins, canals, fountains, cascades, cold baths. There were to be aviaries, hare warrens, pheasant grounds, partridge grounds, dove-cotes, beehives, deer paddocks, sheep walks, cow pastures, and "manazeries" (menageries?); physic gardens, orchards, bowling-greens, hop gardens, orangeries, melon grounds, vineyards, parterres, fruit yards, nurseries, sun-dials, obelisks, statues, cabinets, etc., decorated the garden walks. There were to be land gradings of mounts, winding valleys, dales, terraces, slopes, borders, open plains, labyrinths, wildernesses, "serpentine meanders," "rude-coppices," precipices, amphitheatres. His "serpentine meanders" had large opening spaces at proper distances, in one of which might be placed a small fruit garden, a "cone of evergreens," or a "Paradice-Stocks," – about which latter mysterious garden adornment I think we must be content to remain in ignorance, since he certainly has given us ample variety to choose from without it.

Other "landscapists" placed in their gardens old ruins, misshapen rocks, and even dead trees, in order to look "natural."

In 1608 Henry Ballard brought out The Gardener's Labyrinth– a pretty good book, shut away from the most of us by being printed in black letter. He says: —

"The framing of sundry herbs delectable, with waies and allies artfully devised is an upright herbar."

Herbars, or arbors, were of two kinds: an upright arbor, which was merely a covered lean-to attached to a fence or wall; and a winding or "arch-arbor" standing alone. He names "archherbs," which are simply climbing vines to set "winding in arch-manner on withie poles." "Walker and sitters there-under" are thereby comfortably protected from the heat of the sun. These upright arbors were in high favor; Ballard says they offered "fragrant savours, delectable sights, and sharpening of the memory."

Tree arbors were in use in Elizabethan times, platforms built in the branches of large trees. Parkinson called one that would hold fifty men, "the goodliest spectacle that ever his eyes beheld." A distinction was made between arbors and bowers. The arbor might be round or square, and was domed over the top; while the long arched way was a bower. In our Southern states that special use of the word bower is still universal, especially in the term Rose bowers. A quaint and universal furnishing of old Southern gardens were the trellises known as garden lyres. Two are shown in this chapter, from Waterford, Virginia; one bearing little foliage and another embowered in vines, in order to show what a really good vine support they were. Garden lyres and Rose bowers are rotting on the ground in old Virginia gardens, and I fear they will never be replaced.

The word pergola was seldom heard here a century ago, save as used by the few who had travelled in Italy; but pergolas were to be found in many an old American garden. An ancient oval pergola still stands at Arlington, that beautiful spot which was once the home of the Virginia Lees, and is now the home of the honored dead of our Civil War. This old pergola has remained unharmed through fierce conflict, and is wreathed each spring with the verdure of vines of many kinds. It is twenty feet wide between the pillars, and forms an oval one hundred feet long and seventy wide, and when in full greenery is a lovely thing. It was called – indeed it is still termed in the South – a "green gallery," a word and thing of mediæval days.

There are many pretty trellises and vine supports and arbors which can be made of light poles and rails, but I do not like to hear the pretentious name, pergola, applied to them. A pergola must not be a mean, light-built affair. It should be of good proportions and substantial materials. It need not be made with brick or marble pillars; natural tree trunks of good size serve as well. It should look as if it had been built with care and stability, and that the vines had been planted and trained by skilled gardeners. A pergola may have a dilapidated Present and be endurable; but it should show evidences of a substantial Past.

Little sisters of the pergola are the charmilles, or bosquets, arches of growing trees, whose interlaced boughs have no supports of wood as have the pergolas. When these arches are carefully trained and pruned, and the ground underneath is laid with turf or gravel, they form a delightful shady walk.

Charming covered ways can be easily made by polling and training Plum or Willow trees. Arches are far too rare in American gardens. The few we have are generally old ones. In Mrs. Pierson's garden in Salem the splendid arch of Buckthorn is a hundred and twenty five years old. Similar ones are at Indian Hill. Cedar was an old choice for hedges and arches. It easily winter-kills at the base, and that is ample reason for its rejection and disuse.

The many garden seats of the old English garden were perhaps its chief feature in distinction from American garden furnishings to-day. In a letter written from Kenilworth in 1575 the writer told of garden seats where he sat in the heat of summer, "feeling the pleasant whisking wynde." I have walked through many a large modern garden in the summer heat, and longed in vain for a shaded seat from which to regard for a few moments the garden treasures and feel the whisking wind, and would gladly have made use of the temporary presence of a wheelbarrow.

Seats of marble and stone are in many of our modern formal gardens; a pretty one is in the garden at Avonwood Court.

Grottoes, arbors, and summer-houses were all of importance in those days, when in our latitude and climate men had not thought to build piazzas surrounding the house and shadowing all the ground floor rooms. We are beginning to think anew of the value of sunlight in the parlors and dining rooms of our summer homes, which for the past thirty or forty years have been so darkened by our wide piazzas. Now we have fewer piazzas and more peristyles, and soon we shall have summer-houses and garden houses also.

There are preserved in the South, in spite of war and earthquake, a number of fine examples of old wrought-iron garden gates. King William of England introduced these artistic gates into England, and they were the height of garden fashion. Among them were the beautiful gates still at Hampton Court, and those of Bulwich, Northamptonshire. They were called clair-voyees on account of the uninterrupted view they permitted to those without and within the walls. These were often painted blue; but in America they were more sober of tint, though portions were gilded. One of the old gates at Westover-on-James is here shown, and on page 390 the rich wrought-iron work in the courtyard at the home of Colonel Colt in Bristol, Rhode Island. This is as fine as the house, and that is a splendid example of the best work of the first years of the nineteenth century.

Fountains were seen usually in handsome gardens in the South; simple water jets falling in a handsome basin of marble or stone. Statuary of marble or lead was never common in old American gardens, though pretentious gardens had examples. To-day, in our carefully thought-out gardens, the garden statuary is a thing of beauty and often of meaning, as the figure shown on page 84. Usually our statues are of marble, sometimes a Japanese bronze is seen.

In the old black letter Gardener's Labyrinth, a very full description is given of old modes of watering a garden. There was a primitive and very limited system of irrigation, the water being raised by "well-swipes"; there were very handy puncheons, or tubs on wheels, which could be trundled down the garden walk. There was also a formidable "Great Squirt of Tin," which was said to take "mighty strength" to handle, and which looked like a small cannon; with it was an ingenious bent tube of tin by which the water could be thrown in "great droppes" like a fountain. The author says of ordinary means of garden watering: —

"The common Watring Pot with us hath a narrow Neck, a Big Belly, Somewhat large Bottome, and full of little holes with a proper hole forced in the head to take in the water; which filled full and the Thumbe laid on the hole to keep in the aire may in such wise be carried in handsome Manner."

Garden tools have changed but little since Tudor days; spade and rake were like ours to-day, so were dibble and mattock. Even grafting and pruning tools, shown in books of husbandry, were surprisingly like our own. Scythes were much heavier and clumsier. An old fellow is here shown sharpening in the ancient manner a scythe about three hundred years old.

The art of grafting, known since early days, formed an important part of the gardener's craft. Large share of ancient garden treatises is devoted to minute instructions therein. To this day in New England towns a good grafter is a local autocrat.

Beehives were once found in every garden; bee-skepes they were called when made of straw. Picturesque and homely were the old straw beehives, and still are they used in England; the old one shown in the chapter on sun-dials can scarcely be mated in America. They served as a conventional emblem of industry. They were made of welts or ropes of twisted straw, as were the heavy winnowing skepes once used for winnowing grain. In Maine, in a few out-of-the-way communities, ancient men still winnow grain with these skepes. I saw a man last autumn, a giant in stature, standing in a dull light on the crown of a hill winnowing wheat in one of these great skepes with an indescribably free and noble gesture. He was a classic, a relic of Homer's age, no longer a farmer, but a husbandman. Bees and honey were of much value in ancient days. Honey was the chief ingredient in many wholesome and pleasing drinks – mead, metheglin, bragget (or braket), morat, erboule – all very delightful in their ingredients, redolent of meadows and hedge-rows; thus Cowslip mead was made of Cowslip "pips," honey, Lemon juice, and "a handful of Sweetbrier." "Athol porridge," demure of name, was as potent as pleasing – potent as good honey, good cream, and good whiskey could make it.

Rows of typical Southern beehives are shown in the two succeeding illustrations. From their home by the side of a White Rose and under an old Sweet Apple tree these Waterford bees did not wish to swarm out in a hurry to find a new home. These beehives are not very ancient in shape, but when I see a row of them set thus under the trees, or in a hive-shelter, they seem to tell of olden days. The very bees flying in and out seem steady-going, respectable old fellows. Such hives have a cosy look, with rows of Hollyhocks behind them, and hundreds of spires of Larkspur for these old bees to bury their heads in.

The sadly picturesque old superstition of "telling the bees" of a death in a family and hanging a bit of black cloth on the hives as a mourning-weed still is observed in some country communities. Whittier's poem on the subject is wonderfully "countrified" in atmosphere, using the word chore-girl, so seldom heard even in familiar speech to-day and never found in verse elsewhere than in this rustic poem. I saw one summer in Narragansett, on Stony Lane, not far from the old Six-Principle Church, a row of beehives hung with strips of black cloth; the house mistress was dead – the friend of bird and beast and bee – who had reared the guardian of the garden told of on page 396 et seq.

A pretty and appropriate garden furnishing was the dove-cote. The possession of a dove-cote in England, and the rearing of pigeons, was free only to lords of the manor and noblemen. When the colonists came to America, many of them had never been permitted to keep pigeons. In Scotland persistent attempts at pigeon-raising by folks of humble station might be punished with death. The settlers must have revelled in the freedom of the new land, as well as in the plenty of pigeons, both wild and domestic. In old England the dove-cote was often built close to the kitchen door, that squab and pigeon might be near the hand of the cook. Dove-cotes in America were often simple boxes or houses raised on stout posts. Occasionally might be seen a fine brick dove-cote like the one still standing at Shirley-on-the-James, in Virginia, which is shaped without and within like several famous old dove-cotes in England, among them the one at Athelhampton Hall, Dorchester, England. The English dove-cote has within a revolving ladder hung from a central post while the Virginian squab catcher uses an ordinary ladder. The shelves for the birds to rest upon and the square recesses for the nests made by the ingenious placing of the bricks are alike in both cotes.

A beautiful and fitting tenant of old formal gardens was the peacock, "with his aungelis federys bryghte." On large English estates peacocks were universally kept. A fine peacock, with full-spread tail, makes many a gay flower bed pale before his panoply of iridescence and color. The peahen is a demurely pretty creature. Peacocks are not altogether grateful to garden owners; on the old Narragansett farm whose garden is shown on page 35, they were always kept, and it was one of the prides and pleasures of formal hospitality to offer a roasted peacock to visitors. But, save when roasted, the vain creatures would not keep silence, and when they squawked the glory of their plumage was forgotten. They had an odious habit, too, of wandering off to distant groves on the farm, usually selecting the nights of bitterest cold, and roosting in some very high tree, in some very inaccessible spot. They could not be left in this ill-considered sleeping-place, else they would all freeze to death; and words fail to tell the labor in lowering twilight and temperature of discovering their retreat, the dislodging, capturing, and imprisoning them.

In Narragansett there is a charming old farm garden, which I often visit to note and admire its old-time blossoms. This garden has a guardian, who haunts the garden walks as did the terrace peacock of old England; no watch-dog ever was so faithful, and none half so acute. When I visit the garden I always ask "Where is Job?" I am answered that he is in the field with the cattle. Sometimes this is true, but at other times Job has left the field and is attending to his assumed duties. As he is not encouraged, he has learned great slyness and dissimulation. Immovable, and in silence, Job is concealed behind a Syringa hedge or in a Lilac ambush, and as you stroll peacefully and unwittingly down the paths, sniffing the honeyed sweetness of the dense edging of Sweet Alyssum, all is as balmy as the blossoms. But stoop for an instant, to gather some leaves of Sweet Basil or Sweet Brier, or to collect a dozen seed-pods of that specially delicate Sweet Pea, and lo! the enemy is upon you, like a fierce whirlwind. He looks mild and demure enough in his kitchen yard retreat, whereto, upon piercing outcry for help, the farmer and his two sons have haled him, and where the camera has caught him. But far from meek is his aspect when you are dodging him around the great Tree Peony, or flying frantically before him down the side path to the garden gate. This fierce wild beast was once that mildest of creatures – a pet lamb; the constant companion of the farm-wife, as she weeded and watered her loved garden. Her husband says, "He seems to think folks are stealing her flowers, if they stop to look." The wife and mother of these three great men has gone from her garden forever; but a tenderness for all that she loved makes them not only care for her flowers, but keeps this rampant guardian of the garden at the kitchen door, just as she kept him when he was a little lamb. I knew this New England farmer's wife, a noble woman, of infinite tenderness, strength, and endurance; a lover of trees and flowers and all living things, and I marvel not that they keep her memory green.