XI.
ROSES.
July 2d.
June is the paradise of roses. In this month they break forth into unparalleled splendor. All Rosedom is out in holiday apparel; and roses white and black, green and pink, scarlet, crimson, and yellow, striped and mottled, double and single, in clusters and solitary, moss-roses, damask-roses, Noisette, perpetual, Bourbon, China, tea, musk, and all other tribes and names, hang in exuberant beauty. The air is full of their fragrance. The eye can turn nowhere that it is not attracted to a glowing bush of roses. At first one is exhilarated. He wanders from bush to bush and cuts the finest specimens, until there is no room or dish for more. So many roses, and so few to see them! What would not people shut up in cities give to see such luxuriance of beauty! How strange that those who have ground do not gather about them these favorites of every sense! The air and soil that nourish nettles and thistles, plantain and dock, would bring forth roses with equal kindness. There is enough ground wasted around country houses to furnish root-room for a hundred kinds of roses, without detriment either to fruit trees or ornamental shade trees. Men admire them when they see them in a friend’s house; they are always pleased to receive a lapful as a present to their wife or mother or daughter; but it does not enter their head that they, too, might have roses to give away.
Roses are easy of culture, easy of propagation, requiring almost as little care as dandelions or daisies. The wonder is that every other man is not an enthusiast, and in the month of June a gentle fanatic. Floral insanity is one of the most charming inflictions to which man is heir! One never wishes to be cured, nor should any one wish to cure him. The garden is infectious. Flowers are “catching,” or the love of them is. Men begin with one or two. In a few years they are struck through with floral zeal. Not bees are more sedulous in their researches into flowers than many a man is, and one finds, after the strife and heat and toil of his ambitious life, that there is more pure satisfaction in his garden than in all the other pursuits that promise so much of pleasure and yield so little.
It is pleasant to find in men whose hard and loveless side you see in society, so much that is gentle and beauty-loving in private. Hard capitalists, sharp politicians, grinding business men, will often be found, at home, in full sympathy with the gentlest aspects of nature. One is surprised to find how rich and sweet these monsters often turn out to be! Here is the man whom you have for years heard described, in all the newspapers, as a spectacle of wickedness or a monument of folly. You are, by some convulsion of nature, thrown into his company, and travel for days with him. To your surprise his manners are gentle, his conversation pleasing, his attentions to all about him considerate. This must be artifice. It is a veil to hide that hideous heart of which you have heard so much. You watch and wait. But watching and waiting only satisfy you that this supposed monster is a kind man, with a world of sympathy for beautiful things. And when, in after-months, you have been at his summer-house, and know him in his vineyard and his garden, you smile at yourself that you were ever subject to that illusion which is so often raised about public men.
A man is not always to be trusted because he loves fine horses, or because he follows the stream or hunts in the fields. But if a man that loves flowers, and loves them enough to labor for them, is not to be trusted, where in this wicked world shall we go for trust? A man that carries a garden in his heart has got back again a part of the Eden from which our great forefather was expelled.