Elizabeth And Her German Garden - Part 2

May you enjoy this reading of the beloved 1898 novel, "Elizabeth and Her German Garden"! This was the debut novel of Marie Annette Beauchamp, better known as Elizabeth Von Armin.

It is a charming, sweet, satirical story of a wife and mother attempting to nurture a flower garden on her husband's old family estate in Germany.

The book is semi-autobiographical in nature...and was in fact published anonymously at first, as the author feared that her husband - a German count - wouldn't approve of the content! The book however proved to be extremely popular, with 20 re-printings in the first year alone and eventually the book was attributed to the author herself!

Transcript

Hello there.

Thank you so much for joining me for this continued reading of the charming novel Elizabeth and Her German Garden.

This was the debut novel of the writer Marie-Annette Beauchamp,

Who was better known as Elizabeth von Armen.

It's a very sweet,

Satirical story of an English wife and mother attempting to nurture a garden on her husband's family estate in Germany.

It is semi-autobiographical in nature and was actually published anonymously at first as she feared that her husband,

A German count,

Wouldn't approve.

The book actually went on to be a great success and she was actually credited with the book to her name in the end.

And it is a well-loved classic at this point.

So,

Before we get further into the story here,

Let's just take a moment to have a nice,

Deep exhale,

Letting go of the day,

Letting go of whatever baggage we might be bringing along with us into this moment.

For right now,

There's nowhere else that we have to be and nothing else that we have to be doing.

So we can just relax,

Get ourselves comfortable and enjoy the beautiful tale of Elizabeth and Her German Garden.

May the 14th.

Today,

I am writing on the veranda with the three babies more persistent than mosquitoes raging round me.

And already,

Several of the thirty fingers have been in the inkpot and the owners consoled when duty pointed to rebukes.

But who can rebuke such penitent and drooping sun bonnets?

I can see nothing but sun bonnets and pinafores and nimble black legs.

These three,

Their patient nurse,

Myself,

The gardener and the gardener's assistant,

Are the only people who ever go into my garden,

But then neither are we ever out of it.

The gardener has been here a year and has given me notice regularly on the first of every month,

But up to now has been induced to stay on.

On the first of this month,

He came as usual and with determination written on every feature told me he intended to go in June and that nothing should alter his decision.

I don't think he knows much about gardening,

But he can at least dig and water and some of the things he sows come up and some of the plants he plants grow.

Besides which,

He is the most unflaggingly industrious person I ever saw and has the great merit of never appearing to take the faintest interest in what we do in the garden.

So,

I have tried to keep him on,

Not knowing what the next one may be like,

And when I asked him what he had to complain of and he replied,

Nothing,

I could only conclude that he has a personal objection to me because of my eccentric preference for plants in groups rather than plants in lines.

Perhaps,

Too,

He does not like the extracts from gardening books I read to him sometimes when he is planting or sowing something new.

Being so helpless myself,

I thought it simpler,

Instead of explaining,

To take the book itself out to him and let him have wisdom at its very source,

Administering it in doses while he worked.

I quite recognise that this must be annoying,

And only my anxiety not to lose a whole year through some stupid mistake has given me the courage to do it.

I laugh sometimes behind the book at his disgusted face and wish we could be photographed so that I may be reminded in twenty years' time when the garden is a bower of loveliness and I learned in all its ways of my first happy struggles and failures.

All through April he was putting the perennials we had sown in the autumn into their permanent places,

And all through April he went about with a long piece of string making parallel lines down the borders of beautiful exactitude and arranging the poor plants like soldiers at a review.

Two long borders were done during my absence one day,

And when I explained that I should like the third to have plants in groups and not in lines,

And that what I wanted was a natural effect,

With no bare spaces of earth to be seen,

He looked even more gloomily hopeless than usual.

And on my going out later on to see the result I found he had planted two long borders down the sides of a straight walk with little lines of five plants in a row.

First five pinks,

And next to them five rockets,

And behind the rockets five pinks,

And behind the pinks five rockets,

And so on,

With different plants of every sort and size,

Down to the end.

When I protested he said he had only carried out my orders and had known it would not look well,

So I gave in,

And the remaining borders were done after the pattern of the first two.

And I will have patience and see how they look this summer before digging them up again,

For it becomes beginners to be humble.

If I could only dig and plant myself,

How much easier,

Besides being so fascinating,

To make your own holes exactly where you want them,

And put in your plants exactly as you choose,

Instead of giving orders that can only be half understood from the moment you depart from the lines laid down by that long piece of string.

In the first ecstasy of having a garden all my own,

And in my burning impatience to make the waste places blossom like a rose,

I did one warm Sunday in last year's April,

During the servants' dinner hour,

Doubly secure from the gardener by the day and the dinner,

Slink out with a spade and a rake,

And feverishly dig a little piece of ground and break it up,

And so surreptitious I permeate,

And run back very hot and guilty into the house,

And get into a chair and behind a book and look languid,

Just in time to save my reputation.

And why not?

It is not graceful,

And it makes one hot,

But it is a blessed sort of work.

And if Eve had had a spade in paradise,

And known what to do with it,

We should not have had all that sad business of the apple.

What a happy woman I am,

Living in a garden with books,

Babies,

Birds and flowers,

And plenty of leisure to enjoy them.

Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment,

And burying,

And I don't know what besides,

And would rend the air with their shrieks,

If condemned to such a life.

Sometimes I feel as if I were blessed above all my fellows,

In being able to find my happiness so easily.

I believe I should always be good,

If the sun always shone,

And could enjoy myself very well in Siberia on a fine day.

And what can life in town offer in the way of pleasure,

To equal the delight of any one of the calm evenings I have had this month,

Sitting alone at the foot of the veranda steps,

With the perfume of young larches all about,

And the May moon hanging low over the beaches,

And the beautiful silence,

Made only more profound in its peace by the croaking of distant frogs,

And hooting of owls,

A cockchafer,

Darting by close to my ear with a loud hum,

Sends a shiver through me.

Partly of pleasure at the reminder of past summers,

And partly of fear lest he should get caught in my hair,

The man of wrath says they are pernicious creatures and should be killed.

I would rather get the killing done at the end of the summer,

And not crush them out of such a pretty world,

At the very beginning of all the fun.

This has been quite an eventful afternoon.

My eldest baby,

Born in April,

Is five years old,

And the youngest,

Born in June,

Is three,

So that the discerning will at once be able to guess the age of the remaining middle or May baby.

While I was stooping over a group of hollyhocks planted on the top of the only thing in the shape of a hill the garden possesses,

The April baby,

Who had been sitting pensive on a tree stump close by,

Got up suddenly and began to run aimlessly about,

Shrieking and wringing her hands with every symptom of terror.

I stared,

Wondering what had come to her,

And then I saw that a whole army of young cows,

Pasturing in a field next to the garden,

Had got through the hedge and were grazing perilously near my tea roses and most precious belongings.

The nurse and I managed to chase them away,

But not before they had trampled down a border of pinks and lilies in the cruelest way,

And made great holes in a bed of china roses,

And even begun to nibble at a jackmanny clematis that I am trying to persuade to climb up a tree trunk.

The gloomy gardener happened to be ill in bed,

And the assistant was at Vesper's,

As Lutheran Germany calls afternoon tea,

Or its equivalent.

So the nurse filled up the holes as well as she could with mould,

Burying the crushed and mangled roses,

Cheated forever of their hopes of summer glory,

And I stood by looking on dejectedly.

The June baby,

Who is two feet square and valiant beyond her size and years,

Seized a stick much bigger than herself and went after the cows,

The cow herd being nowhere to be seen.

She planted herself in front of them,

Brandishing her stick,

And they stood in a row and stared at her in great astonishment,

And she kept them off until one of the men from the farm arrived with a whip,

And having found the cow herd sleeping peacefully in the shade,

Gave him a sound beating.

The cow herd is a great hulking young man,

Much bigger than the man who beat him,

But he took his punishment as part of the day's work and made no remark of any sort.

It could not have hurt him much through his leather breeches,

And I think he deserved it,

But it must be demoralising work for a strong young man with no brains looking after cows.

Nobody with less imagination than a poet ought to take it up as a profession.

After the June baby and I had been welcomed back by the other two,

With as many hugs as though we had been restored to them from great perils,

And while we were peacefully drinking tea under a beech tree,

I happened to look up into its mazy green,

And there,

On a branch quite close to my head,

Sat a little baby owl.

I got on the seat and caught it easily,

For it could not fly,

And how it had reached the branch at all is a mystery.

It is a little round ball of grey fluff,

With the quaintest,

Wisest,

Solemn face.

Poor thing.

I ought to have let it go,

But the temptation to keep it until the man of wrath,

At present on a journey,

Has seen it,

Was not to be resisted,

As he has often said how much he would like to have a young owl,

And try and tame it.

So I put it into a roomy cage,

And slung it up on a branch near where it had been sitting,

And which cannot be far from its nest and its mother.

We had hardly subsided again to our tea,

When I saw two more balls of fluff on the ground,

In the long grass,

And scarcely distinguishable at a little distance from small mole-hills.

These were promptly united to their relation in the cage,

And now,

When the man of wrath comes home,

Not only shall he be welcomed by a wife decked with the orthodox smiles,

But by the three little longed-for owls.

Only it seems wicked to take them from their mother,

And I know that I shall let them go again some day,

Perhaps the very next time the man of wrath goes on a journey.

I put a small pot of water in the cage,

Though they never could have tasted water yet,

Unless they drink the raindrops off the beech leaves.

I suppose they get all the liquid they need from the bodies of the mice and other dainties provided for them by their fond parents,

But the raindrop idea is prettier.

May the 15th.

How cruel it was of me to put those poor little owls into a cage even for one night.

I cannot forgive myself,

And shall never pander to the man of wrath's wishes again.

This morning,

I got up early to see how they were getting on,

And I found the door of the cage wide open,

And no owls to be seen.

I thought,

Of course,

That somebody had stolen them,

Some boy from the village,

Or perhaps the chastised cow herd,

But looking about,

I saw one perched high up in the branches of the beech tree,

And then,

To my dismay,

One lying dead on the ground.

The third was nowhere to be seen,

And is probably safe in its nest.

The parents must have torn at the bars of the cage until,

By chance,

They got the door open and then dragged the little ones out and up into the tree.

The one that is dead must have been blown off the branch,

As it was a windy night and its neck is broken.

There is one happy life less in the garden today,

Through my fault,

And it is such a lovely warm day,

Just the sort of weather for young soft things to enjoy and grow in.

The babies are greatly distressed,

And are digging a grave and preparing funeral wreaths of dandelions.

Just as I had written that,

I heard sounds of arrival,

And running out,

I breathlessly told the man of Wroth how nearly I had been able to give him the owls he has so often said he would like to have,

And how sorry I was they were gone,

And how grievous the death of one,

And so on,

After the voluble manner of women.

He listened till I paused to breathe,

And then he said,

I am surprised at such cruelty.

How could you make the mother owl suffer so?

She had never done you any harm.

Which sent me out of the house and into the garden,

More convinced than ever that he sang true,

Who sang two paradises t'were in one,

To live in paradise alone.

May the 16th.

The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter,

Not the house.

In the house are duties and annoyances,

Servants to exhort and admonish,

Furniture and meals,

But out there blessings crowd round me at every step.

It is there that I am sorry for the unkindness in me,

For those selfish thoughts that are so much worse than they feel.

It is there that all my sins and silliness are forgiven,

There that I feel protected and at home,

And every flower and weed is a friend,

And every tree a lover.

When I have been vexed,

I run out to them for comfort,

And when I have been angry without just cause,

It is there that I find absolution.

Did ever a woman have so many friends?

And always the same,

Always ready to welcome me and fill me with cheerful thoughts.

Happy children of a common father,

Why should I,

Their own sister,

Be less content and joyous than they?

Even in a thunderstorm,

When other people are running into the house,

I run out of it.

I do not like thunderstorms,

They frighten me for hours before they come,

Because I always feel them on the way,

But it is odd that I should go for shelter to the garden.

I feel better there,

More taken care of,

More petted.

When it thunders,

The April baby says,

There's Lieber Gott,

Scolding those angels again.

And once,

When there was a storm in the night,

She complained loudly and wanted to know why Lieber Gott didn't do the scolding in the daytime,

As she had been so tight asleep.

They all three speak a wonderful mixture of German and English,

Adulterating the purity of their native tongue by putting in English words in the middle of a German sentence.

It always reminds me of justice tempered by mercy.

We have been cow-slipping today,

In a little wood dignified by the name of the Hirschwald,

Because it is the happy hunting ground of innumerable deer who fight there in the autumn evenings,

Calling each other out to combat with bayings that ring through the silence and send agreeable shivers through the lonely listener.

I often walk there in September,

Late in the evening,

And sitting on a fallen tree,

Listen fascinated to their angry cries.

We made cow-slip balls sitting on the grass.

The babies had never seen such things,

Nor had imagined anything half so sweet.

The Hirschwald is a little open wood of silver birches and springy turf,

Starred with flowers,

And there is a tiny stream meandering amiably about it and decking itself in June with yellow flags.

I have dreams of having a little cottage built there,

With the daisies up to the door,

And no path of any sort,

Just big enough to hold myself and one baby inside,

And a purple clematis outside.

Two rooms,

A bedroom and a kitchen.

How scared we would be at night,

And how completely happy by day.

I know the exact spot where it should stand,

Facing south-east,

So that we should get all the cheerfulness of the morning,

And close to the stream so that we might wash our plates among the flags.

Sometimes,

When in the mood for society,

We would invite the remaining babies to tea,

And entertain them with wild strawberries on plates of horse chestnut leaves.

But no one less innocent and easily pleased than a baby would be permitted to darken the effulgence of our sunny cottage.

Indeed,

I don't suppose that anybody wiser would care to come.

Wise people want so many things before they can even begin to enjoy themselves.

And I feel perpetually apologetic when with them,

For only being able to offer them that which I love best myself.

Apologetic,

And ashamed of being so easily contented.

The other day,

At a dinner party in the nearest town,

It took us the whole afternoon to get there,

The women after dinner were curious to know how I had endured the winter cut off from everybody and snowed up sometimes for weeks.

Ah,

These husbands,

Sighed an ample lady lugubriously shaking her head,

They shut up their wives because it suits them,

And don't care what their sufferings are.

Then the others sighed and shook their heads too,

For the ample lady was a great local potentate,

And one began to tell how another dreadful husband had brought his young wife into the country and had kept her there,

Concealing her beauty and accomplishments from the public in a most cruel manner.

And how,

After spending a certain number of years in alternately weeping and producing progeny,

She had,

Quite lately,

Run away with somebody unspeakable,

I think it was the footman or the baker or someone of that sort.

But I am quite happy,

I began,

As soon as I could put in a word.

Ah,

A good little wife,

Making the best of it,

And the female potentate patted my hand,

But continued gloomily to shake her head.

You cannot possibly be happy in the winter entirely alone,

Asserted another lady,

The wife of a high military authority,

And not accustomed to be contradicted.

But I am.

But how can you possibly be,

At your age?

No,

It is not possible,

But I am.

Your husband ought to bring you to town in the winter,

But I don't want to be brought to town and not let you waste your best years buried.

But I like being buried.

Such solitude is not right,

But it's not solitary,

And can come to no good.

She was getting quite angry.

There was a chorus of no-indeeds at her last remark,

And renewed shaking of heads.

I enjoyed the winter immensely.

I persisted when they were a little quieter.

I slayed and skated,

And then there were the children and shelves and shelves full of,

I was going to say books,

But stopped.

Reading is an occupation for men.

For women,

It is a reprehensible waste of time.

And how could I talk to them of the happiness I felt when the sun shone on the snow,

Or of the deep delight of hoarfrost days?

It is entirely my doing that we have come down here,

I proceeded,

And my husband only did it to please me.

Such a good little wife,

Repeated the patronising potentate,

Again patting my hand with an air of understanding all about it.

Really,

An excellent little wife.

But you must not let your husband have his own way too much,

My dear,

And take my advice and insist on his bringing you to town next winter.

And then they fell to talking about their cooks,

Having settled to their entire satisfaction that my fate was probably lying in wait for me too,

Lurking perhaps at that very moment behind the apparently harmless brass buttons of the man in the hall with my cloak.

I laughed on the way home,

And I laughed again for sheer satisfaction when we reached the garden and drove between the quiet trees to the pretty old house,

And when I went into the library with its four windows open to the moonlight and the scent,

And looked round at the familiar bookshelves and could hear no sounds but sounds of peace,

And knew that here I might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose,

With never a creature to disturb me.

How grateful I felt to the kindly fate that has brought me here and given me a heart to understand my own blessedness,

And rescued me from a life like that I had just seen,

A life spent with the odours of other people's dinners in one's nostrils,

And the noise of their wrangling servants in one's ears,

And parties and tattle for all amusement.

But I must confess to having felt sometimes quite crushed when some grand person,

Examining the details of my home through her eyeglass and coolly dissecting,

Or that I so much prize from the convenient distance of the open window,

Has finished up by expressing sympathy with my loneliness,

And on my protesting that I like it,

Has murmured,

Then indeed I have felt ashamed of the fewness of my wants.

But only for a moment,

And only under the withering influence of the eyeglass,

For after all the owner's spirit is the same spirit as that which dwells in my servants,

Girls whose one idea of happiness is to live in a town where there are others of their sort with whom to drink beer and dance on Sunday afternoons.

The passion for being forever with one's fellows,

And the fear of being left for a few hours alone,

Is to me wholly incomprehensible.

I can entertain myself quite well for weeks together,

Hardly aware,

Except for the pervading peace,

That I have been alone at all.

Not but what I like to have people staying with me for a few days,

Or even for a few weeks,

Should they be as anspruchslos as I am myself,

And content with simple joys.

Only anyone who comes here and would be happy must have something in him.

If he be a mere blank creature,

Empty of head and heart,

He will very probably find it dull.

I should like my house to be often full,

If I could find people capable of enjoying themselves.

They should be welcomed and sped with equal heartiness,

For truth compels me to confess that though it pleases me to see them come,

It pleases me just as much to see them go.

On some very specially divine days,

Like today,

I have actually longed for someone else to be here to enjoy the beauty with me.

There has been rain in the night,

And the whole garden seems to be singing.

Not the untiring birds only,

But the vigorous plants,

The happy grass and trees,

The lilac bushes.

Oh,

Those lilac bushes.

They are all out today,

And the garden is drenched with the scent I have brought in armfuls.

The picking is such a delight,

And every pot and bowl and tub in the house is filled with purple glory.

And the servants think there is going to be a party,

And are extra nimble.

And I go from room to room gazing at the sweetness,

And the windows are all flung open so as to join the scent within to the scent without.

And the servants gradually discover that there is no party,

And wonder why the house should be filled with flowers for one woman by herself.

And I long more and more for a kindred spirit.

It seems so greedy to have so much loveliness to oneself,

But kindred spirits are so very,

Very rare.

I might almost as well cry for the moon.

It is true that my garden is full of friends,

Only they are dumb.

Reviews

Just lovely— except for the haughty ladies 😂 thank you ❤️🙏🏼

Lovely! Anyone who has ever loved their garden needs to listen!☺️