Elizabeth And Her German Garden - Part 3

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.

Perhaps you've heard the preceding parts.

If not,

And if you'd like to hear them,

You can look for the playlist for Elizabeth and Her German Garden.

All the parts are there in order.

This is a very sweet satirical story which is actually semi-autobiographical in nature from the author Marie Annette Beauchamp,

Who was better known as Elizabeth von Armen.

She wrote this book and was at first afraid to have her name attached to it as she thought that her husband,

A German count,

Would not approve of it.

In the end,

She did put her name to the work,

However,

As it proved to be very popular and is now a much-beloved classic.

So before we get on with the story here,

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

Deep exhale.

Just letting go of the day,

Letting go of whichever 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 delightful story of Elizabeth and Her German Garden.

June the 3rd.

This is such an out-of-the-way corner of the world that it requires quite unusual energy.

To get here at all.

And I am thus delivered from casual callers.

While on the other hand,

People I love or people who love me,

Which is much the same thing,

Are not likely to be deterred from coming by the roundabout train journey and the long drive at the end.

Not the least of my many blessings is that we have only one neighbour.

If you have to have neighbours at all,

It is at least a mercy that there should be only one.

For with people dropping in at all hours and wanting to talk to you,

How are you to get on with your life,

I should like to know,

And read your books and dream your dreams to your satisfaction.

Besides,

There is always the certainty that either you or the dropper in will say something that would have been better left unsaid.

And I have a holy horror of gossip and mischief-making.

A woman's tongue is a deadly weapon and the most difficult thing in the world to keep in order.

And things slip off it with a facility nothing short of appalling at the very moment when it ought to be most quiet.

In such cases,

The only safe course is to talk steadily about cooks and children,

And to pray that the visit may not be too prolonged.

For if it is,

You are lost.

Cooks,

I have found to be the best of all subjects,

The most phlegmatic flush into life at the mere word,

And the joys and sufferings connected with them are experiences common to us all.

Luckily,

Our neighbour and his wife are both busy and charming,

With a whole troop of flaxen-haired little children to keep them occupied,

Besides the business of their large estate.

Our intercourse is arranged on lines of the most beautiful simplicity.

I call on her once a year,

And she returns the call a fortnight later.

They ask us to dinner in the summer,

And we ask them to dinner in the winter.

By strictly keeping to this,

We avoid all danger of that closer friendship,

Which is only another name for frequent quarrels.

She is a pattern of what a German country lady should be,

And is not only a pretty woman,

But an energetic and practical one,

And the combination is,

To say the least,

Effective.

She is up at daylight,

Superintending the feeding of the stock,

The butter-making,

The sending off of the milk for sale.

A thousand things get done,

While most people are fast asleep,

And before lazy folk are well at breakfast,

She is off in her pony carriage to the other farms on the place to rate the mam-cells,

As the headwomen are called,

To poke into every corner,

Lift the lids off the saucepans,

Count the new laid eggs,

And box,

If necessary,

Any careless dairymaid's ears.

We are allowed by law to administer slight corporal punishment to our servants,

It being left entirely to individual taste to decide what slight shall be,

And my neighbour really seems to enjoy using this privilege,

Judging from the way she talks about it.

I would give much to be able to peep through a keyhole,

And see the dauntless little lady,

Terrible in her wrath and dignity,

Standing on tiptoe to box the ears of some great strapping girl big enough to eat her.

The making of cheese and butter and sausages excellently well is a work which requires brains,

And is,

To my thinking,

A very admirable form of activity,

And entirely worthy of the attention of the intelligent.

That my neighbour is intelligent is at once made evident by the bright alertness of her eyes,

Eyes that nothing escapes,

And that only gain in prettiness by being used to some good purpose.

She is a recognised authority for miles around on the mysteries of sausage making,

The care of calves and the slaughtering of swine,

And with all her manifold duties and daily prolonged absences from home,

Her children are patterns of health and neatness,

And of what dear little German children with white pigtails and fearless eyes and thick legs should be.

Who shall say that such a life is sordid and dull and unworthy of a high order of intelligence?

I protest that to me it is a beautiful life,

Full of wholesome outdoor work,

And with no room for those listless moments of depression and boredom,

And of wondering what you will do next that leaves wrinkles round a pretty woman's eyes,

And are not unknown even to the most brilliant.

But,

While admiring my neighbour,

I don't think I shall ever try to follow in her steps,

My talents not being of the energetic and organising variety,

But rather of that order which makes their owner almost lamentably prone to take up a volume of poetry,

And wander out to where the king cubs grow,

And sitting on a willow trunk beside a little stream,

Forget the very existence of everything but green pastures and still waters,

And the glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields.

And it would make me perfectly wretched to be confronted by ears so refractory as to require boxing.

Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude,

And it is on these occasions that I realise how absolutely alone each individual is,

And how far away from his neighbour,

And while they talk generally about babies,

Past,

Present,

And to come,

I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one's own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair.

I am speaking of comparative strangers,

People who are forced to stay a certain time by the eccentricities of trains,

And in whose presence you grope about after common interests,

And shrink back into your shell on finding that you have none.

Then a frost slowly settles down on me,

And I grow each minute more benumbed and speechless,

And the babies feel the frost in the air and look vacant,

And the callers go through the usual form of wondering who they most take after,

Generally settling the question by saying that the May baby,

Who is the beauty,

Is like her father,

And that the two more or less plain ones are the image of me.

And this decision,

Though I know it of old and am sure it is coming,

Never fails to depress me as much as though I heard it for the first time.

The babies are very little and inoffensive and good,

And it is hard that they should be used as a means of filling up gaps in conversation,

And their features pulled to pieces one by one,

And all their weak points noted and criticised,

While they stand smiling shyly in the operator's face,

Their very smile drawing forth comments on the shape of their mouths.

But,

After all,

It does not occur very often,

And they are one of those few interests one has in common with other people,

As everybody seems to have babies.

A garden,

I have discovered,

Is by no means a fruitful topic,

And it is amazing how few persons really love theirs.

They all pretend they do,

But you can hear by the very tone of their voice what a lukewarm affection it is.

About June,

Their interest is at its warmest,

Nourished by agreeable supplies of strawberries and roses,

But on reflection,

I don't know a single person within twenty miles who really cares for his garden,

Or has discovered the treasures of happiness that are buried in it,

And are to be found,

If sought for diligently,

And if needs be,

With tears.

It is after these rare calls that I experience the only moments of depression from which I ever suffer,

And then I am angry at myself,

A well-nourished person,

For allowing even a single precious hour of life to be spoilt by anything so indifferent.

That is the worst of being fed enough,

And clothed enough,

And warmed enough,

And of having everything you can reasonably desire.

On the least provocation,

You are made uncomfortable and unhappy by such abstract discomforts as being shut out from a nearer approach to your neighbour's soul.

Which is,

On the face of it,

Foolish,

The probability being that he hasn't got one.

The rockets are all out.

The gardener,

In a fit of inspiration,

Put them right along the very front of two borders,

And I don't know what his feelings can be now that they are all flowering,

And the plants behind are completely hidden,

But I have learned another lesson,

And no future gardener shall be allowed to run riot among my rockets in quite so reckless a fashion.

They are charming things,

As delicate in colour as in scent,

And a bowl of them on my writing table fills the room with fragrance.

Single rows,

However,

Are a mistake.

I had masses of them planted in the grass,

And these show how lovely they can be.

A border full of rockets,

Mauve and white,

And nothing else,

Must be beautiful,

But I don't know how long they last,

Nor what they look like when they have done flowering.

This I shall find out in a week or two,

I suppose.

Was ever a would-be gardener left so entirely to his own blundering?

No doubt it would be a gain of years to the garden if I were not forced to learn solely by my failures,

And if I had some kind creature to tell me when to do things.

At present,

The only flowers in the garden are the rockets,

The pansies in the rosebeds,

And two groups of azaleas,

Mollies and pontica.

The azaleas have been,

And still are,

Gorgeous.

I only planted them this spring,

And they almost at once began to flower,

And the sheltered corner they are in looks as though it were filled with imprisoned and perpetual sunsets,

Orange,

Lemon,

Pink,

In every delicate shade.

What they will be next year,

And in succeeding years when the bushes are bigger,

I can imagine from the way they have begun life.

On grey,

Dull days,

The effect is absolutely startling.

Next autumn,

I shall make a great bank of them in front of a belt of fir trees in rather a gloomy nook.

My tea roses are covered with buds,

Which will not open for at least another week,

So I conclude this is not the sort of climate where they will flower from the very beginning of June to November as they are said to do.

July the 11th.

There has been no rain since the day before Whit Sunday,

Five weeks ago,

Which partly,

But not entirely,

Accounts for the disappointment my beds have been.

The dejected gardener went mad soon after Whitsuntide,

And had to be sent to an asylum.

He took to going about with a spade in one hand,

And a revolver in the other,

Explaining that he felt safer that way.

And we bore it quite patiently,

As becomes civilised beings who respect each other's prejudices,

Until one day,

When I mildly asked him to tie up a fallen creeper,

And after he bought the revolver,

My tones in addressing him were of the mildest,

And I quite left off reading to him aloud,

He turned round,

Looked me straight in the face for the first time since he has been here,

And said,

Do I look like Graf X,

A great local celebrity,

Or like a monkey?

After which,

There was nothing for it but to get him into an asylum,

As expeditiously as possible,

There was no gardener to be had in his place,

And I have only just succeeded in getting one,

So that,

What with the drought,

And the neglect,

And the gardener's madness,

And my blunders,

The garden is in a sad condition.

But,

Even in a sad condition,

It is the dearest place in the world,

And all my mistakes only make me more determined to persevere.

The long borders where the rockets were are looking dreadful.

The rockets have done flowering,

And after the manner of rockets in other walks of life have degenerated into sticks,

And nothing else in those borders intends to bloom this summer,

The giant poppies I had planted out in them in April have either died off,

Or remained quite small,

And so have the columbines.

Here and there,

A delphinium droops unwillingly,

And that is all.

I suppose poppies cannot stand being moved,

Or perhaps they were not watered enough at the time of transplanting.

Anyhow,

Those borders are going to be sown tomorrow with more poppies for next year.

For poppies,

I will have,

Whether they like it or not,

And they shall not be touched,

Only thinned out.

Well,

It is no use being grieved,

And after all,

Directly I come out and sit under the trees and look at the dappled sky,

And see the sunshine on the cornfields away on the plain.

All the disappointment smooths itself out,

And it seems impossible to be sad and discontented when everything about me is so radiant and kind.

Today is Sunday,

And the garden is so quiet that sitting here in this shady corner,

Watching the lazy shadows stretching themselves across the grass,

And listening to the rooks quarrelling in the treetops,

I almost expect to hear English church bells ringing for the afternoon service.

But the church is three miles off,

Has no bells,

And no afternoon service.

Once a fortnight,

We go to morning prayer at 11,

And sit up in a sort of private box with a room behind,

Whether we can retire unobserved when the sermon is too long,

Or our flesh too weak,

And hear ourselves being prayed for by the black-robed parson.

In winter,

The church is bitterly cold.

It is not heated,

And we sit muffled up in more furs than ever we wear out of doors.

But it would of course be very wicked for the parson to wear furs,

However cold he may be,

So he puts on a great many extra coats under his gown,

And as the winter progresses,

Swells to a prodigious size.

We know when spring is coming by the reduction in his figure.

The congregation sit at ease while the parson does the praying for them,

And while they are droning the long drawn-out chorales,

He retires into a little wooden box just big enough to hold him.

He does not come out until he thinks we have sung enough,

Nor do we stop until his appearance gives us the signal.

I have often thought how dreadful it would be if he fell ill in his box and left us to go on singing.

I am sure we should never dare to stop,

Unauthorised by the church.

I asked him once what he did in there.

He looked very shocked at such a profane question and made an evasive reply.

If it were not for the garden,

A German Sunday would be a terrible day.

But in the garden on that day there is a sigh of relief and more profound peace.

Nobody raking,

Or sweeping,

Or fidgeting,

Only the little flowers themselves and the whispering trees.

I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors.

Not stray callers to be got rid of after a Jew administration of tea and things you are sorry afterwards that you said,

But people staying in the house and not to be got rid of at all.

All June was lost to me in this way,

And it was from first to last a radiant month of heat and beauty.

But a garden where you meet the people you saw at breakfast and will see again at lunch and dinner is not a place to be happy in.

Besides,

They had a knack of finding out my favourite seats and lounging in them just when I longed to lounge myself.

And they took books out of the library with them and left them face face downwards on the seats all night to get well drenched with dew,

Though they might have known that what is meat for roses is poison for books.

And they gave me to understand that if they had had the arranging of the garden,

It would have been finished long ago.

Whereas I don't believe a garden ever is finished.

They have all gone now,

Thank heaven,

Except one,

So that I have a little breathing space before others begin to arrive.

It seems that the place interests people,

And that there is a sort of novelty in staying in such a deserted corner of the world,

For they were in a perpetual state of mild amusement at being here at all.

Ereus is the only one left.

She is a young woman with a beautiful,

Refined face,

And her eyes and straight,

Fine eyebrows are particularly lovable.

At meals,

She dips her bread into the salt cellar,

Bites a bit off,

And repeats the process.

Although Providence,

Taking my shape,

Has caused salt spoons to be placed at convenient intervals down the table.

She lunched today on beer,

Schweinekoteletten,

And cabbage salad with caraway seeds in it,

And now I hear her,

Through the open window,

Extemporising touching melodies in her charming,

Cooing voice.

She is thin,

Frail,

Intelligent,

And lovable,

All on the above diet.

What better proof can be needed to establish the superiority of the Teuton than the fact that after such meals,

He can produce such music?

Cabbage salad is a horrid invention,

But I don't doubt its utility as a means of encouraging thoughtfulness.

Nor will I quarrel with it,

Since it results so poetically,

Any more than I quarrel with the manure that results in roses.

And I give it to Ereus every day to make her sing.

To make her sing.

She is the sweetest singer I have ever heard,

And has a charming trick of making up songs as she goes along.

When she begins,

I go and lean out of the window and look at my little friends out there in the borders while listening to her music,

And feel full of pleasant sadness and regret.

It is so sweet to be sad when one has nothing to be sad about.

The April baby came panting up just as I had written that,

The others hurrying along behind,

And with flaming cheeks displayed for my admiration three brand new kittens,

Lean and blind,

That she was carrying in her pinafore and that had just been found,

Motherless,

In the woodshed.

Look,

She cried breathlessly,

Such a much!

I was glad it was only kittens this time,

For she had been once before this afternoon,

On purpose,

As she informed me,

Sitting herself down on the grass at my feet,

To ask about the Liber Gott,

It being Sunday,

And her pious little nurses' conversation having run,

As it seems,

On heaven and angels.

Her questions about the Liber Gott are better left unrecorded,

And I was relieved when she began about the angels.

What do they wear for clothes?

She asked in her German-English.

Why,

You've seen them in pictures,

I answered,

In beautiful long dresses,

And with big white wings,

Feathers,

She asked,

I suppose so,

And long dresses,

All white and beautiful.

Are they are they girlies?

Girls,

Yes.

Don't boys go into the himmel?

Yes,

Of course,

If they're good.

And then what do they wear?

Why,

The same as all the other angels,

I suppose.

Dresses!

She began to laugh,

Looking at me sideways,

As though she suspected me of making jokes.

What a funny mummy,

She said,

Evidently much amused.

She has a fat little laugh,

That is very infectious.

I think,

Said I,

Gravely,

You had better go and play with the other babies.

She did not answer,

And sat still a moment,

Watching the clouds.

I began writing again.

Mummy,

She said presently,

Well,

Where do the angels get their dresses?

I hesitated.

From Liebergot,

I said.

Are there shops in the himmel?

Shops,

No.

But then where does Liebergot buy their dresses?

Now,

Run away like a good baby,

I'm busy.

I'm busy.

But you said yesterday,

When I asked about Liebergot,

That you would tell about him on Sunday,

And it is Sunday.

Tell me a story about him.

There was nothing for it but resignation.

So I put down my pencil with a sigh.

Call the others then.

She ran away,

And presently they all three emerged from the bushes,

One after the other,

And tried all together to scramble onto my knee.

The April baby got the knee,

As she always seems to get everything,

And the other two had to sit on the grass.

I began about Adam and Eve,

With an eye to future parsonic probings.

The April baby's eyes opened wider and wider,

And her face grew redder and redder.

I was surprised at the breathless interest she took in the story.

The other two were tearing up tufts of grass and hardly listening.

I had scarcely got to the angels with the flaming swords,

And announced that that was all,

When she burst out,

Now I'll tell about it.

Once upon a time,

There was Adam and Eve,

And they had plenty of clothes,

And there was no snake,

And Liebergot wasn't angry with them,

And they could eat as many apples as they liked,

And was happy.

Forever and ever,

There now.

She began to jump up and down,

Defiantly,

On my knee.

But that's not the story,

I said,

Rather helplessly.

Yes,

Yes,

It is a much nicer one.

Now,

Another.

But these stories are true,

I said severely,

And it's no use my telling them if you make them up your own way afterwards.

Another,

Another,

She shrieked,

Jumping up and down with redoubled energy,

All her silvery curls flying.

I began about Noah and the flood.

Did it rain so badly?

She asked,

With a face of the deepest concern and interest.

Yes,

All day long and all night long,

For weeks and weeks.

And was everybody so wet?

Yes,

But why didn't they open their umbrellas?

Just then,

I saw the nurse coming out with the tea tray.

I'll tell you the rest another time,

I said,

Putting her off my knee,

Greatly relieved.

You must all go to Anna now and have tea.

I don't like Anna,

Remarked the June baby,

Not having hitherto opened her lips.

She is a stupid girl.

The other two stood transfixed with horror at this statement,

For besides being naturally extremely polite,

And at all times anxious not to hurt anyone's feelings,

They had been brought up to love and respect their kind little nurse.

The April baby recovered her speech first,

And lifting her finger,

Pointed it at the criminal in just indignation.

Such a child will never go into the himmel,

She said,

With great emphasis,

And the heir of one who delivers judgment.

Reviews

I think their rocket must be different from ours (snapdragon) but funny border story! Sad about the gardener…. I am a farmer, strange to think about those who love them so but don’t even do the work of it! Thank you!🙏🏼❤️