Elizabeth And Her German Garden - Part 6

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,

Which was the 1898 debut novel of the author known as Elizabeth von Armen.

Perhaps you've heard the preceding parts of this story.

If not,

You can look for the playlist for Elizabeth and Her German Garden and you'll find all of the different parts there together in order.

But for now,

Let's just take a moment here to have a nice deep exhale,

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,

Nothing else that we have to do.

So we can just relax,

Get ourselves comfortable,

And enjoy the continuing story of Elizabeth and Her German Garden.

November the 20th.

Last night we had 10 degrees of frost,

Fahrenheit,

And I went out the first thing this morning to see what had become of the tea roses.

And behold,

They were wide awake and quite cheerful.

Covered with rime,

It is true,

But anything but black and shriveled.

Even those in boxes on each side of the veranda steps were perfectly alive and full of buds.

And one in particular,

A bouquet d'or,

Is a mass of buds and would flower if it could get the least encouragement.

I am beginning to think that the tenderness of tea roses is much exaggerated and I'm certainly very glad I had the courage to try them in this northern garden.

But I must not fly too boldly in the face of Providence and have ordered those in the boxes to be taken into the greenhouse for the winter and hope the bouquet d'or in a sunny place near the glass may be induced to open some of those buds.

The greenhouse is only used as a refuge and kept at a temperature just above freezing and is reserved entirely for such plants as cannot stand the very coldest part of the winter out of doors.

I don't use it for growing anything because I don't love things that will only bear the garden for three or four months in the year and require coaxing and petting for the rest of it.

Give me a garden full of strong healthy creatures able to stand roughness and cold without dismally giving in and dying.

I never could see that delicacy of constitution is pretty either in plants or women.

No doubt there are many lovely flowers to be had by heat and constant coaxing but then for each of these there are 50 others still lovelier that will gratefully grow in God's wholesome air and are blessed in return with a far greater intensity of scent and colour.

We have been very busy till now getting the permanent beds into order and planting the new tea roses and I am looking forward to next summer with more hope than ever in spite of my many failures.

I wish the years would pass quickly that will bring my garden to perfection.

The Persian yellows have gone into their new quarters and their place is occupied by the tea rose Saffrono.

All the rose beds are carpeted with pansies sown in July and transplanted in October,

Each bed having a separate colour.

The purple ones are the most charming and go well with every rose but I have white ones with Laurette Messimi and yellow ones with Saffrono and a new red sort in the big centre bed of red roses.

Round the semicircle on the south side of the little privet hedge two rows of annual larkspurs in all their delicate shades have been sown and just beyond the larkspurs on the grass is a semicircle of standard tea and pillar roses.

In front of the house the long borders have been stocked with larkspurs annual and perennial columbines giant poppies,

Pinks,

Madonna lilies,

Wallflowers,

Hollyhocks,

Perennial phloxes,

Peonies,

Lavender,

Starworts,

Cornflowers,

Likeness chalcedonica and bulbs packed in wherever bulbs could go.

These are the borders that were so hardly used by the other gardener.

The spring boxes for the veranda steps have been filled with pink and white and yellow tulips.

I love tulips better than any other spring flower.

They are the embodiment of alert cheerfulness and tidy grace and next to a hyacinth look like a wholesome freshly tubbed young girl beside a stout lady whose every movement weighs down the air with patchouli.

Their faint delicate scent is refinement itself and is there anything in the world more charming than the sprightly way they hold up their little faces to the sun.

I have heard them called bold and flaunting but to me they seem modest grace itself.

Only always on the alert to enjoy life as much as they can and not afraid of looking the sun or anything else above them in the face.

On the grass there are two beds of them carpeted with forget-me-nots and in the grass in scattered groups are daffodils and narcissus.

Down the wilder shrubbery walks foxgloves and melanes will I hope shine majestic and one cool corner backed by a group of furs is graced by madonna lilies white foxgloves and columbines.

In a distant glade I have made a spring garden round an oak tree that stands alone in the sun.

Groups of crocuses,

Daffodils,

Narcissus,

Hyacinths and tulips among such flowering shrubs and trees as pyrrhus marlus spectabilis,

Floribunda and coronaria,

Prunus juliana,

Mahaleb,

Seratina,

Triloba and pisadi.

Cydonias and weigelias in every colour and several kinds of crataegus and other may lovelinesses if the weather behaves itself nicely and we get gentle rains in due season I think this little corner will be beautiful but what a big if it is.

Drought is our great enemy and the last two summers each contained five weeks of blazing cloudless heat when all the ditches dried up and the soil was like hot pastry.

At such times the watering is naturally quite beyond the strength of two men but as a garden is a place to be happy in and not one where you want to meet a dozen curious eyes at every turn I should not like to have more than these two or rather one and a half the assistant having stalk-like proclivities and going home in the autumn to his native Russia returning in the spring with the first warm winds.

I want to keep him over the winter as there is much to be done even then and I sounded him on the point the other day he is the most abject looking of human beings lame and afflicted with a hideous eye disease but he is a good worker and plods along unwearyingly from sunrise to dusk pray my good stalk said I or German words to that effect why don't you stay here altogether instead of going home and rioting away all you have earned I would stay he answered but I have my wife there in Russia your wife I exclaimed stupidly surprised that the poor deformed creature should have found a mate as though there were not a superfluity of mates in the world I didn't know you were married yes and I have two little children and I don't know what they would do if I were not to come home but it is a very expensive journey to Russia and costs me every time seven marks seven marks yes it is a great sum I wondered whether I should be able to get to Russia for seven marks supposing I were to be seized with an unnatural craving to go there all the labourers who work here from March to December are Russians and Poles or a mixture of both we send a man over who can speak their language to fetch as many as he can early in the year and they arrive with their bundles men and women and babies and as soon as they have got here and have their fares paid they disappear in the night if they get the chance sometimes 50 of them at a time to go and work singly or in couples for the peasants who pay them a fenning or two more a day than we do and let them eat with the family from us they get a mark and a half to two marks a day and as many potatoes as they can eat the women get less not because they work less but because they are women and must not be encouraged the overseer lives with them and has a loaded revolver in his pocket and a savage dog at his heels for the first week or two after their arrival the foresters and other permanent officials keep guard at night over the houses they are put into I suppose they find it sleepy work for certain it is that spring after spring the same thing happens 50 of them getting away in spite of all our precautions and we are left with our mouths open and much out of pocket this spring by some mistake they arrived without their bundles which had gone astray on the road and as they travel in their best clothes they refused utterly to work until their luggage came nearly a week was lost waiting to the despair of all in authority nor will any persuasions induce them to do anything on saint's days and there surely never was a church so full of them as the russian church in the spring when every hour is of vital importance the work is constantly being interrupted by them and the workers lie sleeping in the sun the whole day agreeably conscious that they are pleasing themselves and the church at one and the same time a state of perfection as rare as it is desirable reason unaided by faith is of course exasperated at this waste of precious time and i confess that during the first mild days after the long winter frost when it is possible to begin to work the ground i have sympathized with the gloom of the man of wrath confronted in one week by two or three empty days on which no man will labor and have listened in silence to his remarks about distant russian saints i suppose it was my own superfluous amount of civilization that made me pity these people when first i came to live among them they heard together like animals and do the work of animals but in spite of the armed overseer the dirt and the rags the meals of potatoes washed down by weak vinegar and water i am beginning to believe that they would strongly object to soap i am sure they would not wear new clothes and i hear them coming home from their work at dusk singing they are like little children or animals in their utter inability to grasp the idea of a future and after all if you work all day in god's sunshine when evening comes you are pleasantly tired and ready for rest and not much inclined to find fault with your lot i have not yet persuaded myself however that the women are happy they have to work as hard as the men and get less for it they have to produce offspring quite regardless of times and seasons and the general fitness of things they have to do this as expeditiously as possible so that they may not unduly interrupt the work in hand nobody helps them notices them or cares about them least of all the husband it is quite a usual thing to see them working in the fields in the morning and working again in the afternoon having in the interval produced a baby the baby is left to an old woman whose duty it is to look after babies collectively when i expressed my horror at the poor creatures working immediately afterwards as though nothing had happened the man of wrath informed me that they did not suffer because they had never worn corsets nor had their mothers and grandmothers we were riding together at the time and had just passed a batch of workers and my husband was speaking to the overseer when a woman arrived alone and taking up a spade began to dig she grinned cheerfully at us as she made a curtsy and the overseer remarked that she had just been back to the house and had a baby poor poor woman i cried as we rode on feeling for some occult reason very angry with the man of wrath and her wretched husband doesn't care a rap and will probably beat her tonight if his supper isn't right what nonsense it is to talk about the equality of the sexes when the women have the babies quite so my dear replied the man of wrath smiling condescendingly you have got to the very root of the matter nature while imposing this agreeable duty on the woman weakens her and disables her for any serious competition with man how can a person who is constantly losing a year of the best part of her life compete with a young man who never loses any time at all he has the brute force and his last word on any subject could always be his fist i said nothing it was a dull gray afternoon in the beginning of november and the leaves dropped slowly and silently at our horse's feet as we rode towards the hirschwald it is a universal custom preceded the man of wrath amongst these russians and i believe amongst the lower classes everywhere and certainly commendable on the score of simplicity to silence a woman's objections and aspirations by knocking her down i have heard it said that this apparently brutal action has anything but the maddening effect tenderly nurtured persons might suppose and that the patient is soothed and satisfied with a rapidity and completeness unattainable by other and more polite methods do you suppose he went on flicking a twig off a tree with his whip as we passed that the intellectual husband wrestling intellectually with the chaotic yearnings of his intellectual wife ever achieves the result aimed at he may and does go on wrestling till he is tired but never does he in the very least convince her of her folly while his brother in the ragged coat has got through the whole business in less time than it takes me to speak about it there is no doubt that these poor women fulfill their vocation far more thoroughly than the women in our class and as the truest happiness consists in finding one's vocation quickly and continuing in it all one's days i consider they are to be envied rather than not since they are early taught by the impossibility of argument with marital muscle the impotence of female endeavor and the blessings of content pray go on i said politely these women accept their beatings with a simplicity worthy of all praise and far from considering themselves insulted admire the strength and energy of the man who can administer such eloquent rebukes in russia not only may a man beat his wife but it is laid down in the catechism and taught all boys at the time of confirmation as necessary at least once a week whether she has done anything or not for the sake of her general health and happiness i thought i observed a tendency in the man of wrath rather to gloat over these castigations pray my dear man i said pointing with my whip look at that baby moon so innocently peeping at us over the edge of the mist just behind that silver birch and don't talk so much about women and the things you don't understand what is the use of your bothering about fists and whips and muscles and all the dreadful things invented for the confusion of obstreperous wives you know you are a civilized husband and a civilized husband is a creature who has ceased to be a man and a civilized wife he asked bringing his horse close up beside me and putting his arm around my waist has she ceased to be a woman i should think so indeed she is a goddess and can never be worshipped and adored enough it seems to me he said that the conversation is growing personal i started off at a canter across the short springy turf the hirschwald is an enchanted place on such an evening when the mists lie low on the turf and overhead the delicate bare branches of the silver birches stand out clear against the soft sky while the little moon looks down kindly on the damp november world where the trees thicken into a wood the fragrance of the wet earth and rotting leaves kicked up by the horse's hooves fills my soul with delight i particularly love that smell it brings before me the entire benevolence of nature forever working death and decay so piteous in themselves into the means of fresh life and glory and sending up sweet odors as she works

Reviews

Beauty and outrage all in one chapter— wild… thank you!🙏🏼❤️