The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT Meditations In the Spring By William E. Bohn The other morning, I sat in our north room reading my Times. It was a sad business. Reports of the McCarthy mess began with big...
...A thrush from deep in the woods and a mocking bird from a tree above the wall garden were joining their songs in an unpremeditated composition that melted the hard structure of the world into a continuous and unified ecstacy...
...Long before steam engines or atomic power plants had been invented...
...As I looked at it that morning...
...the design had appeared...
...Reports of the McCarthy mess began with big headlines on the front page and ran back into the editorials...
...Together with the violets and other wild flowers brought in from the forest, these plants represented beauty in the early American home...
...The preservation and development of these un-utilitarian aspects of our life was exclusively due to the patient interest of the women...
...The rich brown and red of the fieldstone were divided into strata by flowers which grew up from the soil or drooped down from the coping...
...Below, nearest the ground, were rows of iris—for the most part, rich purple...
...India and Arabia were sending us the plants which make for beauty...
...Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that birds were singing...
...When I listened, I heard pouring in through the windows such a duet as no composer could write and no orchestra could play...
...But someone had planned it...
...As the frontier moved through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, four flowering plants moved with it: the lilac, the snowball, the bleeding-heart and the old-fashioned white rose...
...Each was singing to lure his own lady love...
...I had had little to do with it...
...The bloody tragedy of Dienbienphu was nearing its inevitable climax...
...I felt that in all the years I had never really seen that wall garden...
...I was turning over, especially, my memories of American gardens, the ones I had known in my childhood...
...Even the music had been planned for...
...I had merely planted this or that where I was told...
...While the world reported in the Times persisted year after year in ruthlessness and brutality, this little private world had developed forms of beauty...
...As our people moved west, the hard-working mothers and wives, in addition to all of their other responsibilities, took it upon themselves to preserve and distribute the seeds and bulbs which carried the germs of beauty...
...We have had abundant rains to nourish the blossoms and exceptionally cool weather to prolong the blooming period...
...I can recall many springs in many lovely spots, but I never knew another one as lovely as this one has been in Delaware...
...I do not recall that anywhere, in any essay, song or historical account, I have come upon anyone who gives them credit for this great service to our national life...
...In the end...
...All winter, we had maintained our Food and Agricultural Organization for the birds...
...the pink of the Japanese cherries formed a solid, billowing mass...
...When I had got this far in my maundering...
...By this time, I was thinking of the gardens of the world and how they have come to be...
...There is a simple reason...
...We ship seeds, fertilizers, steam engines...
...I wondered...
...My attention began to center on Edith's wall garden, on the forms and colors of spring...
...We are busy now-sending things to the Orient...
...China...
...It is worthwhile to recall that all four of the flowering plants which I enumerated as being the ornaments of our frontier came to us from the East...
...a rather pleasant thought occurred...
...And above and behind the wall and pushing up toward the sky...
...It was a great orchestra, with the two stars out on the apron of the stage taking the chief applause...
...I am sure that they had no notion of cooperation...
...With now and then a change in quality due to the dropping out of a performer or the entrance of a new one, the music went on and on...
...The women were the guardians of the flowers...
...I looked...
...What we are conducting now is a sort of reverse Lend-Lease...
...I listened...
...As far as I could see in all directions, the air was filled with the liveliness of bird motions...
...Flowers which usually last but a few days have beautified the world for weeks...
...The Geneva Conference was getting nowhere—hardly even getting started...
...And over it all dear Mr...
...Justice Douglas suggests that we send an atomic power plant...
...There were song sparrows, white-throated sparrows, golden-winged woodpeckers, cardinals...
...By now, I was lost to the Times, the Geneva Conference and the McCarthy mess...
...In the spring, they were singing their thanks to us...
...Dulles was fluttering and stuttering and softly urging that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds...
...There were no nurserymen in those days—no professional gardeners and, as far as we knew, no books about gardens...
...Midway between top and bottom lay a cloud of wisteria blooms of such a dainty shade that I would never dare to give it a name...
...As I listened, I began to hear other, more modest voices...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 21
