It is a beautiful custom that we put flowers on the graves of our dead, and is more fraught with meaning than many know, for it is as a symbol resurrection that they are so placed, inasmuch as the flower that seems to perish perishes only for a while but comes up again as beautiful, and though it die into the soil it reappears all fresh and lovely with no sign of the soil to mar its beauty. But it is more beautiful to plant the graves of those we love with flowers, as then we symbolise that they are alive in our hearts and for ever flowering in our thoughts. And the shadow of the church over them is but the shadow of the wing of sleep. All our lives, said a French King, we are learning how to die; and when the time comes we cannot help but think of that Garden of Sleep where we must be placed along with other sleepers, there to wait.

In England it has long been a habit to plant the more melancholy trees and shrubs in churchyards, as Yew trees, Myrtle, Bay, and the evergreen Oak. In this way a sense of gloom was intended, much at variance with the Christian doctrine that proclaims a victory over death. But instead of this effect of sombreness the presence of these evergreens gives an extraordinary air of quiet peace, of something perpetually alive though at rest. Often and often I have taken my bread and cheese into a country churchyard, and have sat down on the grass and leaned my back against some venerable monument, and there lunched. I take it that this is no disrespect to the dead, that the living should join company with them even to the extent of spreading crumbs of bread over their resting places. I take it that the smoke of a pipe is no sacriligeous sight in the neighbourhood of tombs; for it is but a friendly spirit prompts it, and no violation of the repose of these dead people. No; no more than does the distant roar of the ship’s guns at practice disturb these quiet souls.

In more than one churchyard there are the stocks remaining where malefactors were placed, and so seated were they that all the good folks passing in and out of church were forced to pass, almost to touch the feet of the wrongdoers as they trod the path to the porch. One place I know in particular where the stocks remain, and a goodly Yew tree having grown thick and strong behind the seat forms a fine back to lean against. From here I have surveyed the landscape over the tops of grey old tombs, now all aslant over the heads of the sleepers. Here the squire of 1640 rests facing the Cornfields once he cut and sowed and stacked. There a lady, Christabel by name, faces the flagged walk to the stone porch. There is grass over them now, and the merriest Daisies grow, and Moss covers the laughing cherubims, and Lichen has crept into the words that set forth their marvellous number of virtues. Spring comes here just as it comes to other gardens, and the trees bud just as daintily, and the young grass is every bit as green, and the first Crocus lights his lamp, and the Dandelion flares as bravely with his crown of gold.

There are these quaint quiet churchyards over the length and breadth of England, where the dead lie so comfortably under the fresh English grass. Some are full of flowers planted by loving hands; Roses grow beside the church and shower their petals over the grey stones of the tombs, and Spring flowers have been set in the grass to nod beside the headstones sleepily. Others are bare and bleak, standing exposed to wind and weather on a hillside, with stone walls about them, and a church buffeted by every storm; yet these are sometimes most peaceful gardens, and Ling and Gorse scent the air, and twisted Fir trees, and gnarled old Pines, all leaning over, wind-bent, stand guard over the sleepers; bees busy in the heather, lizards green as emeralds, and the bright butterflies give the feeling of incessant life; they give that glorious feeling that the great pulse still beats; that Nature all alive is yet at one with the dead.

The gardener of these our dead, what a queer man is he! What a peculiar profession he follows! To bury is but to plant the dead that they may flower into that new life. And he is usually a humorous character, a man of well-chosen words who surveys his garden of headstones and has a word for each. He is no respecter of persons, since in the tomb all are equal, and to see him at work preparing a fresh place for burial is to think that the gravedigger’s work is no melancholy task. In the heat of summer, half buried in the grave himself, he sings some old catch as he shovels up the earth. “Poor little lamb,” he may say of a dead child; “well, thee’ll bide here against our Lord wants ’e.”

I have seen such a man, his clothes brown with grave earth, a Daisy between his lips (something to mumble, as he does not smoke on duty), and watched his face as the lytchet gate clicks. His daughter, a flower herself, is bringing his dinner, which he eats cheerfully leaning against one side of the grave for support. This, with a thrush singing somewhere, and the wheeze of the church clock, and the frivolous screams of swifts make death a comfortable picture.

Here we have Nature triumphant, the Earth with her children asleep in her lap. But a monstrosity has crept into our graveyards—God’s Gardens—and in place of flowers with their joy, their symbolical message of resurrection, one sees ghastly things of bead work and of wax, enclosed in hideous glass cases with a mourning card in the centre of them. This is not seemly nor decent in a place where the Earth reclaims her children, where nothing ugly should be. It is within the reach of everyone to buy fresh flowers and to renew those flowers from time to time, and they should be left, if they are placed there, to die. Away then with glass jam-jars filled with water, with bead wreaths, and all ill-taste and hideous distortion of grief, and let us have our offerings made as if to the living, for our dead live in our hearts, nor torture them with horrid and distressing objects on their graves. I would have every churchyard a garden kept by the pence of those who have laid their dead there to rest; and I would have flowers and shrubs planted and paths made, and seats placed, so that all should be kept fair and bright.

In Switzerland, where I was once, I saw the most delightful graveyard I have ever seen. The church stood on a bluff overlooking a river, a swift running noisy river that sang songs of the mountains and of the big fields and of the bustling towns, a dashing river alive with music, loving the sound of its own voice. Above was this church and its yard, and a little below, the village. The church was low-built and old, with a wooden tower on which a cock stood guard; and it was whitewashed, and toned by sun and rain, and a clock in the tower marked the passage of time, solemnly, “tick-tock; tick-tock.” Along the south wall outside the church was a bench, and a Wisteria over the bench, and a little jutting roof over the Wisteria. This bench, time-worn as all else was time-worn (as the wall was polished by several generations of backs), faced the graveyard. If you sat on this bench you might take a glance at a man’s life there in one long look, for there was a mill near by, and an Inn, and a shoemaker’s, and a forge—the blacksmith was the undertaker, too, any one could see from the fact that he was making a coffin. Besides these you could see mountains covered with snow and wreathed in clouds; great stretches of country, a wood, and the river. What more can there be, saving only a sight of the sea?

But what struck me most forcibly was the appearance of the graveyard, for each grave had flowers growing by it, and a little weeping willow planted to hang over it, and there was something so pleasant to me in this that I was filled with delight of the place as I sat there. It was a real garden, so fresh and bright with flowers and with ugly bead-wreaths as are so usual in foreign countries, and now, alas! in our own. And it was so homely to think of the elders of that place who sat looking at the graves and meditating—very likely—on the spot where they themselves would lie. I remembered then, as I sat there, the description of the graveyard in David Copperfield, and the words came almost exact into my head.

“One Sunday night my mother reads to Peggotty and me in there, how Lazarus was raised from the dead. And I am so frightened that they are afterwards obliged to take me out of bed, and show me the quiet churchyard out of the bedroom window, with the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon.

“There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere as the grass of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother’s room, to look out at it; and I see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and think within myself, ‘Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that it can tell the time again?’”

Even as I remembered those words I looked up and noticed a sun-dial on the wall of the church just over my head, and, curiously enough, just that peace that those words give to me seemed to come to me from the sight of the sun-dial, and the repose of the scene before me.

It is good, I think, to meditate on these things, and all who garden, who are, as it were, in touch with the soil, must sometimes let their thoughts linger over the other gardens where the dead are, and where Spring comes as blithely as in any other spot.

Although the gardens that are what are called “show-places,” tended and nursed by a staff of men, do not bring one into such close contact with earth as earth, still in the greater garden is a peace no other place knows but the graveyard. This is no morbid thought, nor over introspective, but, I think, makes me feel more sanely and not so fearfully of death. In the same way do the poor keep their grave clothes ready and neat in a drawer, with pennies sewn up in linen to put over their tired eyes, and everything decent for the putting away of their bodies. So does the wood of trees enclose them, and good and polished wood in the shape of coffin-stools is there to bear them up. And I have heard many talk of how they wished to lie facing the porch of the church; and others who wished they might be near by the gate so that folks passing in and out might remember them.

This may seem a subject not quite fitted to a book which is to tell of the Charm of Gardens, and yet I am sure lovers of gardens will know just what I mean. To think of and know of the peace and beauty of certain graveyards is to gain consolation and quietude such as the knowledge and thought of all beauty gives. What a wonderful thing it is that we can paint the earth with flowers, set here crimson, and there orange, here purple, and there blue; range our colours from white to cream, to deep cream, to all the shades of all the colours, to deep impenetrable purple, more black than black, like the dusky eyes of anemonies.

When it is night, and “the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon,” the thousand thousand Daisies of the fields have closed their eyes, and the Buttercups’ golden glaze is mellowed by the moonlight, still there are flowers gay in the sunshine somewhere in the world. Though the garden is chequered in the blue-green light and heavy shadows, and the owls hoot in their melancholy voices, still there are birds somewhere in the world singing. And though, across the way behind the wall, white in the moonlight, lies the dark churchyard, and all is very still there, still, I think, they, whose names are carved there on the stones, are not in the dark, and do not know the damp and mouldy earth, but are somewhere in some world more light and beautiful than this.

The solemnity of this type of thought is seldom given to me by flowers; it is more the breath of trees, and the deep places of a wood, that gives one this feeling of hush and peace. Flowers are gay, stately, exuberant, simple, but always joyous, as witness the pert questioning faces of Pansies, and the languorous droop of Roses, the stately propriety of Lilies, the romantic splendour of purple Clematis, and the passionate beauty of the coloured Anemonies. In a garden are all moods, from that given by a school of white Pinks, to the masterly exactitude of the Red-Hot Poker, or the limpid and very virginal appearance of Lavender. Youth itself comes in full blood with the blossom on fruit trees; the slim elegance of childhood with the Narcissus and the Daffodil. Daintiness herself is in Columbine; maidenly virtue is in the hang-head Snowdrop. Zinnias have the melodious colours of the East; Jasmine and Honeysuckle hold the spirit of the porch. Sweet Peas, all laughing and chattering, are like a bevy of young girls; while the proud Hyacinth, erect up his stem, his hair tight curled, his breath strong and sweet, is to me like some hero of the days of William of Orange, a hero in a curled full-bottomed wig. The Iris has the poetry of river banks; the Sunflower peering over a cottage garden wall, spells rustic ease. Fuschias I count very Victorian, like ladies in crinolines; Geraniums also are prim and most polite. Wallflowers I place as gipsy-like, a scent somehow of the wind on the road; while the Snapdragons have a military spirit and grow in brightly uniformed regiments. Carnations are courtiers, elegant, superbly dressed, yet with a refinement all their own; and Larkspurs, like charity schools of children, all dressed alike and out for a walk, on the tall stalk. Primulas, deep-coloured or pale, I feel somehow to be the flowers of memory; and Sweet Sultans are like Scots lords in foreign clothes. There are a hundred others, all with some little fanciful meaning to those who grow them, but all, I think, are full of joy; no flower is sad. It is the trees, the voices whispering in whose leaves bring deeper thoughts.

There are those who say that happiness would come could we but find the Blue Rose; and others that there are places one must need find like El Dorado; and others that a magic charm will bring us the joy we desire. They are all wrong. Happiness lies in the Rose at your hand, El Dorado is at your door, the magic charm!—listen, there is a thrush singing.