Читать книгу Intimate China: The Chinese as I Have Seen Them - Archibald Mrs. Little - Страница 9

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To those who have just arrived off a long sea voyage, as to those who from time to time come down from some roadless, gasless, shopless, but smell-ful up-country sojourn, there is one bit of Shanghai that is exceptionally refreshing and delightsome; and that is the garden by the river. At night, when the lamps are lit and mirrored in the water in rows and garlands of light, when the sea-breeze blows in freshly, and friends gather in the gardens, I have even heard it asserted by its greatest detractors, "Shanghai is as good as any other place by night."

THE BUBBLING WELL.

But it is in the mornings in winter, or in the before-dinner hours in summer, when the band plays, that you must go there, properly to know what the Shanghai Gardens are like. First and foremost, they are full of flowers—flowers with colours and scents. I do not know how many other people may be thus constituted, but there are occasions when I would as soon meet Keats' "Belle Dame Sans Merci" "alone and palely loitering" as wander through such unmitigated greenery as the Botanic Gardens at Singapore offer to the passing traveller, at least in the month of April. Kew Gardens are all too often depressing after the same fashion; though there one can always fall back upon the greenhouses to see

"How great Nature truly joys in red and green,

What sweet thoughts she thinks

In violets and pinks

And a thousand blushing hues made solely to be seen."

SOOCHOW CREEK, SHANGHAI.

Hongkong Gardens are very fair to see, resembling those of Babylon in being hanging gardens, gardens of terraces. But the way in which the Shanghai Gardens are fitted in between the Bund and the Soochow Creek, with the much-traversed Garden Bridge giving something definite to look at, and the river girdling it all—the river with its ever-moving panorama of swift ocean steamers and perky little steam-launches, and yachts and junks of deeply dyed sails, and brilliant coloured sanpans, all within a stone's-throw,—this situation makes the Shanghai Gardens a place not easily to be matched for passing away the after-sunshine hours. But flowers are the Shanghai Gardens' forte. They should be seen when they are all abloom with roses; or when lordly tulips dazzle the eye with their scarlet and gold, till it is fain to seek relief among those blue and white fairies dancing in the sunshine—sweet-scented hyacinths; or when the chrysanthemums are in season. All these flowers are seen against a background of glossy-leaved magnolias, with their pale sweet-scented blossoms, and oleander-trees, and pomegranates and acacias, all in their different seasons glorious with rose and scarlet or feathery pink and white blossoms.

At one season there is a borderful, but full to overflowing, as those borders almost always are, of the Japanese Lilium auratum, a large, almost arrogant, white lily, with a broad band of gold down each petal. A little while before, people went to the far garden across the road to see the fly-devouring flower, and inhale its fetid breath as of dead men's—not bones, certainly—and all uncleanness. Next the water-lilies claimed their attention, and the poetic rosy lotus flowers, one of which grew so fast, and with such precision of rectitude, that its bud forced its way right through the overshadowing fleshy leaf, and there expanded into a beautiful blossom at its leisure.

The rarely visited fernery at the end of this garden well deserves more frequent visits. There you will find that quaint Asplenium bulbiferum, that drops off little plants, that happen to be growing about its leaves like little accidents, and eventually develop into big plants, that again do likewise. There are also fine specimens of the Australian Platycerium, which you do not wonder to find called grande, so solid and woolly-feeling are its great lumps of leaf. That brown irregular mark underneath one of the abruptly broken-off leaves is not decay, but spores of seed. This, with the name of Alicorne, something like an inverted porcupine, reaching out all round hands, some with three fingers, some with six, sometimes with the fingers tipped underneath with seed, sometimes not, is said to have arrived looking for all the world like a withered cabbage. Then it sprouted and burgeoned; and now it is a thing of joy for ever, not to be in the least dwarfed or put into the shade by Australian tree-ferns of really treelike proportions growing close alongside.

But the fernery has nothing of the charm for me possessed by the large conservatory. There, after so many years, I met once again the friends of my childhood.

"The spirit culls

Unfaded amaranth, when wild it strays

Through the old garden ground of boyish days."

And there, when first I saw it, were all the many varieties of fancy geraniums, so seldom seen in England now, together with heliotropes, and begonias, and rosellias, and cinerarias, all growing in loveliest confusion, though not as I remember them, weighing each other down with their prodigal luxuriance in a garden border, in far-away Madeira, but intermixed with Chinese rockwork and ferns, and generally massed so as to show themselves off to the greatest advantage. In August that house is full of velvety gloxinias of richest hues, and again mixed with waxen begonias. Outside the conservatory are two of those very quaint Singapore cup-sponges, serving as flower-pots of Nature's making. And near by, apparently the pride of the gardener, to judge by its lavish supply of netting, is an apple-tree, with many apples peeping from underneath the netting, as yet quite green! But for all their greenness, one has been carried off by the birds already. Hence the netting.

But it is in the garden beside the river where the pleasantest sitting and sauntering is done. No one puts on best clothes to go there in the morning; only people who like to go are to be met there—none from a sense of duty. There the nurses love to congregate whilst their children play together, and add much life and animation to the scene. The nurses introduce a Chinese element; for otherwise Chinese, were it even Li Hung-chang himself, are excluded from the gardens, as now from Australia, solely because they are Chinese. This never can seem quite right. The Japanese nurses add an additional element of picturesqueness, with their dark-coloured, clinging kimonos, and curious gait, as do also Parsee merchants with their high, hard hats.

Yet sometimes I have regretted we do not have more of the flowers of China in Shanghai. What lovely bursts of blossom one sees at times in the interior of China! One February I wrote from Chungking:

"Camellias of infinite variety are to be seen already. It is surprising to notice how many different kinds there are. Perhaps the loveliest is more like a blush-rose than a camellia—delicate coral pink, shading off into white round the edges of the somewhat crumpled petals. Since the Chinese seem now to devote no care to them, nor at all to know how many varieties there are, it is puzzling to think how they arose."

GUILD GARDEN AT KIANGPEI.

By Mrs. Archibald Little.

Whilst on March 21st of another year, I wrote at the time:

"The thermometer is now in the sixties. Our plum-trees done flowering; orchids coming on victoriously; tree-tulips and magnolias like big bouquets; and camellias only slowly waning. Probably nowhere could camellias be seen in greater luxuriance than here, where there are endless varieties; and a blossom of a peony-camellia, loose-petalled and very double, on being measured the other day, revealed a circumference of fifteen and a quarter inches. Great branches of judas-tree and pink peach blossom adorn our rooms, together with a bright-yellow flower that grows in great profusion, and that used to be called New Zealand flax. From all this you can fancy how hothouselike our atmosphere feels just now."

Later in the summer the peonies are the great pride of the Chinese; whilst the scarlet dragon-boat flower is, perhaps, the most remarkable of all the Chinese flowers from being all scarlet together. But it is useless to try to enumerate; for the highest authority in Kew Gardens told me once that in no part of the world was there a more abundant and varied flora than in the Ichang Gorges, which are also the land of the butterfly. It is, however, a mistake, I believe, to think China is called the flowery land from the number of its flowers, the Chinese word translated "flowery" meaning also "varicoloured."