Old Spanish Gardens

Dona Ina Manuelita Echivarra had come to the time of life when waists were not to be mentioned. It took all the evidence of her name to convince you that her cheek had once known tints of the olive and apricot. Tio Juan, who sunned himself daily in her patio, had achieved the richness of weathered teak; his moustachios were whitened as with the rime that collects on old adobes sometimes near the sea-shore. But Dona Ina, who missed by a score of years his mark of the days of mañana por la mañana, was muddily dark, and her moustache—but one does not suggest such things of a lady, and that Dona Ina was a lady could be proved by a foot so delicately arched and pointed, an ankle so neat that there was not another like it in your acquaintance save the mate to it.

Once you had seen it peeping forth from under the black skirt—have not Castilian ladies worn black immemorially?—you did not require the assurance of Tio Juan that there was no one in her day could have danced la jota with Dona Ina Manuelita.

She would clack the castanets for you occasionally still, just to show how it was done, or with the guitar resting on the arm of her chair—laps were no more to be thought of than waists were—she would quaver a song, La Golindrina for choice, or La Noche esta Serena. But unquestionably Dona Ina’s time had gone by for shining at anything but conversation. She could talk, and never so fruitfully as when the subject was her garden.

A Spanish garden is a very intimate affair. It is the innermost under-garment of the family life. Dona Ina’s was walled away from the world by six feet of adobe, around the top of which still lingered the curved red tiles of Mission manufacture. It was not spoken of as the garden at all, it was the patio, an integral part of the dwelling. There was, in fact, a raw hide cot on the long gallery which gave access to it, and Dona Ina’s drawn-work chemises bleaching in the sun. The patio is a gift to us from Andalusia; it is more Greek than Oriental, and the English porch has about as much relation to it as the buttons on the back of a man’s coat to the sword-belt they were once supposed to accommodate. The patio is the original mud-walled enclosure of a people who preferred living in the open but were driven to protection; the rooms about three sides of it were an afterthought.

The Echivarra patio did not lack the indispensable features of the early California establishment, the raised grill or cooking platform, and the ramada, the long vine-covered trellis where one took wine with one’s friends, or the ladies of the family sat sewing at their interminable drawn work, enramada. The single vine which covered the twenty-foot trellis was of Mission stock, and had been planted by Dona Ina’s father in the year the Pathfinder came over Tejon Pass into the great twin valleys. In Dona Ina’s childhood a wine-press had stood in the corner of the patio where now there was a row of artichokes, which had been allowed to seed in order that their stiff silken tassels, dyed blue and crimson, might adorn the pair of china vases on either side the high altar. Dona Ina was nothing if not religious. In the corner of the patio farthest from the gallery, a fig-tree—this also is indispensable—hung over the tiled wall like a cloud. There was a weeping willow in the midst of the garden, and just outside, on either side the door, two great pepper trees of the very stock of the parent of all pepper trees in Alta California, which a sea captain from South America gave to the Padre at San Luis Rey. Along the east wall there were pomegranates.

A pomegranate is the one thing that makes me understand what a pretty woman is to some men—the kind of prettiness that was Dona Ina’s in the days when she danced la jota. The flower of the pomegranate has the crumpled scarlet of lips that find their excuse in simply being scarlet and folded like the petals of a flower; and then the fruit, warm from the sunny wall, faintly odorous, dusky flushed! It is so tempting when broken open—that sort opens of its own accord if you leave it long enough on the bush—the rich heart colour, and the pleasant uncloying, sweet, sub-acid taste. One tastes and tastes—but when all is said and done there is nothing to a pomegranate except colour and flavour, and at least if it does not nourish neither does it give you indigestion. That is what suggests the comparison; there are so many people who would like to find a pretty woman in the same category. Always when we sat together nibbling the rosy seeds, I could believe, even without the evidence of the ankles, that Dona Ina had had her pomegranate days. Only, of course, she would not have smelled so of musk and—there is no denying it—of garlic. Thick-walled old adobes of the period of the Spanish Occupation give off a faint reek of this compelling condiment at every pore, and as for the musk, it was always about the gallery in saucers and broken flower-pots.

And yet Dona Ina was sensitive to odours: she told me that she had had the datura moved from the place where her mother had planted it, to the far end of the patio, where after nightfall its heavy, slightly fetid perfume, unnoticeable by day, scented all the air. She added that she felt convicted by this aversion of a want of sentiment toward a plant whose wide, papery-white bells went by the name of “Angels’ trumpets.”