Part 3

SEPTEMBER 16, 1899

Few forms of frailty are more lamentable than vanity, and few variations of vanity have for some time back seemed to me more stamped with puerility than garden vanity. Can anything be imagined more childish, or less worthy of a reasonable human being, than for A or Z to pride themselves on the fact that whereas Horificus globuratus fl. pl. flourishes like a weed in their gardens, it entirely refuses to grow in those of B or X, despite the fact that B and X have remade the greater part of their borders, in a spirit of slavish emulation? The same argument applies, even more forcibly, to other details, such as the making of cuttings, or layers, the carrying of tender plants through the winter, the satisfactory growing of vegetables, and so forth; operations which ought to be approached in the largest and most enlightened spirit, and never for a moment made the subject of mere petty self-satisfaction, or of a narrow and arrogant self-laudation.

This point being thoroughly settled, I now proceed to draw out a list of plants grown successfully from seed by ourselves during the last three years; premising that this is only our first list, chiefly of rock-plant seedlings, and that I shall have another, much longer, and much more important one to draw up when the right time comes!

Alyssum alpestre. ” montanum. ” saxatile. Anemone Blanda. ” Japonica. ” fulgens. Aquilegia alpina. ” cœrulea. ” canadensis. ” Jaeschkaui. ” vulgaris. ” vulgaris var. grandiflora alba. Arenaria montana. Antirrhinum (various). Armeria Laucheana. ” vulgaris. ” vulgaris var. rosea. ” vulgaris var. alba. Aster alpinus. Aubrietia deltoides. ” Frœbelli. ” Leichtlini. Campanula Carpatica. ” garganica. Campanula pumila. ” turbinata. ” rotundifolia. ” rotundifolia var. alba. Cerastium tomentosum. Cheiranthus alpinus. Dianthus alpinus. ” cæsius. ” cruentus. ” deltoides. ” deltoides var. albus. Draba aizoides. Dryas octopetala. Erinus alpinus. Erysimum pumilum. Erodium Manescavi. ” macradenium. Geranium cinereum. ” sanguineum. ” striatum. Gentiana acaulis. ” verna. Geum montanum. Gypsophilla prostrata. Helianthemum (various). Heuchera sanguinea. Ionopsidium acaule (annual). Linaria alpina. ” anticaria. ” cymbalaria. Linum alpinum. Lychnis alpina. Myosotis alpestris. ” azorica. Meconopsis cambrica. Ononis rotundifolia. Oxalis floribunda. Phlox amœna } ” setacea } cuttings ” subulata } easier. Potentilla nepalenses. Papaver alpinum. ” nudicaule. ” ” var. miniatum. ” pilosum. Primula Cashmeriana. Primula cortusoides. ” denticulata. ” japonica. ” rosea (self-sown). Ramondia pyrenaica. Ranunculus montanus. Saponaria ocymoides. ” ocymoides var. splendens. Saxifraga (various; division easier). Silene acaulis. ” alpestris. ” Schafta. Statice maritima. ” ” var. carnea. ” ” var. alba. Thymus (various; division again easier). Tunica saxifraga. Veronica prostrata. Vesicaria utriculata.

From this list I have carefully omitted all our defeats. Victors I observe, invariably do so!

SEPTEMBER 25, 1899

The gardener seems to pass amongst his kinsfolk and acquaintance for a rather feeble, but more or less meditative sort of man. His trade is held, I perceive, to be productive of some of the milder forms of philosophy. Like the angler he enjoys a rather supercilious consideration on that account from his more violently active brethren.

“You are such a patient fellow,” they say. “You don’t care how long you stay pottering over one small spot. Such quiet ways of going on would never do for us!”

This may be the case, but I cannot say that I have personally observed, either in myself, or other gardeners, any tendency to exhibit more placidity over the cares and crosses of a garden, than over any of the other cares and crosses of existence. As for philosophy, a certain sort of cheap moralising a garden is certainly rather productive of. It sprouts unheeded along the walks, and may be extracted with greater facility than most of the weeds. That “life is short”; that “flesh is grass”; that man groweth up in the spring time, and is cut down in the autumn--such innocent and obvious sprouts of morality as these may certainly be gathered in a good many of its neglected corners. With regard to all the larger and more vital growths of philosophy, I am afraid that they require to be successfully sought for upon wider and more strenuous battlefields.

Lessons of course may be gathered in a garden, as in most other places. For the owner, the most wholesome of these is perhaps that he never really is its owner at all. His garden possesses him--many of us know only too well what it is to be possessed by a garden--but he never, in any true sense of the word, possesses it. He remains one of its appanages, like its rakes or its watering-pots; a trifle more permanent, perhaps, than an annual, but with no claim assuredly to call himself a perennial.

In no garden is this fact more startlingly the case than in those that we have, as we fatuously call it, “made” ourselves. For the owners of such a garden, the precariousness of their tenure is the first thing, I think, that is forced upon their attention. And the reason is simple. In older ones, the reign of the primitive has, to a greater or less extent, ceased, and the reign of the artificial has become the rule. The Wild still flourishes in them, but it has become a mere pariah, a vegetable outcast. Chickweed on the walks, nettles in the shrubbery, daisies in the lawn. “What does this mean? Who gave you leave to be here? Away with you at once, intruders that you are!” that is the habitual standpoint. Now in a new garden, especially a garden that has been won out of the adjacent woodlands, the sense of intrusion is felt--ought to be felt--to be all the other way. It is the so-called owners who are here the trespassers; the unwarrantable intruders; the squatters of a few months’, at most of a few years’, standing. The bracken, the honeysuckles, the briers, the birds--these are the established proprietors; it is they that can show all the documents of original possession. We may have to eject them, but at least it should be done respectfully; with such compensation for disturbance as would be adjudged in any properly constituted agrarian court in the Universe.

Only yesterday these reflections were forced upon my mind as I found myself, for the third time engaged in a life and death struggle with the bracken, which has once more invaded our newly made flower borders, and threatens to gather their whole contents bodily into its capacious grasp. This is, and always must be, a peculiarly humiliating sort of struggle to be engaged in, and not the less so if one remains temporarily the victor. In the first place, one is deeply conscious of the vandalism of trying to get rid of an object immeasurably more beautiful than any of the plants one thrusts it aside for. In the second place, there is a sense of absurdity and futility, which is strongly upon one all the time. Mrs. Partington, in her efforts at sweeping back the Atlantic Ocean with her broom, was hardly a more conspicuous instance of misplaced energy than such attempts to suppress and control the exuberant green waves, the abounding vitality, of our own magnificent, indomitable bracken.

Even where humiliating struggles like these have ceased to be necessary, how slight an excrescence this whole business that we call ownership really is; how strong, how deeply rooted the state of things which it has momentarily superseded. Let the so-called owner relax his self-assertiveness for ever so short a period; let him and his myrmidons depart for a while upon their travels, and how swiftly the whole fabric rushes remorselessly back to its original condition. And why not? What can be more absolutely to be expected? Nor need we even stop at the garden, the farm, the house, or any similar chattel. Even ourselves, sophisticated little creatures though we be, in how many ways we remain the accessories, rather than the masters, of our environment? For a time, especially in towns, we manage to conceal this truth from ourselves. We pretend that we have remodelled matters to our liking; that Nature has become our follower; that our law, not hers, runs through the planet; that we set the tune, and that she merely plays it.

Oh rash, and hurrying ignorance! Put the holder of so untenable a doctrine alone, for ever so short a time, especially in the winter, in the solitary depths of the country, and how soon a perception of his or her own utter transitoriness will begin to break through the thinly formed crust of the new, and the superimposed. Let him lift his garden latch, and step out beyond it into the open country. Let him saunter alone in the woods after dusk. Let him walk across the solitary, blackened heather. Let him look down upon the floods, lace-making over the lowlands. Let him--without taking so much trouble as this--merely lean out of his window after dusk, amid the thickening shadows, and he must be of a remarkably unimpressionable turn of mind if the sense of his own shadowiness, his own inherent transitoriness, is not the clearest, strongest, and most convincing of all his sensations.

Thus vanity provides its own solution, and the little inflated soul is driven into puncturing its own proudly swelling balloon. We discover--sometimes with no little dismay--that it is not alone in our flower-beds that the wild and the tame, the temporary and the permanent, the real and the artificial, meet, jostle, and rub shoulders together. Sir Primitive is a remarkably difficult person to escape from. His blood still courses unheeded through our own veins, and he is as much a part of ourselves as he is a part of the most sophisticated of our plants or our animals. We may imagine that we have left him behind us, and outgrown his teachings, and the very next day something will occur to show us that he is at our elbows all the time, as strong, as fresh, and as absolutely unaffected by any little modern innovations as he ever was.

SEPTEMBER 26, 1899

Yet, although undoubtedly our ancestor, Sir Primitive stands a good way back on the family tree, and other influences have grown up since his time to disturb his teachings. The fear of becoming too tidy, for instance, does not at first sight seem to be a very reasonable fear. It has not been imputed to many people as a failing, especially to those who happen to have been born to the westward of St. George’s Channel! Nevertheless there are moments when a wild passion for tidiness, a perfect thirst and craving for order, seems to sweep across the soul like a wave; when everything else that one habitually cares for is flung back, and overwhelmed before it, even as the hosts of Pharaoh were flung back, and overwhelmed before the cold, subduing waters of the Red Sea.

We are all the children of our age; there is no getting over that fact; heirs of a hardly won civilisation, let us call ourselves Wild Wilfulness, or any other law-defying name, as much as we please. Yearning to show that our spirits are above all trammels, that we are as free as the birds in the air, we nevertheless all sit in identical armchairs, eat the food the cooks provide us, and in most other respects exhibit about as much originality as so many stair-rods.

It is only necessary to consider what happens every day of the week in the garden to perceive that this is the case. We have adopted the most independent line possible; we have vowed that our gardens shall be natural ones, or nothing. We adore flowery wildernesses, we declare. We want our plants to grow as Nature intended them to do, and not as the hireling gardener does. We intend to put a limit to the eternal bolstering up of our soil with all sorts of extraneous elements; above all we will have nothing to say to the clipping of our shrubs into unreal shapes, nor yet to the planting of our bulbs, and other flowering plants into lines, squares, and parallelograms, but all shall be a melting and a blending of one harmonious form into another; every detail, as far as the eye can reach, being subordinated to the larger and more important spirit of the landscape as a whole.

So we say! And yet, after the flag of freedom has been thus ostentatiously raised, what happens? As often as not we find ourselves, by the logic of facts, and by the realities of the situation, forced slowly to retreat, as other and equally eminent strategists have been forced before us. A flowery wilderness is delightful, but unless its owner is content with the flowers that grow in it by nature, or a few, very cautious additions, his flowery wilderness is apt after a time to become a wilderness, minus the flowers. Then perhaps a reaction sets in. A sense of failure gradually overtakes the too ardent amateur. The reins of authority drop more and more listlessly from his hands; until at last he lets them fall altogether, and, with a smile of kindly pity, the momentarily dispossessed professional once more resumes full, and henceforth undivided sway.

From so humiliating a finale may all the kindly divinities that watch over gardens deliver ourselves! Nevertheless there have been moments when such a fate has seemed to draw near, and even to look one in the eyes. Only three days ago I was engaged in that breathless struggle with the bracken. For the last two, aided by Cuttle and his assistant, I have been fighting ankle-deep against a perfect forest of couch-grass, which had practically overwhelmed the whole of our nursery-garden, helped rather than hindered by the fence, with which we had innocently hoped to keep back, not alone rabbits, but every other trespasser.

Worse than the conduct of the couch-grass, because of a certain personal element in it, has been the conduct of the rose-campion. Now I have been exceedingly kind to that rose-campion. Again and again I have intervened to rescue it, when it was on the point of being rooted out, and consigned to the dust-heap. Only last spring I carried its roots by hundreds with my own hands, and re-established them in a special reservation ground, where they might spread unmolested over a good half-acre or so of copse. What has been the result? They have indeed clothed their allotted space, but, not content with this, they have burst like a horde of Ojibeway Indians, or some such aborigines, out of their reservation, across the frontiers of civilisation, sending out myriads of seedlings ahead of them, like a flight of skirmishers, and are now nearly as numerous collectively, and far more luxuriant individually, in the nursery, than they are in the copse itself!

Incidents like these wound one, and are more trying for that reason to the amateur gardener than to the professional one, who probably regards them as only to be expected. I am far from saying that they constitute a sufficient reason for surrender, but they certainly seem to need the aid of a higher quality than mere secular doggedness, to enable one to grapple with them as one ought. It is moreover such occurrences as these that produce that extraordinary thirst for order, that very unlooked-for passion for tidiness, which I just now noted. After a day or two passed in such struggles as these one begins to understand the pride of the colonist in pure, speckless Ugliness; in beautifully clean, naked earth, varied by straight lines of split-wood fences, or the like. I have not as yet reached that point myself, and am glad to feel that I can still tolerate Nature. All the same a sort of nurseryman’s attitude towards everything tainted with wildness is fast gaining upon me, and unless I can check both it, and this overweening love of tidiness while there is time, I plainly foresee that there will shortly be nothing else left!

SEPTEMBER 29, 1899

“Fountains; they are a great beauty and refreshment, but pools mar all, and make the garden unwholesome, full of flies and frogs.”

For two persons who have just been at some pains to establish a pool in their grounds, this is a hard saying! That the judgment has much to support it, apart from the weight of its utterer, I cannot deny. At the same time a better case can, I think, be made out for the culprits than may appear at first sight. Fountains in a copse, be they never so limpid, never so sparkling, would be stamped with an unendurable stamp of artificiality. Pools on the other hand, though there are certainly not many in these copses of ours, are at all events not inconceivable. In the present case we flatter ourselves that the particular spot we have selected for our pool was intended by Nature to contain one, and nothing but the incurable aridity of these dry hillsides hindered her from carrying out that intention. Where every drop of water has to be watched over like hid treasure, it may be doubted whether the amount that we can afford to have trickling through it in summer will suffice to hinder the water in it from becoming yellow, brown, or green. That is a point however which remains for future discovery. Our main preoccupation at present rests with the planting of the edges of our pool, especially with the clothing of the bank which, rising to the north of it, will absorb most of the midday sun, and will require therefore the most attention.

In its present condition a good deal of that bank looks bare to desperation, yet I strongly suspect that summer will prove it to have the reverse fault of being crowded with a dense, and inextricably entangled mass of vegetation. Fortunately half its present inhabitants, being biennials, will depart after the first season, when, the prospect clearing, the permanent inhabitants will stand forth confest and visible.

Omitting this temporary part of its furniture, I will jot the others down as they stand, which will enable us to see what we have, and also to form a better idea of what we still lack.