Part 27

I found my precious seedlings drooping and Griggs ready to depart for his tea.

I love my own tea, so a fellow-feeling made me kind.

"But come back, Griggs, for some watering must be done."

"I can't come no more to-night, oi 'ave to see to things a bit up at 'ome."

"Griggs "--and my voice held dignified rebuke--"you are gardener here, and these flowers are your first duty."

"There ain't no gettin' round with all them little plants wot you've started. I did give 'em a watering two days ago!"

"Two days ago! Don't you want your tea every day?"

"Maybe it'll rain soon, and that'll pull 'em round. They ain't human critturs. Don't you fuss over them, miss. Oi knows their ways. Bless you, I've been a gardener these forty years."

At this I rose.

And what had been the result? Would he care to have his gardening capacity judged by the dearth that reigned at the Rectory? Did the heavy weed crops speak well for his industry? Did the underground interlacement of that pernicious ground-elder do him credit? Did the roses, the jasmine, etc., etc. My pent-up indignation overflowed and Griggs had the full benefit.

The only impression I conveyed was that "Miss Mary was takin' on in a terrible unchristian spirit." Clerk Griggs never had a doubt of his own uttermost fulfilment of the law. In his opinion, "young ladies should play the pianny and leave gardening to them as knows." Griggs meant to go home. I felt this was a decisive moment.

"You will come back and do the necessary watering," I said, "and I shall be here to see it is done; you quite understand?"

With this I walked away, and Griggs came back. I got his Reverence to support me, and we decided to give an extra hour's rest in the middle of the day and insist on the watering, without which all previous efforts are rendered, null and void.

* * * * *

A useful little book, procured for the modest sum of ninepence, gave me a more intimate knowledge of the dwellers in my garden. It is a plain little book, though it reads like a fairy tale, with its stories of marriage-customs and the wind and bees and flying insects as lovers. Straightforward and interesting reading, and to those who begin to desire more knowledge of their plant life, highly to be recommended is this Story of the Plants, by Grant Allen. For surely if you love your flowers it will not be from your own more or less selfish point of view that you will regard them. Their aims and objects will interest you; their growth and evolution be of importance; and, to come round again to one's own advantage, what is best for them must also be best for the garden, since flowers in their full beauty is the gardener's object, and the plants' too.

But the plants go further; they wish to end in seed. All their fine show, their sweetness and light, is with this object in view; and here I for one must come in, in heartless fashion, and thwart them. My scissors in those summer days were as much employed in cutting off dying bloom as in selecting fresh ones. Not a sweet-pea, not an antirrhinum, not a rose must hang fading on its stem. For I must lure my plants on to further flowering and prevent the feeling of "duty done" and a fine set of seeds with which they would fain wind up their summer's career. And it is a business, this chopping off of old heads. "No strength to go that way, if you please," I said to my flowers; "keep it all for blossoms and growing purposes, and I promise that your seed shall not cease from the earth, in spite of your particular thwarted efforts." When I happen to want a seed pod preserved, I mean to label it with brilliant worsted, but my garden must have grown indeed before that good time comes.

The seedlings which, sown in the open, were now rewarding Jim's matutinal thinnings-out, were a comfort and encouragement. The intensely blue cornflowers furnished many a dinner-table, and though they did not face the wind with all the backbone desirable, I had not staked them, they formed a very good background to the less tall pinky-white godetias, and these, too, in July were a boon to those Others. They last very well in water, and, if diligently cut and not allowed to seed, they continue a fine show of bloom into the early autumn.

The Shirley poppies were pure joy. Sunlight or moonlight they were a feast for the eyes; but, N.B., only those which had been properly thinned out and cared for. Some had escaped this process, and the result was invariably miserable little starved plantlets, who would have been cut as poor relations could they have been seen by their fine, stately, well-developed, gorgeously-attired sisters in a patch of ground that they beautified with every shade of pink, and salmon, and white, and rose. So dainty, too, were the bright petals, like crumpled satin, delicately gauffered at the edges; and what matter that their day was brief, as befits such delicate beauties. There were more and more to follow; green bud on bud hanging their small heads among the sage-green leaves, until the time came for them too to "come out" and reign as beauties for a space as long as a butterfly's life.

There was a chorus of praise from the Others.

"Now, why don't you grow more of those?"

"Why did you not fill the two round beds with these? They make a much finer show!"

"Are they very difficult to grow, or very expensive? Why not more?"

"Don't they last? Won't they come again? Oh, but I would make them!"

"You shall do the thinning out and watering," said Jim, grimly, while I tried, but quite in vain, to explain that permanence was the chief thing needed by the two round beds, and that my yellow design would go on.

"They aren't half so effective," the Others murmured, "but of course you will have it your own way!"

* * * * *

The mignonette failed me; a few straggling plants and no bloom was all that packet did for me. I thought it grew as a weed everywhere, and my soil suits weeds! But I cannot master the mystery of what happens to some things below ground. The anemones never gave a sign of life. "They've rotted, that's what they've done," said Griggs, sagaciously, as he dug the spot where they had been buried and found no trace of anything. I intend to try again. Someone said damp had that effect on their roots, so next time for a more open, more sunny spot; but maybe that will prove too dry.

Those hot days of July and August! Alas and alas! how I and my flowers suffered from the "too-dry." With the exception of my blazing yellow beds and my nurslings for next year, which, after my interview with Griggs, did receive a daily draught, my other flowers lifted withered faces to a piteously sunny sky and dwindled away into little dried-up sticks, all for the lack of water. A drop now and then is worse than useless; it only brings their eager roots hastily to the watered surface, and there the strong sun catches them and they are withered up for good and all.