Part 2

It has been a satisfaction to us to find that a moderate upturning of the soil does not apparently disturb those inmates of it that we wish to retain. Bluebells and bracken both have their roots at a depth to which the spade in these operations need not penetrate, while to superimposed earth they appear to be quite indifferent. The spring that followed our first operations of this kind bluebells flowered better than usual, as if glad to be freed from some of their troublesome neighbours, especially probably that pest of copses, dog mercury. The introduced bulbs, which now share the ground with them, are mostly of the taller kinds, daffodils predominating, and for these the fact of the soil being all newly upturned is an advantage. Our present plan is that the sides of the glade shall remain permanently uncut, or cut at most once or twice a year, the central, or walking space, being kept regularly mown. The bulbs, being at the sides, will thus not suffer. Moreover the considerable difference of height between mown and unmown grass is bound to give height and emphasis to our little glade. As in the similar case of planting rock gardens, such considerations may seem to some poor devices. Yet upon the successful carrying out of them depends the whole of that “general effect” which is all that such critics probably heed. We are not, after all, Nature’s mandatories, and our little slopes are not Alps, or even alpine meadows. If we can attain to so much as a suggestion of the sort of thing we dream of we may rest content.

SEPTEMBER 11, 1899

Here on the bench beside me is a basketful of plants, not garden ones by any means, but weeds, mere ugly weeds, detested, and detestable, which, having pulled up, I was about to throw away. And, sitting down for a moment before doing so, I chanced to turn over two or three of them in idle mood, and in so doing have been captured unawares, as I have often been before, by the wonder, the mystery, of those ordinary processes of nature, which we all of us know so remarkably well, and which we certainly as a rule take such uncommonly little heed of.

Matthew Arnold has somewhere counselled us to let our minds dwell upon that great and inexhaustible word “Life,” till we learn to enter into its meaning. It was a critic’s and a poet’s counsel, but it might still more appropriately have been a naturalist’s or a botanist’s. Life is indeed one of the unescapable mysteries, a mystery that expands and grows as we consider it, even as the hosts of heaven seem to grow and multiply as they recede before our straining gaze. For, if we even put aside the more active animal world, and look merely at the comparatively placid vegetable one, is it possible to think of it for a moment without being overwhelmed, as it were stunned, by the vastness of its effects; by the complexity of its untiring energy? To take only one of the results of that energy. It is the plants of the world, especially those which we are in the habit of calling its weeds, which constitute its great restraining forces. The operations of inorganic nature tend for the most part towards obliteration; towards the rubbing down of landmarks, towards the effacing of all individuality in the landscape. Water, tumbling as snow, hardens into ice, and rasps away continually at the surfaces of the mountains. Rivers scrape off, and carry away with them, every particle of earth that they meet with on their journey to the sea. As for the sea, we know that its one object ever since it came into existence has been, day by day, and at each returning tide, to encroach upon, and devour more and more of the heritage of its brother the earth. Seeing that the land we live on occupies only about a third part of the superficies of the globe, it follows that the whole of what is now dry land could easily be disposed of below the water; indeed it has been ascertained that were it thus neatly tucked and tidied away, the level of the ocean would be only altered by less than a hundred feet. It is due mainly to the untiring vigour, to the extraordinary binding power of plants, that this consummation has been averted. Their office has been to hinder a tendency which, even if it had not ended in the submergence of the whole earth, would at least have washed and pared away its irregularities to one deadly monotonous level. Trees and bushes do much in this direction, but it is the little clinging weeds, which as gardeners we detest, and would so gladly annihilate: these crowfoots--why not, by the way, crow_feet_?--with their crowding roots; these knotgrasses, these clinging bind-weeds,--it is such as they, backed by sea-spurreys, and bents, and by reeds and rushes innumerable, that do more to keep the waters of the globe in order, and to maintain dry land, than man, with all his dykes, dams, embankments, and such like accumulations, since first he began to strut or to caper over its surface.

But the journey which lies before one’s thoughts when once they embark upon this river we call “Life,” is indeed too big for them even imaginatively to attempt. Our boats are so small, and the river so wide, that one soon loses sight of shore. Even if, abandoning these perplexing living things, one falls back upon the mere inorganic forces of the world, what a prodigious amount of energy here too comes into play! Nature everywhere eternally building up, and with apparently no blind hand, but with a most clear, definite, and shaping policy. It is good for us to escape now and then out of our own hot and fussy little rooms, into these larger, cooler spaces; yet, if a wholesome, it cannot be said to be entirely a gratifying experience. For how soon, even in the simplest of such matters, does one arrive, like the people in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ at a place called “Stop”? How soon does thought practically cease, and one remains dumb and gasping, like some poor dull beast, in a mere, vacant-eyed daze of wonder? “The mind of man"--it was one who knew what he was talking about that said it--“is an indifferent sort of musical instrument, with a certain range of notes, beyond which, upon both sides, there is an infinitude of silence.”

SEPTEMBER 12, 1899

The Epic of Weeding has still to be written! It should be undertaken in no light or frolic vein, but with all the gravity that the subject demands. What I should wish to see would be either a careful scientific treatise by a competent authority, or, what would perhaps be still better, a great poem, which, like all the highest poetry, would go straight to the very soul of the subject, and leave the votary of it satisfied for ever. To the earnest-minded Weeder, most other occupations seem comparatively subordinate. Blank is that day some portion of which has not been devoted to faithful weeding. Blank is that night in which, as he lays his head upon the pillow, he cannot say to himself that such, or such a piece of ground has been thoroughly cleared, and will not require to be done again--for quite a fortnight!

One disadvantage it certainly has, but then it is one that it shares with all the other higher, and more absorbing pursuits. If inordinately pursued, it tends to grow upon its votary, until everything else becomes subsidiary. What was originally a virtue, may thus in time come near to growing into a vice. Of this danger I am myself a proof. There have been moments--not many, nevertheless some--when I have found myself sighing for more weeds to conquer. Worse, I have had the greatest difficulty on more than one occasion to keep myself from pouncing upon my neighbour’s perfectly private chickweeds and groundsels, which I have happened to catch sight of across a fence!

I notice in myself, and have observed in others, a lamentable lack of accuracy as regards the proper names of weeds. Even some that I know the best, and hate the hardest, I really cannot put any name to. Now this is not as it should be. Everything, however detestable, has a name of its own, and that name ought to be used. You may not like a man, but that is hardly a reason for calling him “What’s-his-name,” or “Thingamy.” It is true that in the West of Ireland it is regarded as a very unsafe thing to mention any of the more malignant powers by their right names. The _Sidh_, for instance, if spoken of by their proper title, invariably fly at you, and do you a mischief. The only way of avoiding this peril is to use some obscure and roundabout designation, which is not their real name at all. I do not know whether the same mode of reasoning has ever been held to apply to weeds. If so, I cannot say that the plan appears to me to answer. At least I can safely swear that I have never called one of them by its proper botanical name in my life, yet they rush in on us from all sides, and persecute us none the less impishly.

There is one particularly diabolical individual, which has clearly marked this garden as its prey, and marches continually to and fro of it like a roaring lion. What its correct name is I shall in all probability never know, though I have carefully cross-examined several botanical works on the subject. It has narrow fleshy leaves; a mass of roots, constructed of equal parts of pin wire and gutta-percha; the meanest of pinky white flowers, and a smell like sour hay. It is not the leaves, the flowers, the roots, or even the smell, that I so much object to. It is the capacity it possesses of flinging out offshoots of itself to incredible distances, which offshoots no sooner touch ground than they begin to weave a kind of ugly green net over everything within reach, enmeshing it all into as dense a mass of leaves and roots as is the parent plant.

Although I am no nearer extirpating it than I was before, since yesterday I have at least been able to name it, a satisfaction which many a poor Speaker must have been thankful for, especially in an age grown too picked and tender to allow of even the most obdurate obstructor being despatched to either the Tower, or the Block.

It was Cuttle who provided me with that satisfaction, and it is not one of the least of the many debts that I owe him.

“What can be the name of this thing, I wonder, Cuttle?” I said, rising exhausted from an effort to hinder a fresh colony from enmeshing and strangling a line of “Laurette Messimy” which had been recently planted upon the top of a slope.

“I’m not sure as I can tell you its proper name, ma’am, but about here _we_ calls it ‘Snaking Tommy.’”

Admirable Cuttle! “Snaking Tommy” of course! The instant I heard it I felt convinced that in that preliminary naming of all plants and animals performed by Adam in the garden of Eden, that, and no other, must have been the name bestowed upon this. It is true some theologian might assure me that there were no weeds in the garden of Eden, but that I think is not particularly likely, because, whether there were weeds in that garden or not, there are certainly no theologians in this one. Moreover we all know that the snake was there, to everyone’s immeasurable discomfort. And if the snake, why not, let me ask, “Snaking Tommy”?

SEPTEMBER 14, 1899

However it may be in other gardens, seed-sowing, I find, to be the very centre and kernel of this one. The sowing of seeds is apt to be accounted merely a matter of the raising of a due supply of annuals, salpiglossis, nicotiana, lobelia, nemophila, clarkia, bartonia, godetia, “and a long etcetera.” With us it is the permanent, the perennial occupants of our flower-beds which must either be grown from seed, or else not grown at all. This fact was early impressed upon our minds, and in a very summary and effectual fashion, such as Nature’s fashion of instilling indispensable truths for the most part is.

It was three years ago, and we were a pair of destitute garden-owners. We had however good friends, with large gardens. The connection was perfectly self-evident. Without a moment’s hesitation the basket went round. The response was noble. Plants came to us from North, South, East, and West, especially West. Alas for those plants!

They were just what we wanted; they were moved at the right time; they were packed with care; they were not unreasonably long on the road; they arrived to all appearance in excellent health; they were received with all the respect they deserved, and their wants provided for as far as our poor knowledge of those wants enabled us to cater for them. Never were elaborate arrangements less handsomely rewarded. Seasons returned, but never have to us returned those plants so generously bestowed, so hopefully planted. In my private garden-book a list of them still exists, and a very black list it is to refer to. There they stand, as they were written down in all the pride of proprietorship. Unhappily a later entry shows a large round _O_ standing out prominently against nearly every one of them. Now a round _O_ in that book signifies Death.

From this disaster we arose chastened gardeners. It was determined that no more guileless plants should be brought to such a fate; no more kindly owners exploited for so inadequate a result. Remembering the good, dark, comfortable earth from which most of those plants came; sadly surveying the very different earth to which they had been consigned, the cause of their doom could hardly be called mysterious.

Friendly gardens, unless labouring under our own disabilities, being thus excluded, the question remained how were the flower-beds to get themselves filled? Only one answer to that question has ever presented itself to the professional gardening mind, and that is “Send to the nurseryman.”

Now that nurseryman may or may not be an excellent one. Ours, as it happens, may fairly I think be called so. Good or bad he is never a functionary to be approached without deference, at least by those in whose eyes Thrift stands for something in the battle of life. “But common plants are _so_ cheap” one is often told. Very likely, they may be; indeed, judging by their catalogues, nurserymen stand habitually astonished before the spectacle of their own moderation. An average herbaceous plant--a lupin, or a larkspur, let us say--costs as a rule about ninepence. It may sink as low as sixpence, or it may rise as high as a shilling. Anybody, it will be argued, can afford sixpence; some people have been known to spend a whole shilling without wincing. A very short walk along any ordinary garden border, calculating as one goes the number of sixpennyworths it would take to fill it, will be found an excellent corrective for such lightheartedness. I made such a calculation myself only the other day, and the result was an eminently sobering one.

Seeds on the other hand are honestly cheap. There are expensive seedsmen, but generally speaking, threepence is the price of a fair-sized packet of the commoner perennials, and sixpence for one of the scarcer kinds. This initial difference is, however, an infinitesimal part of the real one. It is the magnificent possibilities, the vast fecundity of those sixpences, as compared with the others, which is the real point. Not one plant, but dozens of plants, often hundreds of plants, may be the result of a single successful sowing, nor is the time lost by such sowings nearly as great as people seem to imagine.

But the number of plants to be had in the course of a year by this means is only part of the advantage to be gained by it. The great advantage is that by so doing one’s plants become acquainted betimes with the qualities of the soil in which they find themselves, and, so getting acquainted, they reconcile themselves to it, as we most of us do reconcile ourselves to any environment, however little naturally to our taste, which has compassed us round from babyhood. To come to details. Alpine plants, though small to look at, are for the most part tolerably dear to buy. If a man, “whatever his sex!” loves his alpines, is determined to have them, has a fairly big alpine garden or border to fill, but will not be at the trouble of rearing them from seed, then I shall be rather sorry for that man’s pocket. A few of them--notably the Androsaces--are not amiable in the matter of germination, and these therefore require a mother-plant or two to begin upon. Others, of which the gentians may be taken as a type, are unendurably slow in appearing, though, if a safe place can be found for their seed-box, and it is then forgotten, the time passes! The great majority of alpines, fortunately, will grow perfectly well from seed, even ultra-fastidious ones, such as Silene acaulis, or Ramondia pyrenaica, which for that reason rank high in nurserymen’s catalogues, doing perfectly well with care, and, of course, at a fiftieth part of the cost.

Details like these have a sordid ring, and I have to remind myself that it is upon the successful wrestling with them that one’s ultimate failure or triumph wholly hinges. Thrift, moreover, is the badge of every proper-minded husbandman, and it is according to the thriftiness of his husbandry that Nature rewards his labours. “But Nature,” I hear some caviller exclaim, “Nature is herself the most reckless of spend-thrifts. She is the very mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother of extravagance. She squanders her treasures as the rain-clouds squander their raindrops, and tosses her wealth abroad like dust upon the desert air”! True, she does do all this, but I am not aware that she ever specially desired that her children should follow her example. “What are your poor little savings? your petty extravagancies?” we might imagine her saying, “that they should be likened to mine?” Further, by an odd paradox, it is upon her wastefulness that our thrift rests most securely. We possess say one solitary plant of some given kind, and we find that with that single plant her lavishness has freely provided us with the material of a hundred, possibly many hundred others. There is scarcely a plant we can name that by some means or another--by division, by layers, by seeds, by cuttings, or by some other equally simple variation of the garden craft--may not be multiplied almost without limit. Truly there is something staggering about such fecundity, and the brain of even the strongest gardener might be expected to whirl as he contemplates it. Following in imagination the history of almost any flowering plant--yonder pimpernel astray on the gravel will do--giving it only time enough, a fair field, and not too many rivals, and we shall find that it has gone far towards peopling every waste place within reach; nay, if the process could be continued long enough, by the mere law of its organic existence its descendants are capable of reddening their entire native countryside for a dozen miles around.

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.