Part 10

I am only in a position to speak definitely on behalf of the working proprietor, but I am certain that the daughters of the house who have been working so marvellously for the first time in their lives, at the turning out of munitions, taking the place of men in fields and byres, and doing active duties in connection with hospitals, huts, and canteens, will not now be content to go back to their tennis and teas and “districts” as before. They will find their souls in other and more profitable directions, and it is pretty certain that the production of food will occupy a large number of the emancipated ones. We shall have vegetables and fruit and eggs in such abundance as was never dreamt of four years ago. Why, already potato crops of twelve tons to the acre are quite common, whereas an aggregate of eight and nine tons was considered very good in 1912. We all know the improvement that has been brought about in regard to poultry, in spite of the weathercockerel admonition of the Department of the Government, which one month sent out a million circulars imploring all sorts and conditions of people to keep poultry, and backed this up with a second million advising the immediate slaughter of all fowls who had a fancy for cereals as a food; the others were to be fed on the crumbs that fell from the master's table, but if the master were known to give the crumbs to birds instead of eating them himself or making them into those poultices, recommended by another Department that called them puddings, he would be prosecuted. Later on we were to be provided with a certain amount of stuff for pure bred fowls, in order that only the purest and best strains should be kept; but no provision in the way of provisions was made for the cockerels! The cockerels were to be discouraged, but the breeding of pure fowls was to be encouraged!

It took another million or so of buff Orpmgton circulars to explain just what was meant by the Department, and even then it needed a highly-trained intelligence to explain the explanation.

When we get rid of these clogs to industry known as Departments, we shall, I am sure, all work together to the common good, in making England a self-supporting country, and the men and women of England a self-respecting people, and in point of health an A 1 people instead of the C 3 into which we are settling down complacently. The statistics of the grades recently published appeared to me to be the greatest cause for alarm that England has known for years. And the worst of the matter is that when one asks if a more ample proof of decadence has ever been revealed, people smile and inquire if the result of the recent visits of the British to France and Italy and Palestine and Mesopotamia suggest any evidence of decadence. They forget that it was only the A classes that left England; only the A classes were killed or maimed; the lower grades remained at home with their wives in order that the decadent breed might be carried on with emphasised decadence.

If I were asked in what direction one should look for the salvation of the race from the rush into Avernus toward which we have been descending, I would certainly say,--

“The garden and the allotment only will arrest our feet on the downward path.”

If the people of England can throw off the yoke of the Cinema and take to the spade it may not yet be too late to rescue them from the abyss toward which they are sliding.

And it is not merely the sons who must be saved, the daughters must be taken into account in this direction; and when I meet daily the scores of trim and shapely girls with busts of Venus and buskins of Diana, walking--_vera incessu patuit dea_--as if the land belonged to them--which it does--I feel no uneasiness with regard to the women with whom England's future rests. If they belong to the land, assuredly the land belongs to them.

But the garden and not the field is the place for our girls. We know what the women are like in those countries where they work in the fields doing men's work. We have seen them in Jean François Millet's pictures, and we turn from them with tears.

“Women with labour-loosened knees

And gaunt backs bowed with servitude.”

We do not wish to see them in England. I have seen them in Italy, in Switzerland, and on the Boer farms in, South Africa. I do not want to see them in England.

Agriculture is for men, horticulture for women. A woman is in her right place in a garden. A garden looks lovelier for her presence. What an incongruous object a jobbing gardener in his shirt-sleeves and filthy cap seems when seen against a background of flowers! I have kept out of my garden for days in dread of coming upon the figure which I knew was lurking there, spending his time looking out for me and working feverishly when he thought I was coming.

But how pleasantly at home a girl in her garden garb appears, whether on the rungs of a ladder tying up the roses, or doing some thinning out on a too rampant border! There should be no work in a garden beyond her powers--that is, of course, in a one-gardener garden--a one-greenhouse garden. She has no business trying to carry a tub with a shrub weighing one hundred and fifty pounds from one place to another; but she can wheel a brewer's or a coalman's sack barrow with two nine-inch wheels with two hundredweight resting on it for half a mile without feeling weary. No garden should be without such a vehicle. One that I bought ten years ago from a general dealer has enabled me to superannuate the cumbersome wheelbarrow. You require to lift the tub into the wheelbarrow, but the other does the lifting when you push the iron guard four inches under the staves at the bottom. As for that supposed bugbear--the carting of manure, it should not exist in a modern garden. A five-shilling tin of fertiliser and a few sacks of Wakeley's hop mixture will be enough for the borders of a garden of an acre, unless you aim at growing everything to an abnormal size. But you must know what sort of fertilising every bed requires.

I mention these facts because we read constantly of the carting of manure being beyond the limits of a girl-gardener's strength, to say nothing of the distasteful character of the job. The time is coming when there will be none of the old-fashioned stable-sweepings either for the garden or the field, and I think we shall get on very well without it, unless we wish to grow mushrooms.

The only other really horrid job that I would not have my girl face is pot-washing. This is usually a winter job, because, we are told, summer is too busy a time in the garden to allow of its being done except when the ice has to be broken in the cistern and no other work is possible. But why should the pots be washed out of doors and in cold vater? If you have a girl-gardener, why should you not give her the freedom of the scullery sink where the hot water is laid on? There is no hardship in washing a couple of hundred pots in hot water and _in_ a warm scullery on the most inclement day in January.

The truth is that there exists a garden tradition, and it originated with men who had neither imagination nor brains, and people would have us believe that it must be maintained--that frogs and toads should be slain and that gardener is a proper noun of the masculine gender--that manure must be filthy and that a garden should never look otherwise than unfinished at any time of the year--that radiation is the same as frost, and that watering should be done regularly and without reference to the needs of the individual plants.

Lady Wolseley has done a great deal toward giving girls the freedom of the garden. She has a small training ground on the motor road between Lewes and Eastbourne. Of course it is not large enough to pay its way, and I am told that in order to realise something on the produce, the pony cart of a costermonger in charge of two of the young women goes into Lewes laden with vegetables for sale. I have no doubt that the vegetables are of the highest grade, but I am afraid that if it becomes understood that the pupils are to be trained in the arts of costermongery the prestige of her college, as it has very properly been called by Lady Wolseley, will suffer.

What I cannot understand is why, with so admirable a work being done at that place, it should not he subsidised by the State. It may be, however, that Lady Wolseley has had such experience of the way in which the State authorities mismanage almost everything they handle, as prevents her from moving in this direction. The waste, the incompetence, and the arrogance of all the Departments that sprang into existence with the war are inconceivable. I dare say that Lady Wolseley has seen enough during the past four years to convince her that if once the “State” had a chance of putting a controlling finger upon one of the reins of the college pony it would upset the whole apple-cart. The future of so valuable an institution should not be jeopardised by the intrusion of the fatal finger of a Government Department. The Glynde College should be the Norland Institution of the nursery of Flora.

CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH

It was when a gardener with whom I had never exchanged a cross word during the two years he was with me assured me that work was not work but slavery in my garden--he had one man under him and appealed to me for a second--that I made my apology to him and allowed him to take unlimited leave of me and his shackles. He had been with me for over two years, and during all this time the garden had been going from bad to worse. At the end of his bondage it was absolutely deplorable. At no time had we the courage to ask any visitor to walk round the grounds.

And yet the man knew the Latin name of every plant and every flower from the cedar on the lawn to the snapdragon--he called it antirrhinum--upon the wall; but if he had remained with me much longer there would have been nothing left for him to give a name to, Latin or English.

I took over the garden and got in a boy to do the pot-washing at six shillings a week, and a fortnight later I doubled his wages, so vast a change, or rather, a promise of change, as was shown by the place. Within a month I was paying him fifteen shillings, and within six months, eighteen. He was an excellent lad, and in due time his industry was rewarded by the hand of our cook. I parted with him reluctantly at the outbreak of the war, though owing to physical defects he was never called up.

It was when I was thrown on my own resources after the strain of leave-taking with my slave-driven professor that I acquired the secret of garden design which I have already revealed--namely, the multiplying of “features” within the garden space.

It took time for me to carry out my plans, for I was very far from seeing, as a proper garden designer would have done in a glance, how the ground lent itself to “features” in various directions; and it was only while I was working at one part that the possibilities of others suggested themselves to me. It was the incident of my picking up in a stonemason's yard for a few shillings a doorway with a shaped architrave, that made me think of shutting off the House Garden, which I had completed the previous year, from the rest. I got this work done quite satisfactorily by the aid of a simple balustrade on each side. Here there was an effective entrance to a new garden, where before nothing would grow owing to the overshadowing by the sycamores beyond my mound. My predecessor took refuge in a grove of euonyma, behind which he artfully concealed the stone steps leading to the Saxon terrace. This was one of the “features” of his day--the careful concealing of such drawbacks in the landscape as stone steps. Rut as I could not see that they were after all a fatal blot that should put an end to all hope to make anything of the place, I pulled away the masses of euonyma, and turned the steps boldly round, adding piers at the foot.

Here then was at my command a space of forty feet square, walled in, and in the summer-shade of the high sycamores, and the winter-shade of a beautifully-shaped and immense deciduous oak. And what was I to do with it?

Before I left the interrogatory ground I saw with great clearness the reflection of the graceful foliage in a piece of water. That was just what was needed at the place, I was convinced--a properly puddled Sussex dew-pond such as Gilbert White's swallows could hardly resist making their winter quarters as the alternative to that long and tedious trip to South Africa. The spot was clearly designed by Nature as a basin. On three sides it had boundaries of sloping mounds, and I felt myself equal to the business of completing the circle so that the basin would be in its natural place.

I consulted my builder as to whether or not my plan was a rightly puddled one--which was a way of asking if it would hold water in a scientific as well as a metaphorical sense. He advised concrete, and concrete I ordered, though I was quite well aware of the fact that in doing so I must abandon all hopes of the swallows, for I knew that with concrete there would be none of that mud in the pond which the great naturalists had agreed was indispensable for the hibernating of the birds.

A round pond basin was made, about fifteen feet in diameter, and admirably made too. In the centre I created an island with the nozzle of a single _jet d'eau_, carefully concealed, and by an extraordinary chance I discovered within an inch or two of the brim of the basin, the channel of an ancient scheme of drainage--it may have been a thousand years old--and this solved in a moment the problem of how to carry off the overflow. The water was easily available from the ordinary “Company's” pipe for the garden supply; so that all that remained for me to do was to tidy up the ground, which I did by getting six tons of soft reddish sandstone from a neighbouring quarry and piling it in irregular masses on two sectors of the circular space, taking care to arrange for a scheme of “pockets” for small plants at one part and for large ferns at another. The greatest elevation of this boundary was about fifteen feet, and here I put a noble cliff weighing a ton and a half, with several irregular steps at the base, the lowest being just above a series of stone rectangular basins, connected by irregular shallow channels in a descent to the big pond. Then I got a leaden pipe with an “elbow” attachment to the Company's water supply beneath, and contrived a sort of T-shaped spray which I concealed on the level of the top of my cliff, and within forty-eight hours I had a miniature cascade pouring over the cliff and splashing among the stone basins and the ir channels--“_per averpace coi seguaci sui_”--in the large pond below.

Of course it took a summer and a winter to give this little scheme a chance of assimilating with Nature; but once it began to do so it did so thoroughly. The cliff and the rocky steps, which I had made in memory of the cascade at Platte Klip on the side of Table Mountain where I had often enjoyed a bath, became beautifully slimy, and primroses were blooming so as to hide the outlines of the rectangle, while Alpines and sedums and harts-tongue ferns found accommodation in the pockets among the stones. In the course of another year the place was covered with vegetation and the sandstones had become beautifully weathered, and sure enough, the boughs of the American oak had their Narcissus longings realised, but without the Narcissus sequel.

Here, then, was a second “feature” accomplished; and we walk out of the sunshine of the House Garden, and, passing through the carved stone doorway, find ourselves in complete shade with the sound of tinkling water in the air--when the taps are turned in the right direction; but in the matter of water we are economical, and the cascade ceased to flow while the war lasted.

I do not think that it is wrong to try to achieve such contrasts in designing a range of gardens. The effect is great and it will never appear to be cheap, provided that it is carried out naturally. I do not think that in a place of the character of that just described one should introduce such objects as shrubs in tubs, or clipped trees; nor should one tolerate the appearance for the sake, perhaps, of colour, of any plant or flower that might not be found in the natural scene on which it is founded. We all know that in a rocky glen we need not look for brilliant colour, therefore the introduction of anything striking in this way would be a jarring note. To be sure I have seen the irrepressible scarlet geranium blazing through some glens in the island of St. Helena; but St. Helena is in the tropics, and a tropical glen is not the sort to which we have become accustomed in England. If one has lived at St. Helena for years and, on coming to England, wishes to be constantly reminded of the little island of glens and gorges and that immense “combe” where James Town nestles, beyond a doubt that strange person could not do better than create a garden of gullies with the indigenous geranium blazing out of every cranny. But I cannot imagine any one being so anxious to perpetuate a stay among the picturesque loneliness of the place. I think it extremely unlikely that if Napoleon I. had lived to return to France, he would have assimilated any portion of the gardens of Versailles with those that were under his windows at Longwood. I could more easily fancy his making an honest attempt to transform the ridge above Geranium Valley on which Longwood stands--if there is anything of that queer residence left by the white ants--the natural owners of the island--into a memory of the Grand Trianon, only for the “_maggior dolore_” that would have come to him had such an enterprise been successful.

My opinion is that a garden should be such as to cause a visitor to exclaim,--

“How natural!” rather than, “How queer!”

A lake may be artificial; but it will only appear so if its location is artificial; and, therefore, in spite of the fact that there are countless mountain tarns in Scotland and Wales, it is safest for the lake to be made on the lowest part of your ground. I dare say that a scientific man without a conscience could, by an arrangement of forced draught apparatus, cause an artificial river to flow uphill instead of down; but though such a stream would be quite a pleasing incident of one of the soirees of the Royal Society at Burlington House, I am certain that it would look more curious than natural if carried out in an English garden ground. The artificial canals of the Dutch gardens and of those English gardens which were made to remind William III. of his native land, will look natural in proportion to their artificiality. This is not so hard a saying as it may seem; I mean to say that if the artificial canal apes a natural river, it will look unnatural. If it aims at being nothing but a Dutch canal, it will be a very interesting part of a garden--a Dutch garden--plan, and as such it will seem in the right and natural place. If a thing occupies a natural place--the place where you expect to find it--it must be criticised from the standpoint of its environment, so to speak, and not on the basis of the canons that have a general application.

And to my mind the difference between what is right and what is wrong in a garden is not the difference between what is the fashion and what is not the fashion; but between the appropriate and the inappropriate. A rectangular canal is quite right in a copy of the Dutch garden; but it would be quite wrong within sight of the cascades of the Villa d'Este or any other Italian garden. Topiary work is quite right in a garden that is meant frankly to be a copy of one of the clipped shrubberies of the seventeenth and of the eighteenth century that preceded landscape treatment, but it is utterly out of place in a garden where flowers grow according to their own sweet will, as in a rosery or a herbaceous border. A large number of people dislike what Mr. Robinson calls “Vegetable Sculpture,” and would not allow any example to have a place on their property; but although I think I might trust myself to resist every temptation to admit such an element into a garden of mine, I should not hesitate to make a feature of it if I wanted to be constantly reminded of a certain period of history. It would be as unjust to blame me on this account as it would be to blame Mr. Hugh Thomson for introducing topiary into one of his exquisite illustrations to Sir Roger de Coverley. I would, I know, take great pleasure in sitting for hours among the peacocks and bears and cocked hats of the topiary sculptor, because I should feel myself in the company of Sir Roger and Will Wimble, and I consider that they would be very good company indeed; but I admit that I should prefer that that particular garden was on some one else's property. I should spend a very pleasant twenty minutes in. a neighbour's--a near neighbour's--reproduction of the grotto at Pope's Villa at Twickenham, not because I should be wanting in a legitimate abhorrence of the thing, but because I should be able to repeople it with several very pleasant people--say, Arbuthnot, Garth, and Mr. Henry Labouchere. But heaven forbid that I should spend years of my life in the construction of a second Pope's grotto as one of the features of my all-too-constricted garden space.

One could easily write a book on “Illustrating Gardens,” meaning not the art of reproducing illustrations of gardens, but the art of constructing gardens that would illustrate the lives of certain interesting people at certain interesting periods. The educational value of gardens formed with such an intent would be great, I am sure. I had occasion some time ago to act the part of their governess to my little girls, and to Dorothy's undisguised amazement I took the class into the garden, and not knowing how to begin--whether with an inquiry into the economic value of a thorough grounding in Conic Sections, or a consideration of the circumstances attending the death of Mary Queen of Scots--I have long believed that a modern coroner's jury would have found that the cause of death was blood poisoning, as there is no evidence that the fatal axe was aseptic, not having been boiled before using--I begged the girls to walk round with me.

“This is something quite new,” said Rosamund--“lessons in a garden.”

“Is it?” I asked. “Did Miss Pinkerton ever tell you about a man named Plato?”

It was generally admitted that if she had ever done so they would have remembered the name.

I saw at once that this was a chance that might not occur again for me to recover my position. The respect that I have for Miss Pinkerton is almost equal to that I have for Lemprière or Dr. Wilkam Smith.

I unfolded like a philaetery the stores of my knowledge on the subject of the garden of Academus, where Plato and his pupils were wont to meet and discover--

“How charming is divine philosophy!

Not harsh and crabbed as some fools affirm,

But musical as is Apollo's lute,”

and the children learned for the first time the origin of the name Academy. They were struck powerfully with the idea, which they thought an excellent one, of the open-air class.

This was an honest attempt on my part to illustrate something through the medium of the garden; but Miss Pinkerton's methods differed from those of Plato: the blackboard was, in her opinion, the only medium of illustration for a properly organised class.