in the well-ordered garden of every well-ordered house—that is, every house that numbers children in its treasury—there lies, screened perhaps by some inconvenient shrubbery but none the less patent to the stars and the winds and the polite visitor, a tormented patch of earth where sway in dubious security of tenure a number of sickly plants. for days they have lain parched and neglected in the summer sun; for days they have been beaten down into a morass by torrents poured from an excited watering-pot; their roots have regarded heaven for no less a period than their heads; and in the face of such unnatural conditions ceres, one fancies, must have fallen back in confusion and left them to struggle on as best they can unaided. it is only the most hardy p. 168of plants that may survive the attentions of a youthful gardener, and it is a tribute to nature’s obstinacy that any survive at all. i have in my mind a garden of this kind, and thereby hangs one of those rather tragic stories which grown-up people are apt to consider funny. the garden lay below an old brick wall, which must, i think, have faced south, for, as i remember it, it was always lit by the sun. it was the property of three children, and their separate estates were carefully marked off by decorative walls of shells and freakish pebbles. here, early and late, two of the children waged a gallant war against nature, thwarting and checking her with a hundred delicate attentions; but on the third had fallen that pleasant mood when it is nicer to lie in the shade and to dream of wine than to labour in the vineyard. his garden was a tangle of weeds and of healthy, neglected plants, and when the inevitable awakening came he saw that it would require days of unprofitable work to turn the wilderness into a proper garden. yet to hear the uninformed comparisons of visitors was a shameful ordeal not to be p. 169borne. he solved the problem, i still think, in a very spirited manner. he cleared the garden by the simple process of removing plants and weeds alike, and sowed the ground with seeds, purchased alas! with a shilling extracted quite illegally from his money-box. but the secrecy of these movements had not escaped the notice of the olympians, and later there fell on his horrified ears an entirely new and obviously truthful theory of botany; it seemed that the word “thief” could be plainly deciphered on the flowers of dishonest gardeners. there were no blossoms in that little boy’s garden that year. like the monk in browning’s poem, he pinched off all the buds before the sun was up.
they were simple flowers we sought to cultivate in those days, simple flowers with beautiful names. violets and snowdrops, the reticent but cheerful pansy, otherwise known as “three faces under a hood,” love-lies-bleeding, wallflowers, stocks, and london pride, or “none so pretty”; of these and their unaffected comrades we made our gardens. spades and pickaxes were denied us, but the p. 170simple gardening tools were ours, and he has lived in darkness who has not experienced the keen joy of smacking the earth with the convex side of a trowel. my hands tingle when i remember how sore weeding made the finger-tips, and there is something in the last ecstatic chuckle of a watering-pot as it runs dry that lingers in the ear. i am aware that there are persons of mature years who can find pleasure in the performance of simple garden tasks. but i am afraid that subconsciously it is the ?sthetic aspect of flowers that attracts them, and that their gardening is only a means to an end. no such charge could be brought against our efforts. we cared little about flowers or results of any sort; we only wanted to garden, and it troubled us not at all that the labours of one day destroyed those of the day before. to dig a deep hole and to fill it with water when completed is, as far as i have observed, no part of the ordinary gardener’s daily work, but it was our favourite effort, and a share in the construction of these ornamental waters was the greatest favour that we could grant to a p. 171friend. there were always captivating insects with numerous and casual legs to be discovered in the digging, and great stones that parted from the earth as reluctantly as nuggets. and when we had hollowed a cup in the earth we would pour in the sea and set our hearts floating upon its surface in paper ships. the sides of the hole would crumble down into the water like real cliffs, and every little fall would send a real wave sparkling across the surface of the ocean. then there were bays to be cut and canals, and soundings to be taken with pieces of knotted string weighted with stones. water has been the friend of children ever since moses floated in his little ark of rushes to the feet of pharaoh’s daughter.
i question whether they know very much about this sort of gardening at kew, a place which is, however, beloved of children for the sake of the excellent spiral staircases in the palm-houses. but every sensible child has the art at its finger-tips, and in the time that we take to reach brighton in a fleet motor they will construct a brand new sea for themselves—a sea with harbours and p. 172islands and sunken reefs, a perfect sea of wonder and romance.
if we are prepared to set aside our preconceived ideas as to what a garden ought to be, we must own that the children are not far wrong after all. a garden is only a world in miniature, with prairies of flowers and forests of roses and gravel paths for the wide, dusty roads. when we plant flowers in our garden it is as though we added new territories to our empire, new reds and blues and purples to our treasury of colours. and so when a child has wrought a fine morning’s havoc in its little patch of ground it has added it may be an ocean, it may be only a couple of stars to the kingdom of imagination which we may no longer see. it only needs a sunny hour or two, a trowel, and a pair of dirty hands to change a few square yards of earth into a world. and the child may be considered fortunate in being able to express itself perfectly in terms of dust. our books and pictures cumber the earth, our palaces strike the skies, and yet it is our common tragedy that we have not found expression; while p. 173down the garden behind the lilac-bushes at this very moment milton may have developed lycidas into a sticky marsh, and shakespeare may have compressed hamlet into a mud-pie. the works of the children end as they begin in dust; but we cannot pretend that ours are more permanent.
