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3.ARY

ERSITY

DRNIA
JELES

de.r

I T

THE HAPPY GARDEN

"In summer nights the tea-house is hung with Japanese lanterns."

(see page 185.)

HAPPY

GARDEN

6r

With frontispiece & decorations
by Charles E Dawson ck*
other i/lustmfionsjromphoto&dphs

CZ?SS<SIL di C?£<? Igndon,

NefvYbrk^lbronto & Melbourne

1912

ALL EIGHTS RESERVED

"A little, double-fronted cottage, crowded in with laurels."

CONTENTS

1. Gardener's Pride

2. Jane Admires

3. Cherry Walk and Lawn

4. The Orchard .

5. A Long Way Round

6. Over the Hills and Far Away

7. Annuals

8. The Toy River

.

PAGE

3

.

17

.

47

.

65

83

Away

. 101

.

. 121

. 139

A I >-l tfVlOO

VI

Contents

9. An Alarming Interlude

10. Gardener's Faith

11. Sun Rose and Spiraea

12. Friendly Flowers

13. Excuse and Epilogue
Appendix .

PAGE

157

175
191
201
215
223

~l*hsj^^-ial*i

LIST OF PLATES

" In summer nights the tea-house is hung with Japanese

lanterns" (colour) .... Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

" Great tall fellows they are, where they go striding up

the hill behind the house " .... 10

The brick court where the laurels used to be . . 12

" Where the conservatories had been I built out the

room, with as much window as possible " . .14

" The sundial is a trite person, and says in all weathers

. . . ' Time can do much ' " . . .16

The window which curves into the drawing-room is the

invalid's seat, facing south .... 26

The fireplace that happened ..... 28

" Most of the woodwork is painted apple green. The
walls are white and so are the door and window
frames " . . . • • • • .30

The view from the lawn, with the round windows of the

new study ........ 48

" The despised privet hedge is now ten feet high " . 52
" The croquet lawn running into the pine-woods

in the distance "...... 54

" Another wide border topped by a cherry walk " . 56
" The carved urn on the lawn, bought in Venice " . 58

90

viii List of Plates

FACING PAGE

The herbaceous border and lawn .... 62
Luath loves to drink at the bird bath ... 68
" The pines go marching up the hill that was once a

Roman camp " .
Nearly all the flowers by this walk are blue against the

dark pines .....■• 92

" Here you have the best view of the house ... all

corners, and gables, and angles " . . .94

" A narrow crooked path . . . between tall lilies, white

foxgloves, and anchusa, and, best of all, delphiniums

of every shade of blue " . • • • .96

The annual border seen from the edge of the wood . 122
The annual border in September, tobacco plants, asters,

and autumn lilies . . . • • .132

" In a little pool . . . stands the Dolphin Boy of

Verrocchio " • • • • . . 150
Steps down the rock garden 192

PR^IDE

-\f

<■- w

m

So good luck came & .
on my roof did light
Like noiseless snowor.
as the dew of nidht,
Not all at once;but
dently;as the trees
Are, by the sunbeams,
ticket d by decrees';

fiferricJ\

&■

.'06 *« o

n

THE HAPPY GARDEN

I

Gardener's Pride

To live in London and to possess a garden in the
country is to be in the position of an Anglo-Indian
mother whose children are in England. In the
winter and spring you snatch a Sunday here and
there to see how your flower-children are growing
up ; all is not well : you have fearful presenti-
ments : they are not what you had planned and
dreamed and hoped ! Your gardener crushes you
with his expert professional knowledge : he dis-
counts your enthusiasm as severely as a tutor
discounts a mother's love. Summer comes. The
flowers are beautiful, but the garden is not really
your garden — it is not intimate ; the gardener has
provided a brave show, like hundreds of other
brave shows, but the whole lacks form, atmosphere,
breeding, manners — what you will. Here and
there it is as though the flowers were shy and timid,
as though the spirit had been bullied out of them

3

The Happy Garden

by their scientific training. They do their best,
but sadly and sslf -consciously ; they look mourn-
fully out on the world, and say :

" It isn't really any good. The world is much
too busy for the likes of us ! "

Many are tucked away or killed by crude colour,
for there still lingers in the gardening mind some-
thing of the bad tradition of bedding -out, and the
reproduction of old patterns, without regard to
the ground lines, or the background, or the view.
There are gardeners (and mine was one of them)
who are excellent virtuosi, but miserable composers.
They can carry out without really grasping the
significance of what they are doing, and often
grumble until the scheme is carried out. If it
succeeds, they forget the designer, as the actor
forgets the dramatist, and the musician the com-
poser. If it fails, they do not conceal their rejoic-
ing. The relation between gardener and owner is
very delicate and subtle. Sometimes it is difficult ;
always, if the owner lives in London, and can only
give intermittent care to the preparation of the
summer glowing festival. In that case, it is wise
to give your gardener glass-houses, and fire him
with an ambition to win prizes at the chrysanthe-
mum shows. That will, at least, keep him from
expending too much energy on the garden, and

4

Gardener's Pride

some of your pet schemes may be saved from
devastation.

But the situation is impossible. Half a garden
is almost worse than none. Really, to create a
garden, it is necessary to fling away ambition,
social pleasures, to reduce natural responsibilities
to a minimum, and, if you are a man, to retire on
a certain income. If you are a woman, then marry
an artist, an author, or a clergyman, and make it
clear to him that your garden is to be the central
idea of both your lives, stipulate for an adequate
allowance to meet the temptations of the autumn
catalogues, select your friends, discard your ac-
quaintances, and set to work.

Such a programme sounds monstrously selfish,
but, indeed, gardening is a very serious business,
as serious as literature, or stocks and shares, and
much more serious than most of the professions ;
and it has the blessing that there is no money to be
made out of it. In other arts there is the dreadful
necessity of pleasing the publisher, or the picture -
dealer, and as many of the public as can be wheedled
into interest ; between works, imagination and
energy are exhausted in haggling. The gardener
has none to please but him- or herself, and he
(or she) is never wholly pleased, for the garden will
never be perfect, it will never be finished. As the

5

The Happy Garden

gardener develops, so must the garden. A spinster's
garden would never satisfy a wife ; an unhappy
woman's garden would make a happy woman weep.
But it is essential to be happy in a garden, and
happiness is so enormously a matter of luck. The
means for it may come into your hands when you
are not ready for it, or when it comes, you may
waste the opportunity by timidity, or through some
fond imagined need for sacrifice. Slips and failures
which hardly emerge into the region of admitted
fact may snatch it away ; but, for the purposes
of a garden, an effort must be made to grasp and
hold it, or the garden will suffer.

Perhaps I don't really mean happiness, but
rather that condition of strength and courage when
all the events of life can be accepted as one ; and
it is perfectly clear that sorrow is only the cloud
drawn over the sun, or that certain watery joys are
like the misty moon, foretelling days of rain. In
the garden one is glad of rain. Indeed, one is glad
of everything, except, perhaps, caterpillars, slugs,
blight, June frosts, weeds, and incompetent seeds-
men ; and then even these blackest of all evils
serve only to make success all the sweeter when it
comes, and the July pride of a garden is a very
mighty thing.

I am proud of my garden, proud with that salt
6

Gardener's Pride

of humility which dabbling with the earth imposes
on all nice human beings (and it makes the nasty
nicer than they would be otherwise), for it is per-
haps the one positive achievement I have to show.
Therefore, I show it to the world in much the same
spirit in which my cat, Peter, shows me the moles
and fieldfares he has caught (he despises them as
food), or as my friends among children display their
staggering drawings, with legends in drunken
capitals to inform me that the lines and smudges
are a cock, a house, or a steeple with a dog climb-
ing it to eat the weather-vane !

So I present this book of words as my garden,
though it may be that it is no more like my lawns
and trees, and borders and flowering shrubs, than
my friend Hookie's lines of green and red are like
a horse. Still, perhaps there will peep out of the
pages what the garden is to me, and, with a careful
study of it, historically, geographically, geologic-
ally, romantically, sentimentally, and sensibly,
something of its brilliance as it shines in green and
mauve and blue. Or the dark glimmer of the pine-
trees may gleam forth, and its pattern be imprinted
on the minds of others who have felt the charm of
growing things. When Hookie, a small imp, with
an angel's face, brings me his drawings of green and
red — his pattern — I feel closer to him. He gives

7

The Happy Garden

me pleasure, and wins pleasure from me. My
garden is my pattern, and there are not enough
to see it, if I am to believe those who come. John
Smith comes to see me. He admires :

" Ah ! If only Jane were here ! "

Jane will never come, and so this book is for
her. I take her by the hand, ask her to trust me,
and make allowances for any exaggeration into
which my exuberant pride and delight may bring
me, and lead her along my yellow road that rises
between dark pines — like a golden river sometimes
— and at the white gate we stop. I turn to her,
and say :

" Forget London."

And it is very necessary to forget London : that
is what I have been doing ; or rather, I have been
trying to see it in perspective : out of seven million
people, how many are there who can do that ?
London is not allowed in my garden, nor are move-
ments, or sociology — that queer disease of the new
century — the great thing is to be happy, and, if
you don't like me, at least to be pleasant about it.

Here you are at my gate, about to be submitted
to a fearful test of your character, for it may be
that you will dislike the place, or like the wrong
things, and in that case, I shall believe, perhaps
arrogantly, that you are at fault ; for, indeed, there

8

Gardener's Pride

is no trickery in the garden. The river is a sham,
there is a sham butterfly on the window and a dish
of sham fruit in the hall, but these are honest shams.
They ask to be admired only as shams. Now there
are sham books and sham pictures which ask to
be admired as the real thing, and very often they
succeed, and it is notorious that sham artists and
sham men of genius are very prosperous ; but a
sham garden is inconceivable in these days. Nature
herself is the medium with which the artist works,
and Nature is, above all things, honest. She takes
dreadful revenges for lapses of taste and any
attempt to dodge difficulties.

Have you forgotten London ? It should be easy,
for the lie of the land assists you. Between the
house and the railway station are two hills and a
valley. London and all its works fall away behind
you, as you breast the top of the first hill from the
station. In front of you are miles of fairly wild
country : pines, moors, rivers, hills, heather, lakes.
Here and there Cockneydom has left a dirty thumb-
mark on it, but that is easily avoided, and with us,
in our clearing of four acres, you are as free as you
may be in all England. There are people who find
the crowds of pines as oppressive as the millions
of people in London ; but often that passes, and
the charm of the woods comes over them. They

9

The Happy Garden

delight in their rich scent, and the roar that comes
from them as they swing in the wind. Great, tall
fellows they are, where they go striding up the hill
behind the house. But that is not yet.

Have you forgotten London ? You left it be-
hind you at the top of the hill, as you gasped at
the sight of the purple hills flung like a mothering
arm about the valley. Then it was gone, and you
swung down a green tunnel, beech, and birch, and
oak interlacing above the road. Over the little
river you came into the pines ; then dogs bark at
you — a great Newfoundland, sober, solemn, and a
clownish sheepdog — glorious weather, of course,
and this is the house that I built.

It had a sad little romance before I came to it :
the pitiful small tale of an old gentleman who loved
well and truly, and lost, and was so wounded that,
for modesty, he gave the trunks of all his trees
trousers of laurel. There were laurels everywhere,
and the little hedges there by the kitchen door and
the green kennel that makes the house semi-
detached— the sheepdog sleeps in it — (" Down,
Billy ! Where's that whip ? ")— are all that is left
of the mania of his blighted love. He also built
the red-gabled wing out to the back, and did it
surprisingly well.

But, oh ! my dear, you should have seen
10

Great tall fellows they are, where they go striding up the
hill behind the house "

Gardener's Pride

the house ! A little double -fronted cottage,
crowded in with laurels, and inside as dark as it
could possibly be made. What was it made the
English of the last century hide away in dark
corners ? Of what were they ashamed ? Dark cur-
tains, dark mantel-places, dark wood, two conserva-
tories— one a " lean-to," at the back of the dining-
room — and, as you entered, a little lobby, looking
up a straight stair with banisters wrapped in dark
red plush. Even in his house, you see, the old
gentleman could not stand naked wood. Strange
to what eccentricities disappointed men will cling
for comfort ! On either side of the little lobby were
two rooms, two corresponding rooms above them,
and two more above the new kitchen wing : all ugly,
dark, hopeless ; but I was carried away by the
situation — the pines, the hill behind, the garden
(if it could be called a garden then) running into
the wood. A heron flew over the house, and that
settled it. I had brought some seeds with me, for,
to take possession of a piece of land, one must set
things growing, and there and then I planted them.
That was my first active piece of gardening. Having
planted the seeds, I saw the house-agent. That was
all some years ago. But at once it was my house
and my garden, and I felt the better for it, and yet
I think it was never really my house until now.

ii

The Happy Garden

For a long time it was only a cottage in the country,
a sort of half-and-half position which no house
should be called on to endure. Live in the country
and have a place in town, by all means ; but to
reverse the process is unnatural. The garden
suffered for it, and so did I.

My dear Jane, we are not yet inside the gate.
The two dogs you have seen \ somewhere about the
place are a man, a cat, a tortoise, a gardener, a
gardener's wife, a gardener's baby, six green lizards,
gold-fish, toads and tadpoles, servants, and part of
a boy. All wonderful, of course, and all living in
the life of the garden.

There is another gate just along the road, but
nobody ever uses it.

Come in and have some tea ; talk, and let me
talk, and you shall see.

Here, where the brick court is, until a year ago,
was nothing but the old gentleman's laurels, forcing
the acacias, and the almond tree, and the may
trees, up to an unnatural height. Nobody could
ever find the front door. People used to go to the
kitchen, and the scullery, and the drawing-room
window, blundering from shyness to confusion,
until we rescued them, and then, often, they were
so bewildered that they were unhappy, and thought
of nothing but the time when they could escape.

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Gardener's Pride

Last year the laurels were all cut away, the hedge
was opened, the brick court and path were laid
down, and the front door is now visible.

Yes, it is pretty, but it will be much prettier
next year.

That is the formula which you must keep in
your mind all through, and if you admire because
you think I want you to, I shall stop, and order
the car at once.

Solomon's seal, polygonum, with rhododendrons
for a background; giant orange lilies for the
autumn, scarlet tulips and scarlet anemones for the
spring, scarlet poppies and white lupins for June,
fill the wide borders on either side of the brick path
that brings you to the door. From the gate — that
nobody ever uses — a pergola covered with roses also
leads to it. In June, it is a mass of blossom, pink
and white and crimson.
Come inside.

The man tells me that there was once a French-
man who made quite a charming book out of a
Journey Round his Room, beginning with the
pictures and ending with the bed. We are not so
hard put to it as that, but, if necessary, we will
have a chapter on beds, as an appendix to the
observations on herbaceous borders.

You see what I did ? Down came the wall on
J3

The Happy Garden

the right-hand side of the staircase, the lobby was
thrown into the room, the three bottom stairs were
turned at right angles, the red plush was removed
from the hand-rail, leaden panes were let into the
inner front door, the room was painted white —
indeed, the whole cottage was painted white —
and as soon as possible the conservatories were
removed to the farthest away part of the garden,
for no self-respecting house can endure a " lean-
to." Where they had been, I built out the room,
with as much window as possible. That gave me a
long and spacious sitting-room hall ; we eat at the
new end of it, and use the old as a sitting-room.
And then it was ready for colour : blue with a touch
of purple, and a cushion or two of old red ; you
know the rare red that goes with purple ?

Brass and copper, and a few sober pictures ;
books, seed and bulb catalogues, Gauntlett's fasci-
nating list of flowering shrubs ; convex mirrors to
give jolly pictures of the room at night ; a Cay ley
Robinson, a Lee Hankey ; pieces of sculpture from
the shop near the museum at Naples ; some pretty
things from Florence ; old pieces of furniture picked
up here and there ; old china — it is all blue in this
room, and sits around the top of the panelling and
on the long window-sills ; Thorwaldsen medallions,
bought in Rome by the man's great-aunt in the

14

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55
o

The Happy Garden

1830's — nothing has really been bought of set
purpose : things only that have pleased me, and
have clamoured to be mine ; for charming things
are often impatient of the company they keep in
shop-windows, and, when they see the right person
coming along, they cry :

" Buy me ! Buy me ! "

And, let me tell you, they hate collectors.

One thing I'm rather proud of — the radiators.
I could not bear the sight of them, so I set to work
to make them look like something else. Do you
see that curtain of mauve silk behind a door of
brass latticework ? It conceals a radiator ; in the
drawing-room, it is between two bookcases that are
under the window, and a green curtain hides it ;
a boot cupboard and medicine shelves are on either
side of it in the bedroom ; and so on in all the
rooms. Nobody suspects that they are there, and
they banish all the cold damp terrors of the winter.

The little courtyard out there was where the
" lean-to " stood originally. The yew hedge sur-
rounding it is doing famously, clipped into ingenious
patterns. The stones came from a church, and one
of them bears the remains of an epitaph.

The sundial is a trite person, and says in all
weathers, even when it is not telling the time :

" Time can do much."
16

" The sundial is a trite person, and says in al
weathers . . . ' Time can do much

Gardener's Pride

In the courtyard a succession of flowers bloom ;
beginning with tulips, and the double white arabis,
and, later, purple ten-week stock and mauve and
blue viola ; clematis vitalba throws its generous
growth across it at a height of twenty feet, and the
beautiful ceahothus " Gloire de Versaille " covers
the white wall with its delicate blue

My dear Jane, of course, you shall have tea,
and I won't say another word !

But I do want you to see my new Japanese
garden.

17

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Sancho Pan^e*. beKeld all this
with wonder <Su> delidht.

Don Quixote.

II

Jane Admires

There is more than one famous instance of a guest
arriving for one night and staying for years. I have
arranged for Jane to stay, at any rate, until the
book is finished, for already she has shown the
most intelligent appreciation ; as, of course, she
was likely to do, being my own invention ; but
that is not so very certain either, for I am sure
the characters in fiction do not always or altogether
approve of their authors, and often, at nights, there
are meetings in the study of gentlemen and ladies
of all periods, and many votes of censure are passed.
At such gatherings, if anywhere, you will find sound
criticism, though here and there it must be vitiated
by personal grievance. They know their authors
through and through, and their lives suffer from the
weaknesses of their creators, and too often they
have been misrepresented or made to act in violent
contradiction to their natures. They protest, and
it is very entertaining to hear Steerforth on Charles
Dickens, and Jekyll and Hyde squabbling about

21

The Happy Garden

R. L. S., and Mrs. Tanqueray vowing that she
never did and never could have said :

" Where's the pride in being a married woman
among women who are married ! "

Living down here in a room which is almost
all windows, looking on to green lawns and climb-
ing roses, has made them realise how and where
they are wrong, and it is only very, very few who
have vitality enough to escape through the window
in the twilight and parade themselves in the garden.
Don Quixote leads the way and wages war on all
the villains of romance. He has a splendid time
of it.

And as with the creatures of imagination, so
with actual people. They come into the garden,
and all the parts of themselves which they have
borrowed from other people and books and plays
fall away from them like the skin of a sloughing
snake. They are surprised to find themselves
genuine, and, if by chance borrowed words of
admiration come to their lips, they swallow them
down, or, if they are out, they apologise at once,
not so much to me as to the nearest flower, who is
naturally gracious.

And I have not escaped the test of the garden.
It keeps me real, insists on it, and relations between
us are strained directly I begin to pat myself on

22

Jane Admires

the back, or to adopt a manner that is in the
slightest degree artificial ; and when I look back
on it, it seems to me that the trees must have
suffered agonies in the days when I came down
from London for only a month or two in the
year. Even now there are difficult moments, such
moments as bear their fruit in the caustic com-
ments I hear from the characters of fiction in the
study. It is a dreadful thought that in the evening
when their day's work is over, the flowers discuss
my failings, and the lingering bees hear and carry
away the tale of them to their hives. Bees sweeten
their honey with gossip, and the things they over-
hear and never understand. Bees think perfectly
clearly about their own affairs, but about human
affairs they are quite silly — almost as silly as human
beings, without their excuses.

Strange things do happen in the garden, strange
shapes and shadows hover in the woods, and on
moonlight nights in spring and autumn one is often
sure that odd creatures run and chatter, and dart
away so quickly that one can never see them. See-
ing is not always believing, and believing is very
little a matter of seeing. What you see, dear Jane,
is only a millionth part of what you might see, only
a thousandth part of what you will see when you
have trained your eyes to know — more or less —

23

The Happy Garden

what to look for. What I want you to see first of
all is that all this has not been made, but has
happened. It has grown ! . . . Show me your
garden, and I will tell you what you are, and if you
like me, you are bound to like my garden ; for
gardening, like every other art, is an implacable
mirror of the soul, and as yet there is no curtain of
false criticism between it and you.

Do you know Mr. Robinson ? There is his book,
" The English Flower Garden," one of the most
revolutionary works in the English language. Quite
respectable, I assure you. Real, healthy revolu-
tions always are perfectly respectable ; perfectly
normal, perfectly sober, and they happen slowly
and painlessly — except to the people who were
making money out of the old order.

Now, that old order was a matter of bedding-
out, mosaics, plaster-work ; niggling, tiresome re-
production of old patterns, without regard to soil,
position, surrounding country, or even common
sense : all the vices of French gardening without
its charm or quality. It reached its climax, I
believe, when the Crystal Palace was laid out long
ago. Half-a-dozen different flowers were enough
for that sort of work, but they were not enough for
Mr. Robinson. He had discovered the cottage
garden, where, if there was no design, there were

24

Jane Admires

often harmonious masses of colour, formed of
flowers which the professional horticulturist de-
spised or ignored. Then he set about smashing the
pattern gardeners, and stuck to it with such patience
and practicality that he has produced the Royal
Horticultural Society with its 12,000 members, and
built up a tremendous industry.

It is not a cult, but rather a passion. The
Robinsonian garden is one of the greatest civilising
agencies in England, and as for the Freedom of
Women, John Stuart Mill fades away before Mr.
Robinson as a champion. Mill provided arguments :
Mr. Robinson provided action, and a sphere of
activity. If a woman has wrongs, let her take them
into her garden, and if her wrongs have destroyed her
perspective and sense of proportion, the acquaint-
ance with the laws of Nature which she will gain can-
not fail to put her right. If she feels very strongly . . .

Quite right, Jane ; no politics ! You shall see
the rest of the house.

The kitchen is through the door there : red-
tiled floor, plenty of window, with leaded panes,
plenty of air ; rules of housekeeping hanging up
which no one ever keeps : they are there to remind
everybody that there are such things as rules, and
that, if it comes to a pinch, there is such a thing as
discipline. It is so important, whoever you are, to

25

The Happy Garden

know your place without being blatant about it.
That is really the only law we observe. Everybody
and everything in its place, and when by accident
we get out of it, the force of habit is there to swing
us back. Human nature — and dog nature and
plant nature — is so elastic.

You, Jane, shall have no difficulty, for directly
you show signs of getting out of hand you shall
cease to exist. You have neither past nor future,
and only such present as I choose to give you.

(Jane grows very meek. She is an odd little
person ; very ordinary, very like everybody, and
very unlike what everybody likes to think she —
or he — is. That is to say, that she is not at all
romantic. She is rather pretty, though she might
easily be prettier ; rather intelligent, though she
just lacks confidence ; in fact, she is the sort of
person who thinks of the right repartee an hour
after she ought to have said it — which is so like
everybody. And that makes her an admirable
audience, for she only asks to admire, and if she
can admire honestly, then she will have one of the
rarest pleasures granted to mortal woman, and also
to all the imaginary creatures with whom we sur-
round ourselves ; all the queer creatures who, in
mad, impossible ways, have the experiences which
we ourselves escape.)

26

THE WINDOW WHICH CURVES INTO THE DRAWING-ROOM IS
THE INVALID'S SEAT, FACING SOUTH

Jane Admires

Here is the drawing-room, almost altogether a
summer room. It used to be an oblong with which
it was practically impossible to do anything. The
nicely leaded door into the garden was there, but,
do what I would, I could not make it my room,
until it occurred to me that I wanted a dressing-
room out of my bedroom, which is above it. There-
fore, I decided to build out ; but not the whole
length of the room ; that would take more of the
garden than I could spare. Half the room then, to
make another window. That made an L shape,
and it followed naturally that the window in the
heel of the L should jut into the room instead of
out of it. At once that gave an unusual tone, and
it had the practical advantage that, outside, a seat
could be placed in the bend and a little roof built
over it ; it faces due south, and is a regular sun-
trap, even in winter. Invalid visitors are placed
there, and they have a view right away to the
river — in reality not much more than a hundred
yards, but that is quite enough space in which
to dream. There are no immense distances
here, but there is a sense of peace, a feeling of
being closed in by the pines, and, I hope, an
atmosphere of happiness ! There should be, if
joy in creation, which is the only joy, counts
for anything.

27

The Happy Garden

You like the fireplace ? I'm not sure whether
I designed it myself, or whether it happened. I hope
it happened, and at any rate I shall say it did.
Plain bricks, you see, built in an undistinguished
pattern. The draught is got from a grating outside,
and a fine blaze we can make with pine cones and
branches, a fire so cheery that it must thaw and
dissolve the coldest reserve. The flames flicker and
lick the green needles of the branches, which shrivel
into glowing, red-hot spears, and the sparks go
flying ; we throw on logs, and the fire roars and
the cones open crackling.

Most of the woodwork is painted apple -green.
The walls are white, and so are the door and window
frames, so that you can have the chintzes as riotous
as may be. The rosewood spinet adores the flowers
in the summer, though, poor thing, it can only tell
you so with half the compass of its notes, and those
cracked ; but it gains expression in the scent that
comes from the bowl'of lavender there by the round
window, and it finds company in some of the
pictures, old engravings of its period :

" Cupid stung by a Bee"

Bless him ! There he is taking comfort with a
round-legged lady, who could never understand the
woes of child or man ; and she is almost as charm-
ingly stupid as the Curly-headed Family over there :

28

Q

z

UJ
Qu
Qu
<
I

<
X
H

UJ

O
<

cu

UJ
OS

Jane Admires

five bewigged and becurled heads, faces of people

who have never seen, never heard, never thought,

never felt anything, and always lived as people did

in those days — (Do they still ? . . . I wonder) — on

imitation emotions, imitation joys, imitation hopes,

imitation sorrows, so that they are angry and hurt,

as such people always are, at the reality and delight

of the two yutti of Correggio scratching inscriptions

with their arrows. They are hurt and bewildered,

just as Sacred Love is hurt in the Titian picture in

the Villa Borghese, by what the Profane Lady is

telling her of life. They like the coy maternity of

" The Duchess of Devonshire " better, and they

have no difficulty in pretending that the nurse is

round the corner, scowling, and fearful of the harm

that the Duchess may do " The Rt. Honble. Lady

Georgiana Cavendish " before Sir Joshua has

finished. And what they can make of the modern

Italian impressionist etching is more than I can

imagine. They live there, posing and smirking and

quite content to ignore everything but their own

beautiful selves ! . . . Unfortunately, they cannot

see the sampler in the corner by the fireplace. It

is by :

Mary Fleetwood.

Aged 12.

And her old school dame burst into poetry in
29

The Happy Garden

her enthusiasm over the achievement ; unless the
verse is a pure convention :

" jfHarg ,jf Iffttoooti is mg name,
Mis toorb's enrlosefc tDttfjtn tfjis frame;
■Sittr bg tf)ts tofecn gou mag see
<L2af)at rare mg parents 1)atr for me."

It is a marvel of patience, done in single stitch
on silk which has faded to a delicious colour. It
is so delicate and so fine, that one would swear that
Mary Fleetwood's eyes must have suffered. But,
no ; Mary Fleetwood married, had children, met
her full share of trouble, and lived through it to the
age of eighty-one, and did not take to spectacles
until she was over sixty. We shake our heads,
Jane and I, and say regretfully that these things
do not happen now, and we forget that samplers
were only sewn because the school dames exhausted
the fund of their learning in the morning, and had
not the wherewithal to fill in the afternoons, so that,
when Mary Fleetwood had swallowed her crumbs
of reading, spelling, arithmetic, and the use of the
globes, her idle hands must be preserved from the
friend of Dr. Watts. Therefore she sewed her
sampler ; and now little girls have their little heads
crammed full of things which even we were afraid
to know, and actually are taught to follow the
processes of the loves of the plants, with the expo-
sure of which Erasmus Darwin so shocked Mary

30

Jane Admires

Fleetwood's mother. . . . Little girls know so much
more than we knew when we were young, and
when they are women they will be so little wiser,
as we showed ourselves so little wiser than Mary
Fleetwood when it came to facts, and the foolish
thing that was there to do.

Jane sighs, and turns away from Mary Fleet-
wood's only work of art, and stands before a coarse,
full-bellied, dark-blue jug that came from Bruges,
and has borne many a quart of Flemish ale to
Flemish lips. And she gives a timid little chuckle
of delight at a pair of silly Dresden figures striking
attitudes worthy of the Curly-headed Family,
under their blue canopies.

Next she sees a drawing of Miss Ellen Terry
as " Nance Oldfield " ! It is not at all like Miss
Terry really, though in the line there is caught
something of her vitality, her grace, and the charm-
ing quality of life that make her one of England's
rarest and most precious possessions.

I whisper to Jane.

" No — not really ? " says Jane.

" Yes. Indeed ! "

" What ! . . . She came here ! "

And Jane thinks of the incomparable woman
descending from the (stage) sky against which she
always sees her in her funny little imagination; and

31

The Happy Garden

I would not for the world destroy Jane's illusion.
But I know something of the stage, and I know
that it was not the actress that was so rare so
much as the woman ; and it was the woman that
was, and is, so treasured.

When Jane has recovered from the flutter of
her vicarious acquaintance with the illustrious and
great, I take her farther on her zig-zag pilgrimage
through the drawing-room. I insist that she shall
admire the twelve dancing Dresden children bought
at Aix-les-Bains, because they were so like Isadora
Duncan's entrancing babes ; and the carved marble
lamp that came from Florence out of the amazing
shop on the Lung 'Arno, into which you plunge out
of the brilliant Florentine light into a dim region
where ages, and centuries, and whole worlds whirl
round you, presenting you with relics of Napoleon,
and Louis XIV., and Lorenzo the Magnificent, and
various Popes, and Catherine of Russia, and modern
Birmingham. In the dim light gems wink and
shimmer ; men, and clogs, and stags, and horses
run stiffly across old tapestries, and ivory beasts
grimace and whisper of the east ; and there are
swords, and guns, and arrows, and medals and
pagodas. . . . And it is all fascinating. . . . And
when you long to walk back into your own life
for a moment or two, out you step into a street

32

Jane Admires

and find yourself opposite a shop glowing with
oranges and lemons. . . . Are they genuine, or did
they, too, come from Birmingham ? . . . Genuine
enough as things go ; and this is Florence, and
over against Fiesole is a great white bird. . . .
Heads are all craned to look at it. Indeed it is
no bird, but an aeroplane : and this is very
much the twentieth century.

There's a digression ! . . . To recover from it, look
out of the window at the roses, and the white wall
over which hang laburnum, clematis, and ceano-
thus brilliant ; and there, in the larch, is a squirrel
frolicking ; one of the rascals who take all my
filberts and Kentish cobs in the autumn. You
would never think that the road is there, only
twenty yards away. Such a jolly road, leading from
the world, through the wilderness, down even to
the sea, whence the winds come full of melody that
they murmur to the pines. . . . And the herons
squawk like gulls, so that here it is easy to
satisfy the natural craving to pretend that every-
thing is something else. . . .

Now you shall admire the brass and copper, and
the mirrors which make such charming pictures.
To my mind, a mirror should never be hung where
it cannot show its reflection and make a little
picture of its own. In the convex mirror above the
d 33

The Happy Garden

spinet you see the room like a Dutch painting, a
Peter de Hooch, with a glimpse of the courtyard
and the umbrella roses beyond. All through the
summer months I have purple and mauve sweet
peas in the copper bowls, and they show finely
against the green net curtains which I discovered
after a long and desperate search for something
to replace white muslin and silk as a foil to chintz.
They fade in the sun, but that makes no difference.
We have a dyeing-day, and dip them and the
darkish-blue tablecloths, and the man's shirts, and
anything else that clamours to be blue or bluer
than it is.

Here at the windows, to hold back the chintz
curtains, are apples of green glass with ormolu
leaves, which set me thrilling when I look at them,
though I have had them for more than three years.
I'm afraid they are Empire, and, strictly speaking,
out of place in a room devoted, like most of the
house, to Queen Anne ; but principles and rules are
most effective when they are broken here and there,
and, after all, Queen Anne is dead, and the Empire
and many other fashions have passed over her
memory. And certain things are so charming that
I must and will have them, whether the rest of the
furniture likes it or not. What is a chair or a table
that it should dictate to a free English woman ?

34

Jane Admires

I think you must see the rest of the house before
we set foot in the garden. Stand for a moment at
the front door, and look along the hall. You did
not appreciate the Hepplewhite chairs with their
blue cushions, or the narrow Tudor table, which
doubles its length at one touch, and again at
another, or the Florentine baby sitting on the rose du
Barri cushion reading his little scroll of music. His
brother is up there writing : the composer and virtu-
oso. I believe they have another brother blowing his
own trumpet, but that is what no one is allowed to do
here — except myself — so he was left behind in Italy.
Here is Peter-cat, a smoky blue Persian with
golden eyes. He has been very friendly with us
lately because the kitchen cat has had four kittens,
which he cannot endure. When first he came from
London he was filled with enthusiasm for the
simple life, and undertook to live only by what
he killed. He had his moment of revolt against
modern civilisation, but, like the rest of us, the
habit of good living and ease was too strong for
him, and he comes to us for food, and having his
neck tickled takes the place of sport. He is beauti-
ful enough to be entirely selfish without unpleasant
consequences, and he is irresistible when he comes
in with the smell of honeysuckle, or roses, or
lavender strong upon him.

35

The Happy Garden

(Don't take him on your lap, or you will not
be able to escape for hours ! All I He has gone
upstairs to lie on a purple quilt which he finds
essentially the right background for his colour
scheme. You shall see.)

Upstairs, under the Japanese prints, with a
chance of peeping at yourself in the Wellington
mirror at the top.

Now for the study — straight ahead 1 It is the
latest room of all, and it finishes the house. Alas !
I have a plan for building out one more room,
which we don't want, and the man clamours for
a study away from the house, somewhere in the
wood.

" So like a man ! " says Jane.

I think it is only male discontent, and entirely
because he has a friend who has a study that was
once a cowshed. ... If it ever became serious
he might be turned into the washhouse.

" He couldn't want anything better than this,"
says Jane.

Men always want something better — so do
women !

It faces south and west. Two walls are all
taken up with long, low, rounded windows with
leaded glass and window-seats with green cushions.

36

Jane Admires

The sheepdog loves to sit on them with his head
hanging out of the window, watching the shadows
come and go, and listening to the carts going by
on the road. . . .

Very often you can get a good effect by inver-
sion. When it came to furnishing the room, I
remembered that I had seen a black carpet in
Paris ; so the floor is painted white and the carpet
is black with a green rug in front of the fireplace ;
the curtains are green, with white cashmere inner
ones close to the window. When it was finished,
it still seemed to lack something. A piece of old
red tapestry was tried as a curtain at the end of
the bookcase, where there are still no books, and
has been a joy for ever.

Jane has seen it ! . . . The convex window over
the fireplace, with the green net curtains and the
" Winged Victory," in miniature, striding through
them. The room was built over the extension of
the hall, the flat roof of which had originally been
left as leads under the windows of the passage.
These had to be blocked up, and the problem arose
how to light the passage and at the same time to
have a fireplace in the wall. Being a study, books
must occupy every available wall space there was.
The problem was easily solved by having the window
over the fireplace. . . . And the chimney ? It is

37

The Happy Garden

good for chimneys to go crooked ; so this one goes
to the right, and interferes with nothing, though
perhaps it makes the wall a little too hot for the
books. The little window looks on to the passage.
Stand on the hearth, Jane, and look through it,
and I will show you something more than a white
door and wall as a background to " Victory."

Jane stands on the hearth, on tiptoe, for she is
very short, and her funny little face peers through
the window at me with childish wonder and expect-
ancy in her eyes. I open the door of the little mauve
spare room, and her mouth forms a round O as
she gazes through the room and out over the apple
trees and flower border into the woods. Suddenly
she disappears, and comes round to join me in
raptures over the deep mauve carpet and the chintz
with its mauve roses, and the Japanese prints on
the white walls, and the Queen Anne furniture, and
the peep of the gardener's absurd little doll's house,
and the view along the drive up to the garage and
the fruit garden.

It is a perfect little nest for Jane, and she says
so. She shall have a volume of Nietzsche, and she
shall sleep there between the chapters. . . . She
will be no trouble to the servants.

She is as curious about the doors in the passage
as the wives of Bluebeard.

38

Jane Admires

Yes, Jane. That's the bath-room ; nice and
cool with its white tiled walls and green-lined bath.
And you can't go in there, because that's the man's
dressing-room, and he may be hiding, as he often
does when visitors come.

I have difficulty in bringing Jane back to the
study, where she does not show all the respect that
one would like. She is not at all impressed when
I tell her that books are written at the desk, and
I am afraid that the old superstitious reverence for
literature is dying out, which is no bad thing, for
I am sure it is good for both parties for men of letters
to realise that they have a great deal in common
with their audience. . . . And she is almost in-
different when I lead her to the bookshelves and
show her the august company gathered there, with
a few interlopers : Shakespeare, and Meredith, and
the New Dramatists, all rather hurt by J. M. Synge's
preface to " The Tinker's Wedding," with its dis-
respectful reference to their Ibsen. And Kipling
hobnobs with H. G. Wells, while Tennyson shudders
as far away from Swinburne as he possibly can.
" Jean Christophe " denounces mountebanks, and
protects himself from Stendhal on the one hand
and Balzac on the other, with the lives of Beethoven
and Tolstoi written by his godfather, Romain
Rolland. "Don Quixote " finds himself sandwiched

39

The Happy Garden

in between " Roderick Hudson " and " The Blue
Bird," and never dreams that they are anything
but books of chivalry. . . . Stevenson and Henley
are united in wondering when literature is going to
digest the mess of sociology which it gulped down
so hastily as soon as their protecting presences were
removed. And Robert Burns roars at them all :

"Man to man, the tcorld o'er,
Shall brithers be for «,' that."

But Jane is not stirred. She has no feeling
for it all : dramatists, poets, preachers, teachers,
knaves, fools, hypocrites, angels and glorious man,
she lumps them all together, and she sees a copy
of " Richard Feverel," and says : "I think that
is such a pretty story."

That is the limit of her criticism. She asks for
a story. If it can be called " pretty " she likes it ;
if not, not. It is not that she has no power of
appreciation so much as that she has only a limited
power of expression. If by any chance she were
to read "King Lear, '"and were held by it, she
would call it " pretty " ! . . . She is never likely to
read " King Lear," however, for she has taken her
Shakespeare as read, and has dismissed him long
ago, though she would be quite angry if she
ever heard the supremacy of his genius called in
question.

40

Jane Admires

She likes the reproductions of the Pompeii
frescoes above the south window, and the odd little
coloured engraving of an old cricket match, and the
portrait of Keats, whom she finds so like her brother
Mark, who used to write verses in the albums of her
school friends ; but he did something— and went
to Canada. . . . But she is so oppressed by the
atmosphere of literature that she is rather unjust
to the study and goes away without even looking
at the gabled roof of white paint and oak. A
ceiling seems so unnecessary.

I explain to her what an advantage it is to have
the extra space between the ceiling and the roof
in the room, and go on talking at length, until
I find that she has darted back to the little mauve
room ! . . .

She had heard the baby at the gardener's cottage
crowing. That is all very well, but Jane was
invented for sightseeing purposes, and she has to
see the sights, and eschew sentiment. Jane ! If
you don't come at once I shall turn you into a
Cook's Tourist.

She comes at a run. We peep into the best
spare bedroom with its rose-bud wallpaper, and its
two little white beds, and the single bookshelf run-
ning round two-thirds of the room, containing all
the second-rate fiction which has been banned by

41

The Happy Garden

the censorship committee of the study. Peter-cat
is lying on his purple quilt. Jane coos at him, but
he ignores her.

So — to my room. Honeysuckle and roses nod
at the window at one end, clematis and jasmine
hang a curtain at the other. Always the windows
are wide open, and the night sounds come drowsily
up : the squawking of the herons, the rattle of the
nightjar, the fluting of the toads, the barking of
the gamekeeper's dog down the road, sometimes
the nightingale, always the wind in the trees. . . .

The little white shelf that runs along the.
wall by the side of the bed is a speciality of
mine ; it is so useful for so many things — all
the things one loves in the way of books
.and knick-knacks, and a portrait or two. And my
pet pictures hang above it, some Botticellis in
pretty Italian frames ; best of all, the Carpaccio
boy from Venice ; the perfect angel playing a lute.
Here I sleep, or, when I do not sleep, I lie and
dream colour and form and new schemes for house
and garden, or think the funny half-thoughts that
are all that will come to a person's bed. Some-
times the bed is like a boat, and with sails all out
away we go dreaming, dreaming, and laughing, as
we dart out on the golden sea, which is the end of
all things. . . . Sometimes there are dreadful

42

Jane Admires

visitors : moths, spiders, bats, all the horrible things
that are said to fasten in a woman's hair.

There is no door through to the dressing-room,
only the narrow Gothic aperture. That is because
the only fireplace is in the dressing-room, and
because a room so tiny has no business to have
a door. There is a curtain which we will draw
when you have had a glimpse of the green ivory
dressing-table outfit, brushes, powder-box, etc. etc.
The name on them is pricked in with gold, in the
old way. They began their lives as blue and turned
green by degrees, like all the old green knives. If
they had begun green, they would have turned
brown and yellow ; the lovely green is faded blue !

Well, then, the chest of drawers in the dressing-
room is Queen Anne, those in the bedroom Shera-
ton, also the wardrobe. Queen Anne, of course,
must object to the Italian element, but it broadens
her mind, and helps her to shake off the Churchill
influence. She took it all so seriously at first — as
seriously as the people for whom modern tourist
Italy was invented — that the room was in danger
of becoming a little sombre. However, that little
gay cushion on the chair there, and the chintz-
covered box — in which are kept oddments of every
description — dismissed Culture for ever.

There remains one gap to be repaired. One of
43

The Happy Garden

the four great Ghirlandajo frescoes is missing, and
the reproduction of the Venus di Milo is so bad
that some day I shall smash her, and when next
I visit the Louvre I shall tell the Goddess of
Beauty, and she will thank me for seeing to it that
there is in the world one less of the million, million
offences committed in her name.

44

CHEEP&WALK

Friends,books,a £arden,# perhaps

Dclilitftl industry enjoyed at home,
Ana nature in her cultivated trim
Dressed to his taste, inviting him
abroad— , ,

Can he want occupation who has

these? ,J M gowperslask^

Ill

Cherry Walk and Lawn

To be really thorough, I would have to set out
my lease, a proper parchment, with its scrolled
writing, saying loudly :

"TEbis 3noenture Mitnessetb — "

But it would be polite on your part to take the
lease for granted, and to assume that I have not
squatted, or taken any advantage of the confused
law relating to Real Property in England. There
is a blot on the escutcheon of the garden. Origin-
ally three acres, my predecessor's gardener took in
a few yards every year by putting, first of all, trees
outside the fence, then the fence outside the trees.
It was his delight, too, to plant everything with a
view to its being seen by the passer-by on the
road. Did I tell you that the garden was entirely
overlooked from the road ? But I soon saw to that,
and one of the first things I did was to plant a fir
hedge, and it is now quite ten feet in height, and
that, with all the flowering trees and shrubs, most

47

The Happy Garden

effectually hides us, and also keeps away any motor
dust that may come our way.

Where was I ? Oh ! about taking in the wood
by the old gardener. I was more honest ; not that
I had any rooted objection to his practices ; but
I found it simpler to go straight to the landlord
and ask him if I might not extend the garden
a few yards into the woods on three sides. No
objection was raised, and by taking in a little every
few years, the estate grew to four acres of garden
and four of wood, and, as the wire fence is invisible
and the pine woods seem to go on for ever and
ever, it is possible to sit on the lawn, or by the
tea-house, and feel free of all boundaries and neigh-
bours and legal obligations ; and, between seven
in the morning and seven in the evening, when the
post comes, to forget the world.

The daily paper is an intrusion at twelve o'clock,
but that is just a joke, for journalists manage to
make even the truth unconvincing ; and their facts
are always much more distorted than the fiction
of their feuilleton.

Jane has been sound asleep in her little mauve
room distorting a perfectly peaceful and happy
picture of a procession through a green Japanese
gate into a representation of an execution. In her

48

Cherry Walk and Lawn

confusion, the colour print on the wall by the
window was blurred in her mind with an illustra-
tion of Tennyson's " Rizpah," which is a memory
of her early youth !

Now for the outside of the cottage.

First, she is to see the view from the lawn with
the round windows of the new study. There she
is free from the literary atmosphere which so
oppressed her, and can admire the effect of the
green shutters and the white rough-cast walls and
the brown tiled roofs. The old roofs of the original
house were grey slate, which was not to be endured
for a moment. To replace the slates with tiles was
expensive and troublesome. Therefore, the blue-
grey was blotted out with red paint I
1 Why not ?

The red soon tones down, and the effect is
almost as good as tiles. But, let me add, it really
is not quite so simple as this. I had to stand over
the painters while they were working at it, and got
them to rub in, here and there, some patches of
brown paint, and, even green, in places, to get the
artistic effect that is needed when you attempt
to paint a slate roof. The result is so satisfactory,
that when I explain to my visitors they are at once
reduced to the proper admiring sense of the mar-
vellous and say :

e 49

The Happy Garden

" Good Heavens ! "

All the new rooms, the addition to the drawing-
room, the study, and the servants' hall, are roofed
with tiles, so that it is easy to mark the progress
of the house.

The blue bambino on the drawing-room wall
looks its best when the Virginia creeper is trailing
over it, but it is always a relief from the white,
green, and ruddy brown of the general scheme ;
just as the old red curtain in the study quickens
the effect of the black, white and green.

Now come through the green door into the
little front garden and the brick court, and out into
the drive, to see the north-west side of the house,
and the gardener's cottage. There is the window
of Jane's little mauve room, and the bath-room
with the brass jugs — mostly brought from Siena —
gleaming at the window. That nice long sloping
roof is the servants' sitting-room, the very latest
addition.

A tiny brick court is between this room and the
privet hedge round the lower end of the orchard.
In summer it is gay with tubs of fuchsias.

The gardener's cottage is an absurd little house,
like a little tug butting at a great ship. Another
brick court gives it a little garden of its own, walled
in with espalier fruit trees.

5°

Cherry Walk and Lawn

It was originally a coach-house, and the first
man I had lived at the other end of the garden,
until the County Council declared that it was illegal
to live in wooden houses, even though you build
them yourselves. . . . The car and the gardener's
family changed places, and the coach-house was
cut up into four rooms, each hardly bigger than
the dog-kennel. Husband and wife and three
children have lived in it happily enough, and
husband and wife and crowing baby are living in
it now ! . . . The baby, for the most part, inhabits
the courtyard ! . . .

" Who loves a garden loves a greenJioKse too."

That is not true of the first gardener. He loved
the greenhouse to the exclusion of the garden. He
was unhappy and uneasy when he first came,
because the conservatory had been abolished, and
in all the garden there was no glass. He felt that
his reputation and position in the neighbourhood
were at stake, and, therefore, one winter, he built
three glass-houses, and when I came down on a
Sunday, met me with the announcement :

" There, ma'am. It is now a real gentleman's
garden ! "

I dared not tell him that it was never meant to
be anything else but a woman's garden, my garden.

The Happy Garden

His successor, the present Man of Earth, has a
better sense of the fitness of things. To him the
greenhouse serves the garden, and I have not yet
discovered any wayward ambition to show chrysan-
themums. He is in all things a worthy servant of
the garden.

At one time there were lovely peaches on the
south wall of his cottage, but the privet hedge grew
up and blotted out the sun, and the trees died,
and, alas ! they cannot be induced to grow against
any other wall. But inside the hedge is our summer
dining-room, and the green wall shuts us in from
the wind, while the cherry trees shelter us from
the sun.

And just here I must say a word in defence of
the much-maligned privet hedge. Mine was already
there, a straggling ill-kept row of sturdy bushes.
I hesitated for some time whether to demolish it,
but it held out such possibilities of a quick shelter,
that I decided against that ; and, instead, tried
what could be done to improve it. The despised
privet hedge is now ten feet high and four deep,
is cut into turrets, and has a door through it for
the maid to bring in the trays, etc.

The way lies past the yew hedge, and the chest-
nut tree to the lawn and the main courtyard, where
the lions dwell, and the poppies grow in the cracks

52

Cherry Walk and Lawn

between the stones, and pink cranesbill rears little
green forests in the corners. ... A few years ago it
was all lawn up to the drawing-room window, with
a giant fir tree, which dwarfed the cottage and shut
out the afternoon sun. That was cut down at the
time when I had discovered the use of brick, and
the first courtyard was laid out. Unhappily, I used
good house bricks, and they crumbled away and
became dust to dust, like mortal men. They were
exhumed, and Yorkshire stone was put down, all
round the corner of the house with a wide path
extending the length of the wall. A bird bath was
bought from Mrs. G. F. Watts, at Compton, together
with the terra-cotta tubs for the umbrella roses —
" Lady Gay " and " Dorothy Perkins." Of course,
they don't really grow in the tubs. They would
soon become pot-bound. The bottoms of the tubs
were knocked out so that the roses can root happily
in specially-prepared clay, and loam. They are very
very happy there, and like the proximity of the
honeysuckle and the Banksia rose growing over
the drawing-room window. They have cranesbill
worshipping at their feet and from every visitor
they gain as much adulation as they can want ;
certainly as much as is good for them. They are
arrogant and rebellious in temper, and always when
they come to bloom they struggle against the

53

The Happy Garden

passing of summer into autumn, of autumn into
winter, and long after the leaves have fallen and
nearly all the plants have gone into winter-quarters
they put out their defiant little pink buttons with a
forlorn little swagger. But they have to submit
like the rest of us and retire for the next year's
work of covering up their crinolines, in which, at
last, the horticulturists have found a use for the
hoops of our grandmothers.

Weeds and ants battle for possession of the
crevices between the stones. The ants I murder
with paraffin, and as for the weeds, when they grow
too rampant, I invite one of those visitors who
burn to be of use to their hostess.

A hedge of dwarf lavender marks off the court-
yard from the lawn, beginning by the stone steps
with the lions — they came from Venice, and are
called James and John — right round to the old
apple tree that was struck by lightning, and now
serves as a prop for climbing roses and wistaria,
which, when it is grown tall enough, is to mingle
with the laburnum growing near by. Inside the
lavender, in the spring, grow crocuses and tulips,
and by the time these are over the lavender has
grown out over the stones. Over the round draw-
ing-room window a lieine Henriette rose climbs
about the brown roof, and near by a Judas tree

54

Cherry Walk and Lawn

gives us beautiful pink flowers in the spring, and
later on its fine foliage ; a passion-flower twines
itself above the Madonna lilies beneath another
window, and laburnum and clematis Jackmanni
bloom alternately over the wall that divides the
front garden from the garden proper. . . .

I'll open the door.

There ; you see the brick court from the other
side, and the rose pergola between the front door
and the little front gate, and the clematis montana,
and the acacias, the almond tree, what remains of
the old gentleman's laurels, the berberis, polygonum,
and the larches where you saw the squirrel.

He is still there. . . . Two of them ! Little red
fellows. They will have nothing to do with their
grey American cousins, and I believe the Americans
eat out the Europeans. It is a terrible invasion :
surely a case for the Monroe Doctrine.

Now, Jane — to adopt the manner of the pro-
fessional guide — turning our backs on the eligible
mansion — it is really a mansion, for it has two
staircases — we find in front of us an extensive view
of the croquet lawn running into the pine woods in
the distance, and flanked on one side by a herba-
ceous border and a high hedge and trees, and on
the other by another wide border topped by a
cherry walk.

55

The Happy Garden

When you have made the tour of that you can
go to sleep again.

The oak tree in the hedge reaches right over to
the pines on the other side of the road, and is used
by the squirrels as a bridge. For us, it is most use-
ful to create an illusion : it makes it seem as though
the woods were immediately on the other side of
the hedge, and only the motors that go snorting
by bring back the reality. Under the spruce tree,
the home and birthplace of many birds, is St. John's
wort and blue periwinkle, rampageous trailers that
would take possession of all the borders if they
were not repressed with a firm hand.

May and laburnum are lovely in the spring
against the dark background of the pines, and the
rowans are fully aware of their effective setting,
and put forth masses of scarlet berries in the
summer, which Cook makes into jelly, of an ex-
cellent tartness that makes them a serious rival
to red currants.

Jane is hurt ! . . . Why not think of eating in
the presence of beauty ? Why not think of beauty
while one is eating ? Why not eat beauty ? Why

not beautify food ? Why not ? At any rate,

my dear Jane, it is beautiful to be alive, and one
must eat to live, and I will not hear your ridiculous
middle-class prejudices in my garden. I will not

56

Cherry Walk and Lawn

have life split up, ticketed, priced, labelled, sold as
a bargain and tucked away in a secret drawer.

I have bullied Jane into meekness, but she is
growing more and more Victorian, like a little
feminine Nineteenth Century that has walked from
an ugly place of worship into a garden, and, in a
frightened sort of way, announced herself as the
Twentieth.

However that may be, here she is in my garden,
and she has to see it all and to get the spirit of
it into her veins, before she is allowed to go out
into the world again. She shall live through the
life of the garden, from snowdrops and crocuses to
autumn lilies and Michaelmas daisies ; she shall see
the trees come to life, feel the sap coursing through
them, follow them putting forth leaves, flowers
and fruit ; she shall eat the apple in my garden,
and learn the wisdom of earth and sky, and so
with a vision of what will be in the garden, she
shall go back over the hills to be swallowed up by
the world, and there she shall plant seeds that will
one day bring forth fruit an hundredfold.

The great use of happiness is to make others
happy. It is Shelley's " Sensitive Plant " :

" Which scattered love, as stars do .light,
[Found sadness, where it left delight. . . ."

57

The Happy Garden

and if it be turned to selfish uses, it withers long
before the coming of the eternal winter.

Sad poets, who have lost happiness, see winter
in the garden, death almost before life begins ; and
they have said charming, melancholy things, but
by losing or abusing happiness, they have lost the
sense of continuance. It is unreasonable to see
winter behind spring, without seeing spring through
winter.

Jane grows glummer and glummer. Talking
of happiness is so depressing, just as there is a
certain pitch of gloom which is an absolute tonic !

There's a peony which is almost vulgar in its
insistence on being recognised : thrusting its way
to the front and shouting down the lupins and
delphiniums. Truth to tell, he is red in the face
because they are so tall.

Mark the bees in the lily-trumpets and the
monkshood, and the larkspurs. Each labourer, each
day, sips the honey of only one flower. The bee
flits from larkspur to larkspur, never from larkspur
to Canterbury bell, etc. Each cell's honey must be
pure, and perhaps each cell is labelled in a language
which we cannot read.

I only know one tnmg certain of the bees, one
thing of my own knowledge, and that is that they
detest dogs, which makes me almost turn against

58

"The carved stone urn on the lawn, bought in Veni(

Cherry Walk and Lawn

them. And I would, but for M. Maeterlinck, who
lias made me sentimental about them for ever
and ever !

Arbutus and Rhus cotinoides make a fine
shrubby background for the flowers, which grow
here as thickly as they choose : violas, cranesbill,
poppies, lupins, anchusa, lilies, delphiniums, etc.

And so on, down to the dovecot, the bamboos
and the rhododendrons. To see them rightly you
must walk back to the courtyard, looking neither
to the right-hand nor the left, for you must see
everything in due order ; but you may observe the
Madonna lilies growing by the long hall window,
and the carved stone urn on the lawn, bought in
Venice for one pound, though by the time it reached
England by the " little quickness," it had cost three
times that sum.

(Jane, being of a later generation than Mary
Fleetwood of the sampler, is quick at figures, and
in an astonishing short time has worked it out in
lire !)

Now, dear Jane, you see the rhododendrons
massed against the wood and the silver birches
rising above them, under which we swing our
hammocks, and the glimpse of the road through
the trees, and the weeping elms half hidden behind
the cherry walk.

59

The Happy Garden

Down the lawn once more — (I wouldn't throw
the croquet ball for Billy, if I were you. He'll like
you for it, but it isn't worth it) — to marvel over the
giant lilies which grow, according to Miss Jekyll,
in deep beds of rich vegetable mould in the Hima-
layas. It seems inhospitable, therefore, to invite
such lovely exiles to grow in my light sandy soil,
but I have done my best. A bed four feet down has
been dug for them : a great grave filled up with
farmyard stuff, and clay, and chalk, and leaf -mould,
and the bulbs have been laid carefully just below
the surface — and, wonder of wonders, they have
prospered. No mother ever took greater care of
her children. Last year, through ignorance — not
neglect — I gave them too much shade, for they
need to be protected from the morning sun. I
buried them much too deep. They grew up heroic-
ally, hung out three glossy leaves, and rotted ; and
I had my only comfort in the knowledge that the
same tragedy hung over the house and garden of
my nearest rival, who is a formidably scientific
gardener, armed cap-a-pie with all the books, all
the newest inventions, and all the latest French
dodges ; and she has the advantage of a rich clay
soil. The two tragedies were simultaneous. The
exiles from the Himalayas pined and withered ;
tragedy indeed ! for when they live they are ten

60

Cherry Walk and Lawn

feet high, with lily-trumpets nine inches to a foot
long, hanging all the way up the stem— splendid
aliens, whom all countries delight to honour. With
them and the tall spears of asphodel by the river
I shall be a proud and happy parent.

Bamboos again to the right of the birches. The
border begins on this side of the lawn with good
clumps of funkias and megaseas and iris, and
spiraeas. It is a shady corner, and these damp-
loving plants thrive well here. All the flowers at
this end are dark blue : delphiniums, monkshood,
and blue thistles, veronicas, perennial cornflower,
violas, dark blue cranesbill. Running in and out
of these, are deep orange lilies, in large clumps,
then a little pale yellow asphodeline, alstrcemeria,
gladiolus, the giant mullein, cheiranthus, almost the
only yellow flowers admitted to my borders. White
follows the yellow : pyrethrums, white iris, corn-
flowers, thalictrum, phloxes, and leads to pale
pink, gladioli, phloxes, Canterbury bells, pink
lupins, not to speak of the pink cranesbill, which
grows apace and propagates itself as quickly as the
poor in London slums. It creeps out on the lawn
and destroys the formalism which should never by
any chance be in a herbaceous border. From the
pale pinks we come to mauve, and pale blue finishes
the scheme. Amongst these are delphiniums,

61

The Happy Garden

gladioli, campanulas, Canterbury bells, cranesbill,
iris, veronicas, and some grey foliage plants.

In the spring, there are Darwin tulips and
daffodils and .anemones scattered here and there,
all down the length of the border to give colour,
and primroses and primulas grow in the grassy bank,
where the robins sometimes nest. Always, from
May on, the border is a triumphant mass of colour.
An arch of roses frames it as you approach from the
orchard, roses growing over to the little pergola, by
which the greatest wonders of the place are reached,
places like the sunk garden and the Alpine garden,
where the friendliest flowers grow and the earth
has taken form and become intimate. The her-
baceous borders are for decoration rather than for
friendship. They are bands and frames of colour,
put on as boldly and with as firm a hand as may
be. No one could take liberties with a herbaceous
border, nor could I ever breathe a word of confi-
dence to any flower in the rabble. Nearly all her-
baceous plants are great livers, loud voiced, lusty,
Rabelaisian, and they would shout with laughter at
me and my private thoughts ; not unkindly, but
it is always hard to think that laughter, whether
of flowers or men, is not unkind.

The cherry trees are tender. In the spring,
when the frail snowy blossoms are hung out against

62

tJ*

Cherry Walk and Lawn

the sky almost, one is afraid to enter the little
grassy avenue. Such purity is there ! It is a place
for children, and young lovers, boy and girl, melt-
ing under the sweet burden of their love, stealing
shy glances, sighing, thinking all the loveliness of
heaven and earth is in themselves, and so big with
it that they are afraid, hand in hand, to walk slowly
to the mossy seat under the weeping elms !

Oh ! Jane !

Jane has squeezed a funny little tear out of her
eye. It is running dowrn her nose :

Let us go in.

63

"A thousand of
pleasant delights^
are in an orcriard

fyfiam fciwson

IV

The Orchard

I am willing to stretch a point and swear that the
nightingale sings in the orchard all through the
season, though I am afraid he gave his farewell
performance long ago. I have only once heard
him, and then he was a good quarter of a mile
away from the garden.

Perhaps the art of the garden is offensive to
such a worshipper of Nature, or perhaps, like the
poets, he can best sing of beauty when it is hidden

from him.

The fact is that the nightingale never comes
to the orchard, and, indeed, it is beautiful enough
to stand in no need of romantic embellishment.

We eat in the orchard : lunch and tea ; dinner
attracts too many insects to be possible or
pleasant.

There is a green table and an old public-house
settle under the cherry tree at the end of the
privet hedge, where the della Robbia Madonna is
enshrined.

67

The Happy Garden

An old flour-bin serves to keep the wind from
the spirit lamp, over which the coffee is boiled.

The whole family assembles for lunch, includ-
ing the tortoise, Everard, the second of his line,
who is tethered by a long string and pegged down.
His predecessor was slain by the Newfoundland
dog, who was filled with a passionate scientific
curiosity. He wanted to know how the creature
worked, and what became of its head and legs, and
he was always turning it over on its back. One
day it disappeared, and was found some weeks
later on its back, dead, with head and legs hanging
limp ! It was to avert any such tragedy with the
present tortoise, who arouses just the same senti-
ments in Luath, that the long string was invented.
The cat plays with the string, and Luath follows
the tortoise round the garden, barking in protest
when it walks too far. It lives in the sunk garden,
and is visited night and morning by the dogs —
a silent, solitary existence, but I like to think it
is happy, and certainly it is energetic enough.

Seen from the back the tortoise is like an old
woman in a poke-bonnet and a jet-beaded cape ;
one of those old ladies who have long since ceased
to be women to become bundles of clothes.

Along the top of the garden grow a line of
roses, on chains and pillars — Crimson Ramblers,

68

**"»*■

LUATH LOVES TO DRINK AT THE BIRD BATH

The Orchard

Dorothy Perkins, Lady Gay, Carmine Pillar and
Rubens — a glorious splash of colour against the
green and grey and purple haze of the woods.
A peep of them can always be seen from the table
in the orchard. Under the fruit trees in the
spring there is always colour and blossom. Crocuses
begin the dance, and when they are weary it is
taken up by anemones, muscari, daffodils and nar-
cissi, and cottage tulips of every colour possible.
These are planted in masses ; one or two trees
have only the deep blue muscari and blue anemones,
and they are almost the most satisfying. Later on
in May, a brave troop of Darwin tulips marches
down by the rose hedge and the privet hedge to
the shrine of the Madonna of the orchard. It is
the overture to the symphony, leading to the
pastoral of the blossoms. Nothing is needed but
young lambs to skip under the trees. Failing lambs,
we tried kittens, but their mother, the black kitchen
cat, objected, and hauled them all back to her dark
cupboard in the pantry ; she is an ugly cat, but a
most excellent parent, and she will trust no one,
except Luath, who watched their birth, and when
one of the kittens was lifted down from the bed,
he picked it up and restored it to her. The tender
chivalry of the act won her undying confidence,
and when she requires a rest she leaves him in

69

The Happy Garden

charge. He is never happier than when he can
procure a situation as a temporary nurse.

When the blossoms arrive, there is often a gap
between spring and summer, until one day we wake
up to discover that the painter of the sunrise has
dropped red splashes here and there in the garden,
and when we look closer we discover that they are
roses. . . . Out come the hammocks, wide-brimmed
hats are unearthed, cricket-bats are oiled, mos-
quitoes come up from the cellar : — it is summer.
The young herons chatter through the night, and
it seems years since we saw the father of all the
herons flying over to the post office to send tele-
grams conveying the glad announcement.

The busy artist paints sunrise after sunrise,
sunset after sunset for the great picture which will
never be finished, and drops more and more red
paint into the garden. Bits of the sky and
the sun fall down and the gardener and the
gardener's boy, and I, hang them up in their
places. Sad winter thoughts of workaday are
rolled up and put away in drawers, and all the
jolly thoughts of the last summer are taken out
and polished up and set to gather sunbeams and
store them up against the long nights, and one is
kept to light the Christmas fire, for Yule logs can
only be kindled by a summer sunbeam.

70

The Orchard

The birds have reared their families success-
fully, and they no longer sing of love, but rather
of pride in their achievement. They sing the song
of domestic happiness, and they, too, pretend that
it will last for ever, though in their heart of hearts
they know that, when the sun begins to be dragged
lower and lower in the sky, a restless fever will
overtake them, and they will hear the call of the
south, and only one word will be in their minds
and hearts :

" Go."

And so they go and forget all the romance of
spring, and all the summer's joy and pride, and
next year it will again be more wonderful than
ever before. It will again be like the first-coming
of love, and He will say to Her : " This time I
know. This is the love of my life."

All the same, I wish the birds would
not eat my cherries. They have ninety-nine
hundredths of each year's crop, and leave me the
rest. The impudence of them is beyond words :
blackbirds, thrushes, and, above all, jays. They
laugh at scarecrows, and a gun is a joke to them.
You may stand under the tree and clap your hands
and they will not budge. Whether it is that they
think : " First come, first served " is good enough
morality for man and beast, or whether they have

7i

The Happy Garden

an impish delight in thieving, I do not know. The
trouble is that they like them just a little unripe,
while I must have them in perfect condition. . . .
In such a situation, there is nothing to be done.
The trees might be netted, but that were cruel
to the trees, forcing them to take the veil,
and to such nunnishness I could never be a
party.

It is hardly at all better with the apples and
pears. Hardly are they ripe than the birds peck
at them with their beaks, but then they are not
so voracious, and if they are allowed to glut them-
selves with the cherries they are not in a condition
to tackle all the larger fruit.

There is a superstition that if the birds are
given water they will not touch fruit. It is non-
sense. The birds here have the bird-bath in the
courtyard, the vase on the lawn, the dog's drink-
ing bowl, the pond and the rivers, and several rain
tanks, and they are not a bit more honest for it ;
and they refuse to eat the insects and grubs and
caterpillars which give them a magnificent oppor-
tunity of justifying their existence.

It is not altogether affectation to have the boles
of the trees dressed in1 white. The first thought
was for effect : but the lime-wash certainly keeps
down many pests, and helps to destroy the

72

The Orchard

dreadful beasts that escape the winter washing of
Bordeaux mixture.

The orchard is a troublesome family : a con-
stant anxiety. Those who argue from tree to man
and declare that a tree conducts and controls its
life more wisely than a man, are more amusing
than exact. Trees accept every sort of plague
without protest, from sheer dull inability to put up
a fight against the injustice of Nature. They are
born — like men, in the most impossible places, but
unlike men they make no effort to get away : they
stay and grow up dwarfed and stunted and mis-
shapen. And if they are given every advantage
of soil and situation, they exhaust themselves in
putting out a very tangle of shoots, and think that
growth for the sake of growing is what is asked
of them : rather like men who talk of Art for Art's
sake : — and artists often stand in need of pruning,
while other men, like luckless trees, grow stunted
and mis-shapen and dwarfed. . . . No : perhaps
there is not much to choose between trees and men,
but what advantage there is most certainly does
not lie on the side of the trees : at least, to judge
from the behaviour of my orchard.

There are anxious moments in May and June
lest frost should come and nip the setting fruit.
When the moon is crescent there is always fear,

73

The Happy Garden

and with what gladness does one say : " The moon
is full to-night."

Danger is almost past then, and anxiety can
shift from the orchard to some other part of the
garden. It is all anxiety passing swiftly to pride
and pleasure, with the march of summer through
all the lurking perils of the early year.

The orchard is the pivot of the whole design
of the garden. At one side, cut off by a hedge of
Rugosa roses, is the fruit garden, and on the other,
running out of it, are lawns and flower beds. On
one side is land tilled for the profit of the body,
on the other, all is for the nurture of the spirit,
through the senses. So all the appetites can be
fed, and, lying in a hammock under the apple trees,
one may turn to the east and think greedily of
strawberries and raspberries, and asparagus, and
artichokes, and peas ; or, wearying of that, one
may turn to the west, and feast on colour, and
the song of birds, and watch the moving shadows
and the sun dappling the lawn under the trees.
Then, all being well, and the mind being free, one
may weave dreams and fantasies, peep through
the woods and pretend to see fauns and nymphs,
or the spirit of the men of ancient days hovering
about the hills on which they camped and fought.
Probably there will be old women and children

74

The Orchard

gathering sticks half-way up the hill, or a tramp
will go slouching by, or, if you have any luck, you
may see a lovely lady riding through the trees on
a white horse attended by a handsome cavalier.
The cavalier is probably the lady's groom : or her
grandfather : but no matter : all who pass seem
to move from nowhere into nothing, or from the
pages of " Grimm's Fairy Tales " into the covers
of Perrault, or gentle Madame d'Aulnoy. . . .
One thing is certain : you will not be bored. That
in any orchard is impossible : in my orchard it
were a crime, a crime so horrible as to make the
leaves of the trees stand on end and set the birds
moulting out of season.

It were hard to tell whether the orchard is more
beautiful in spring or autumn. When the blossoms
come, eyes tuned to winter dullness drink their
beauty ecstatically, and it is almost well that
their life is short and they are soon scattered : but
there is rich comfort in watching the ripening ruddy
fruit, and, though it is almost the last glory of
the pageant of the seasons, all that has gone before
has so ripened appreciation that perhaps the
greatest joy of all is the joy of harvest : it is the
fulfilment of promise, a reality more beautiful than
the dream : fulfilment ; contentment, peace. — And
the tinge of melancholy in the autumn gives a new

75

The Happy Garden

zest to the pleasure of the orchard, just as the
eager nip in the air quickens the senses and sets
the blood racing and the mind scheming of new
activities and fresh triumphs in the coming year.

Full summer is high holiday. Then nothing can
be taken seriously : not even love : not even Jane.
The earth throws back the heat of the sun. The
air above the ground quivers. Heavy clouds come
lumbering. In the curious light colour is deadened,
and form rules. The shapes of all things take
sharp lines. The dogs lie panting with their
tongues out. We call for cool drinks. . . . Pre-
sently great drops fall. The parched earth seems
to heave and swell, to open up her veins for the
cool draught that will never be enough to slake
her thirst. . . . It is too hot to walk, too hot to
talk, to laugh, to think, almost too hot to breathe.
. . . The rain comes. The toads come out, and
we go in : for a few minutes only.

Then there is a blessed coolness and relief, and
already the brown patches in the lawn are green
again. It is good to live in England, where we can
have flowers all the year round, and there are four
seasons merging imperceptibly into each other, and
through the year the country is green and rich and
restful. It would be unbearable to have a garden
killed by the sun'in June, to have only winter^and

76

The Orchard

summer, to have, as it were, the rise of the Roman
Empire, and then its Decline and Fall. My Empire
grows at the bidding of a gentler Nature, and,
when all is done, there are winter joys, winter un-
dented by mud : an empty garden, leafless trees,
a field for a new campaign, a scene for new triumphs
and defeats.

Through the winter the garden gives us food.
Apples are stored, and in the autumn there is a
tremendous brew of jams and jellies : crab-apple,
blackberry, rowanberry, and even the hips and
haws of the Japanese rose hedge are pressed into
the service.

The path from the fruit garden enters the
orchard between the privet and the rose hedges.
On either side of it are sweet peas eight feet high.
From early June — for the seed is sown in the
autumn— right into September, they give me
flowers of every colour and shade. Mauves shading
to white on the one side and scarlet to the palest
pink on the other. Sweet peas are the most gener-
ous of plants, and the more one takes the more
they give. They have such an enthusiasm for pro-
pagation that they will put forth flower after flower
in the hope that something will be allowed to come
of it.

Before they arrive on the scene, the long path

77

The Happy Garden

is gay with wine-coloured wallflowers and forget-
me-nots, and in the autumn, when they are almost
past, pink and purple asters, spurred on by the
beauty that has gone before them, make new glory
to wipe out the memory of the old.

Behind the sweet peas are the strawberry beds,
and the currants, black, red, and white, and goose-
berries and raspberries, all caged in from the birds.
It is not good to have them altogether enclosed,
for the birds cannot devour the harmful insects,
and therefore, at intervals, there are gaps in the
wire roofs, which are covered with netting when
the fruit is ripening. The cage is over six feet high,
so that any ordinary person can walk freely and
gorge strawberries in comfort.

For Jane's benefit the strawberry season shall
be turned on, and she shall be left to feast, while
I recall how Hookie, still a baby, before the robus-
tious boy began to grow in him, sat in an apple
tree in full blossom, half fearful, and half proud,
and clapped his hands and delivered himself of his
first poem :

" Over my shory shoulder
The parrots and bullfinches fly : —

a fragment which another infant completed :

The bullfinches are the bolder,
The jmrrots are strangely shy."

78

The Orchard

And when he descended from his perch, where
he seemed to have lighted like an angel, the sheep-
dog hurried him away for a game which ended
disastrously, for presently Hookie came weeping
and declaring vengefully, as he held out a podgy

little hand :

" He's laid his teeth on me."

Dear Hookie ! Later in the day we tried to
comfort him by reading " The Back of the North
Wind," as he sat up in bed. He thought over it,
turned the flavour of it round his tongue and pro-
nounced judgment :

" There's too much bosom in that book."

Our choice was bad. He was too young for
sentimentality.

The sight of Hookie in the apple tree is an
enduring memory, and now often, in the early
morning and the twilight, dream-babies descend
from the pines and light in the fruit trees, which
there and then, whatever the season, burst into
blossom.

79

I pity the man who
can travel from Dan
toBeensheba &lj
cry ' tis all barren,
4so it is :<Lso is
all the world to
him who will not
cultivate the fruits
it offers. "

^1 Jentimental Journey.

A Long Way Round

One chief aim in the garden is to make your plot
of land seem larger than it is. Therefore, when you
have laid out your ground so as to deceive your-
self and everybody else, except those who pass over
it in a balloon, you can considerably heighten your
triumph by conducting your visitors by a zig-zag
path. Decide on a given point, and go there as
indirectly as possible. There is so much for your
visitor to see by the way that he (or she) will never
perceive the trick and will go away dreaming of a
vast estate. . . . The Japanese have a dodge of
reducing everything to scale so that, to pass from
the fish-pond to the tea-house, you have to circum-
vent a mountain, traverse a perilous gorge and
thread through a forest, while, in your sober senses,
you are perfectly aware that it is really no more
than one stride. A Japanese garden is a cut-and-
dried symbol which, no doubt, saves trouble, but
it must curtail the scope of invention and originality,
and even sometimes forbid the use of the material

83

The Happy Garden

nearest to hand. I am sure it is not right to sym-
bolise Buddhism in an English countryside, and,
in my own case, the proximity of the pines would
make it absurd to have a miniature Fuji-Yama,
or even a small Snowdon in the carefully contrived
distance. Those who demand mountains for their
Paradise must see them in the sky, which often
obliges with whole ranges, dotted here and there
with castles, and great cliffs and many man-
sions.

Short of mountains, I can produce almost every-
thing to order. There is no extended view from
any corner of the garden, for it is all enclosed by
a wall of pines, a mile or two thick, but three
minutes' walk up the hill behind the house shows
a view of lakes and hills, including the highest
point between the Thames and the south coast.
Five minutes on shows a wider view of heath and
moor. Then, if you cavil at my own particular
river, in half an hour's walk I can show you three
rivers of divers dimensions, a tract of rich meadow-
land, more hills, a lake, between twenty and thirty
herons, a ruined abbey, and, if you are weary of
the pines, a wood of beech and oak, under which
in turn grow snowdrops, primroses, daffodils, blue-
bells, and foxgloves, and a willow copse which is
said to be a perfect place for nightingales, though

84

A Long Way Round

no nightingale has ever been known to agree with
that opinion. . . .

I seem to have left Jane caged up in the fruit
garden. She will never be able to look a straw-
berry in the face again, like those unfortunate rich
people in London who are sick of strawberries by
March, because by a curious inversion they cannot
afford to eat anything in season. To have too much
money is a great deal worse than having too little,
and when you reach the point of finding ordinary
food too cheap for your income, then it is time
to take desperate measures.

Jane, in her youth, was poor, but not too poor.
In middle life she was rich, but not too rich, and
she has never had any real anxiety, or real trouble.
She has never quarrelled with anyone. She is
patriotic when other people are patriotic, despon-
dent when other people are despondent, not from
sympathy, but from sentiment, and because it
makes things comfortable to be so. She hates
nothing, and she loves nothing. She would admire
a villa garden with a Derbyshire spar rockery and
oyster-shell edging to the beds of scarlet geranium
and blue lobelia as much (and as little) as in her
heart of hearts she admires all that I am so
proud to display.

Why worry about her ?
85

The Happy Garden

Because she is just a good, kind, ordinary little
soul, and ordinary people are such a blessing, and
such a comfort. She is shrewd and knows honesty
when she sees it, and if she has never touched any
great height in her life, neither has she reached
any great depth. She has pursued an even middle
course, and gathered a sort of wisdom by the way,
and some sweet memories. She shed a tear at the
end of the third chapter. ... In her inmost soul
she will admit that there is more in life than she
has got out of it, and she will honour those who
have dared where she has had neither opportunity
nor temptation. Your Pharisees are those who
have failed to meet the demands made of them.

By this excursion into morality the back
premises are reached which lie over against the
fruit garden. . . . Washhouse and wood-shed
first : remarkable chiefly for the William Allen
rose that grows up the front and over the black
roof most of the summer. Dotted about are frames
where cucumbers and tomatoes grow, and beyond
them again a pergola of gourds which are used for
house decoration in the winter. Down by the tool-
house and apple-room, which were once the
gardener's cottage, are the glass-houses which gave
the place its finishing touch as a gentleman's resi-
dence. A vine grows in one of them, where the

86

A Long Way Round

agapanthus lilies are stored during the winter : in
the summer they stand on the lawn and the court-
yards, and delight the gardener by filling his
rivals with envy. Always there are complicated
seeding processes toward, a mixture of routine
and daring experiment. Giant pots of pink
geraniums, trained round sticks, which stand on
the courtyard in summer, tubs of hydrangeas, early
Canterbury bells, and lilies, are carefully nursed
in what is called " a cold house " against the
ravages of , winter frosts.

More fruit trees, Jane, but that is a Morella
cherry by the garage, and the fruit is for cooking.

Jane has found something that her English
heart can really love. A broad gravel drive flanked
on either side by lupin and cranesbill and every
kind of cottage flower. On the left is the kitchen
garden, and on the right is the front view of the
gardener's cottage : a little green door and a
window on either side, neat, trim and serviceable,
as plain and honest as his cabbages. On a line by
the door are aprons and baby-clothes hung out
to air, and Jane greets them with a great sigh of
relief. It seems that she was Britishly weary of
beautiful things and hungering for utility. She
was worried by the absence of any kind of cooking
or washing or housekeeping, and disliked the

87

The Happy Garden

thought of life being so organised that all the
machinery of it was hidden.

" Bother your flowers," she seemed to say,
though she could never put it so vigorously, " let
me see your grocer's bills."

And so she shall — between chapters.

Master Gardener is in his perambulator on the
courtyard, kicking, and crowing, and glad that he
can see a little more to-day than he could yester-
day, and certain that he will see a great deal more
to-morrow. It must be a fine time of life when
the world unfolds itself in daily miracles, when
to-day appears a great tree where none was yester-
day, and out of the darkness emerge shapes ever
more and more wonderful, faces kind and terrifying,
colours and lights more and more dazzling and
brilliant. . . . But Jane has no philosophy. To
her a baby is a baby and she must hug it.

She does so.

She says, " Ooza-popsy-wops . . . '' and
Master Gardener roars lustily. His mother comes
at a run, glares at Jane, snatches her precious son
from her uncomfortable arms ; at once his mouth
closes, his eyes open and his face is wreathed in
the fattest of smiles.

Perhaps Jane would be better for a little
philosophy.

88

A Long Way Round

A peep into the doll's house will be suffered by
Master Gardener. He has not yet begun to resent
intrusion or to regard the cottage as exclusively
his house. Later on though, he will reach human
egoism and the doll's house will be written all over :

" The house where I live."

He will be a gardener like his father — (indeed,
as soon as he can crawl, he is to be set a-weeding)
— and gardeners grow out of that sort of thing
sooner than most of us.

Jane peeps into the tiny kitchen, and I tell her
how the gardener made the house ready against
the coming of his bride, working through the night,
painting, and papering, and whistling like a thrush :
and how she came and was like a little white dove,
so soft and pretty ; and how Master Gardener
shouldered his way into the world with a lusty
yell, and put us all in our places by the mere fact
of his arrival, and how the Newfoundland had
received an intimation that he had set out on his
journey and made inquiries every day for a week
and barked a welcome when at last he descended
upon us out of the night.

And simple Jane declares that she has found
the perfect place on earth and will never, never
stir. She actually sits down and puts the most
embarrassing questions to Mrs. Gardener — (Jane

89

The Happy Garden

was once a district visitor and has never recovered)
— and shows such a firm determination to take up
her quarters there that at last Mrs. Gardener has
to say that things are rather crowded as they are,
though she would be only too delighted to have
Mrs. Smith as a paying guest, were it not that all
the available space is needed for a future Miss
Gardener.

She blushes so prettily as she says it, and is so
shy and timid that I laugh outright and take my
offending Jane away, and leave after Master
Gardener has given my hand one last suck. Bless
him !

With Jane away, I feel safer and relieved,
though, having invented Jane for a certain
purpose, I am bound to it : and having invented

a sort of Early Victorian Jane, who is all

conscience, my conscience becomes active too.

Jane has claims upon me and must be satisfied ;

but she shall go the very longest way round, and

I refuse to spare her.

She has seen the kennel, but I think she did

not see the water-butt, and I am sure she did not

sufficiently admire the thick hedge of fir and spruce

cut to half the height of the trees.

It is hardly necessary for her to see the garden

rollers or the shed where the games live ; almost

90

E
o
C6

A Long Way Round

enough to start a small store. However, she may
see the other side of the privet hedge, since people
of her period seem so rarely to have seen the other
side of things.

There now, Jane : Where are you ?

She rubs her eyes, and is amazed to find her-
self at the orchard end of the sweet-pea path : the
point from which she set out.

She likes things large, and the zig-zag treat-
ment is beginning to have its effect. She remem-
bers miles of strawberry beds, acres of cabbages,
a carriage drive a quarter of a mile long, and like
the American, caught tripping on the verge of a
wild exaggeration, a conservatory one mile high —
and six feet wide.

She shall approach the rest — and best — of the
garden through the woods. Therefore, up the path
on the other side of the Japanese rose hedge, past
Hookie's apple tree, along the little path through
the border and into the woods.

The smell of the pines !

In spite of herself, Jane is impressed. The
pines go marching up the hill that was once a
Roman camp, and later the monks' rabbit warren,
and for a little way we follow them, up to the lane
where we saw the good people from Grimm and
Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy.

9i

The Happy Garden

There we turn : and with the pines swinging
above us, and the sun mottling their stems, and
all about us a haze of purple and gold, we gaze
down into the garden gleaming like a jewel of
emeralds and sapphires, with here and there a
ruby in its dark setting.

" A blue garden," says Jane.

It is not really blue, but it has that effect
which comes from the rigorous application of an
elemental law which forbids a crude yellow.

Yellow is taboo.

It is an arrogant, upstart, vulgar colour, which
will not admit the right of any other to exist. It
is a tyrant, and in my garden meets the fate of all
tyrants. It is rooted out : and so, to my thinking,
it should be in all gardens.

A passion for laurels is often accompanied by
a taste for sunflowers, and when the garden and I
were first acquainted, it was delivered over to the
dominion of every size and shape of sunflower.
It did not so much matter then, as there was no
"attempt at colour or form, and the three acres
were almost all stubble and cabbage beds. Sun-
flowers grew everywhere, and, like everything else,
seeded themselves with indecent haste and persist-
ency. . . . For years' they tormented. Like
Frederick the Great, I waged a "Seven Years' War,

92

A Long Way Round

and even now I am not sure that victory is mine.
I have nightmares of my borders of blue and
mauve and pink being invaded by this Yellow
Peril. My state is much like that of the Australians
and the Americans of the Pacific coast. In moments
of depression I see yellow everywhere.

Of course, I except daffodils, but even so, I
am reluctant to admit the heavy double blooms
that have too rich a colour. Between them and
the pale jonquil or the light trumpet of the wild
daffodil there is the difference between fresh coun-
try butter and the town conglomerate. . . . Pale
yellow is admissible even in full summer. Tall
handsome mullein is warmly greeted. For all his
stature and the beauty of his figure, mullein is
modest and strikes no yellower note than the lemon
tint in the after-glow of a dull sunset. His com-
plexion sorts well with the greeny-yellow of the
autumn lawn ; and, grown amongst the pines in
the woods, he looks his very best. Yellow broom
and yellow gorse can offend no one — in their place.
They are stippled yellow splashes from the paint-
pot, and must be set against a dark back-
ground. So also with the laburnum, which, if it
be hung against the sky, loses half the beauty of
its form. Laburnum should always be hung out
against a pine wood, or if pine woods are not

93

The Happy Garden

available, a dark bank, or a mass of trees as dark
as possible, and, if wistaria can be got to cling
about and droop its pale mauve tresses through
the yellow, so much the better.

In my garden yellow laburnum hangs out into
the road like a banner, and to ignorant eyes seems
to mock my stern denunciation of yellow.

Primroses, of course, no one could or would
denounce. There is a carpet of them when snow-
drops pass under the birch avenue.

But that there may be no misunderstanding,
let me say at once, that pale yellow and deep
orange have no offence in them, and, therefore, I
have pale asphodeline lutea with its pretty light
grey foliage and handsome pods : yellow monks-
hood, creamy iris, yellow roses, alstrcemerias and
other orange lilies, tree lupins and columbine.

I think that list exhausts the yellow flowers that
are bearable. Many of them are things of joy, and
are on the best of terms with all the other flowers.

From here, Jane, you have the best view of the
house, because the most fairy-like and full of
enchantment. You see the whole length of it and
the odd shape that it has come by in its growth :
all corners and gables and angles ; the offices
reaching out towards the west, and the house proper
towards the south. All right-minded houses, like

94

A Long Way Round

healthy fruit (and people), turn their faces sunward
to the south. And the creepers embrace it and
bring it naturally into the garden. House and
garden should be one. They should give and take
and strive always to be worthy of each other.

" Like marriage," sighs Jane.

Exactly. And, as in marriage, there is neutral
ground — the courtyards — where they can deposit
their differences of upbringing and prejudice, and
properly admire each other's qualities and make
due allowance for each other's failings.

" Ah ! " sighs Jane.

" Has John no qualities ? " say I, thinking, of
course, that Jane is off upon her own married life.

" Much worse ! " she says. " He thinks he has
no failings."

It is time to lead Jane on. People always
become so sentimental in the woods.

She shall come down to the old gate which is
a bower of carmine pillar and Montana clematis
and guelder-rose, while, hard by, a tall silver birch
stands sentinel. Lavender grows by the gate, and
honesty, megasea and iris on the other side, where
the great border of delphiniums reaches back into
the wood. This border has grown wider and wider,
and at last became so unget-at-able and unmanage-
able, that I was compelled to make paths through

95

The Happy Garden

it. One wide grass path runs through the centre
of it, leaving on either side a border of about twenty
yards long and fifteen deep. Through each of these
a narrow crooked path leads you between tall lilies
and white foxgloves, and anchusa, and, best of all,
delphiniums of every shade of blue into the woods.
In the early summer, giant scarlet poppies make
a' brilliant show against the deep colour of the
pines. At sunset this border is at its best, the
gentian blue of the anchusa becoming a thousand
times more vivid as the sun catches it before finally
dropping behind the hills. The smaller portion of
the border, on the left side of the wide grass path,
that runs up to meet the carpet of peat and pine
needles and moss, is mostly given up to red and
orange flowers ; and sweet bergamot and alstrce-
merias, lychnis, geums, chelone barbata, gaillardia,
gladiolus, brenchleyensis, with the grey foliage of
funkia, and the double white arabis and white pinks,
make a brave show in July. ... I keep these
wide borders for all the very hardy plants, as it is
almost impossible to give them individual atten-
tion. Phloxes are heavily mulched early in the
summer, and left to take care of themselves, and
they are not often far behind those planted in the
borders on the lawn, which are watered and cos-
seted as though they were delicate children. This

96

> -Q

n

s

c

3

01

c

<u

^

_c

a

<U

JO

<u

A Long Way Round

same scheme of colour is carried out on the right-
hand side of the grass path, but with the addition
of pale yellow mullein and thalictrum, and orange
lilies escort you along the little path that joins this
and the main portion of the border, in which are
repeated the blues of the delphiniums, in very
large masses, the mauve of the cranesbill, the white
and pink of the phloxes, the fine foliage of the grey
artichoke, with pinks and violas, polygonum, iberis,
and other dwarf flowers tumbling over one another
on to the path.

The whole scheme is designed to be an intro-
duction to the comer through the woods, and an
invitation when seen from the house through the
framework of the chain of rambler roses. It is a
half-way house between Art and Nature, the rich
beautiful Nature who is seen at work in the valley
from the top of the hill.

And there, after a breathing space, I shall take
Jane on the way to the annual borders which are
stretched in a curve at the bottom of the slope of
the lawn ten yards away from the stone courtyard.

97

OVERMHi;
W

'The time has come.

to talk of many things."

VI

Over the Hills and Far Away

Nothing is so difficult as to do exactly what one
meant to do : bad so often becomes worse, but
good less frequently becomes better.

The point of the remark is that Jane has turned
out so different from what she was intended to be,
that an ordinary digression is not enough for her.
She has brought her matrimonial difficulties into
this affair, and it looks as though we should have
to go from the top border to the sunk garden by
way of John o' Groats if she is to be shaken clear
of them. . . . John Smith plays the game, and
gives the impression that his first thought is for
Jane, when he says :

" Ah — if only Jane were here ! "

But Jane has not been here more than a few
days before she begins to give John away. On the
whole, I am not sure that John's " game " is not
really more treacherous than Jane's indiscretion,
though I would not say so for the world. Men are
so proud of their rules of conduct, as they have

IOI

The Happy Garden

every right to be, for they work out very well in
theory.

The dogs have guessed that we are thinking of
a walk, and are protesting vigorously at our delay.
Between Jane and John they have no thought of
judging.

This way : round through the trees to the
southern gate in the wire fence, which marks the
bounds of the estate and serves to keep the rabbits
out, and the dogs and other animals in.

Who says that dogs do not understand words ?
Their vocabulary, like our own, is limited to their
needs. When I say : " Water ! " they know per-
fectly well that we shall keep straight on at the
foot of the hills, until the time comes to turn to
the left and cross the road down to the river, where
they bathe.

" Collars off ! " has a clear and definite meaning
to their minds, and they will stand still to be
undressed.

The river is about half a mile from the garden,
and the dogs walk and run many times that
distance. . . . They are off on the scent of rabbits,
hares, pheasants, and squirrels, but they very
rarely catch anything. Once Luath caught a sitting
pheasant — (I hardly d'are tell the story) — carried
it half a mile, and buried it hard down in the soft

102

Over the Hills and Far Away

peat. It was rescued a quarter of an hour later,
none the worse, save for the loss of a few feathers.

A dog's instinct seems to drive him to burial
rather than to out and out murder, and perhaps
our animals are too civilised to make a clean job
of it, for they are never wholly successful. Their
victims always escape, and upon the only occasion
when the sheepdog, Billy, succeeded in frightening
a rabbit into "shamming dead" — it was really
hypnotised by fear — his instinct so failed him that
he had to wait for instructions from Luath, who
buried it for him.

For half a mile we go along the ride through
the woods until we reach the clearing known as
" the Heather Glen," a wide gap between two walls
of trees. In the summer it is like a purple river,
while through the rest of the year, it is brown and
green-blue in the distance — and at the bottom is
a path of silver sand that looks like a glittering
stream. On either side of the glen the dark pines
are fringed with silver birches — the lady among
trees, as the beech is the gentleman. Lovely mosses
grow among the heather, and in the autumn bright-
coloured toadstools which I gather from day to
day for my winter table garden : — a garden in
miniature which is laid out in a dish. Moss and
peat furnish the soil, and it can be made gay with

103

The Happy Garden

anything that comes to hand, natural or faked.
The chief thing is to have very little in it. Two
or three snowdrops growing by a baby fern on one
side, whilst a piece of a branch of a pine tree
covered with grey lichen may spread itself across
the other, with a gay toadstool — if in season — a
tiny imitation one, if not — completes it. But when
one begins to make a table garden, it is wonderful
what varieties of things can be found to furnish it.

They are melancholy toys, these winter gardens,
but, when heavy work is toward — and the rectifi-
cation of the mistakes of one year before the
coming of the next is very heavy work — it is well
to have something to play with. It is parlour
gardening ; much as, in the absence of war, soldiers
are set down to a board with pawns to play the
war-game. There are people who declare that
gardening is not serious, but those are disappointed
souls who will have it that all art is " fair but
futile." And so, I would retort, it is for them,
but that I know the danger of limiting art, and
the arrogance that believes that only the elect may
enjoy and profit by it. Indeed, I cannot and dare
not believe that there is any creature finally and
hopelessly impervious to art and Nature.

That is a confession of faith which must be
irritating to the utilitarian who is seeking for the

104

Over the Hills and Far Away

practical happiness of the garden, and, to jump
back to the objectiveness of the utilitarian, let me
say that the little winter garden is invaluable as a
table decoration. Not only does it feed the eye
but it furnishes a topic of conversation and saves
much uneasiness. For the country-hungry Londoner
it is precious, keeping memory alive, and furnishing
excuses for escape at the week-end, for it needs
replenishing from week to week, and the where-
withal cannot easily be purchased in the shops. . . .
The gossamers ! Sometimes they can be seen
where the glint of the low sun catches their threads,
but the marvel is when, in early spring and late
autumn, the morning mists and dews turn them
to sheets of glass and mirrors and bridal veils and
gauzy webs, spun thick over the heather, and
strings of glittering beads flung from tree to tree.
Often the spruces are clad in a soft grey veil. It
is as though the little people of the woods had gone
away and left their furniture in their winding sheets.
Foolishly, perhaps, one endows the wood-people
with human habits and desires. Not guessing the
purposes of the fairy rings, we vow that they must
dance in them, and when a toadstool thrusts itself
up through the peat and stands with a thatched
roof of pine-needles, that we call a fairy house :
though, if there are wood-people, it were more

105

The Happy Garden

reasonable to believe that earth and sky are house
enough for them. It is hard to relinquish fantasy,
hard not to see everything in one's own imperfect
human image, and when, on the slope of the hill,
I find rows of little mossy cushions, like green
buttons, I decide that there has been a Parliament,
or an Eisteddfod, or a Revivalist meeting, flinging
to the winds the suggestion of reason that things
natural have no affairs to discuss, no formal songs
to sing, no sins to repent of, and no prayers to say.
It is self-flattery perhaps : but more likely the
inventions of Puck and Oberon, and Titania, with
their very ordinary domestic jealousy, serve only
the more easily to express the poet's sense of kin-
ship with the trees and all the living things har-
boured in their shade. The remembrance of it is
comforting food for the natural man or woman
who has to bear the burden of the artificial person
who rubs along through the surface duties of society #
And this is very irritating to Elisabeth, that
utilitarian person who, a moment or two ago,
demanded the practical service of the winter dish-
garden. She has stepped off the paper and taken
her place by Jane's side. She has a determined
look in her eyes and a faint line about the right
corner of her mouth which I do not like, and I
hear her saying to Jane :

1 06

Over the Hills and Far Away

" Don't you believe a word of it. It's no good.
There's no money in it. Higher education's the
thing."

She is the unwomanly woman, who crops up,
as here, in such unexpected places : a Newnhamite,
a Fabian, a lady-actuary : she looks for tendencies
rather than deeds, even in herself : with the appal-
ling result that she invariably judges and condemns
the deeds of others. To her the cult of gardens is
sentimental and old-fashioned, like Mozart's music
and the Florentine pictures : and she has those
safely advanced professions which are never likely
to be called into practice. She has a reputation,
and her chief safeguard lies in hammering into
Jane — who believes anything, if it is said often
enough — that I and people like me who feed on
the colour and charm and vividness of life, are
out of date, which is much worse than being
immoral.

I regard Elisabeth as dangerous to Jane : Elisa-
beth regards my influence on Jane as dangerous to
herself : and, as for Jane — no one will ever know
what she thinks of either of us.

There's a queer little drama to have cropped
up in a digression !

Having set out upon it, we must go the longest
way round — we three and the dogs — and if Elisa-

107

The Happy Garden

beth is obstinate, I think I have a thing or two
in the garden that will settle her.

This is the sort of thing that happens. I call
upon Jane to admire one of the most royal of my
beech-tree friends, a tree whom I am proud to
know, with an immense bole spreading into six
great trunks, reaching up to the heavens and
covered over with a green mantle, like the tree of
Jove.

Jane cranes her neck and marvels, and at once
Elisabeth makes her shy and timid and afraid she
is doing the wrong thing by snapping :

" When it is made into chairs and tables, I'll
admire it."

The retort did not come to me until much later.
The gift of ready repartee so often seems to go
with a seemingly hard self-possession which is
foreign to me. What I should have said, and what
I hasten to say now is this :

" But till then, as a tree, it is beautiful, and its
beauty is there to be enjoyed."

However, I did not say it and went on, feeling
that I was getting the worst of it, and beginning
to hate the sight of Elisabeth's Liberty blouse, and
her stiff collar, and her tight hair, and her pince-nez
that were always falling from her rather large nose
to be fastened on again with much ferrety screw-

108

Over the Hills and Far Away

ing of her eyes and a nervous shrug of her sloping
shoulders.

The beech tree stands at the entrance to the
cool green glade which ends abruptly in a wall of
oaks above a sandy bank that slopes steeply down
to the river. Skirting the edge of the pine-woods,
the river comes winding in a long curve flanked on
either side by the willow copse and the slope of a
flat fat meadow — the monk's pasture ; for the
ruined abbey is only half a mile away, and the
monks of old invariably fastened on the richest
land in their region.

There are cows grazing and they lift their heads
in fear as they wind the dogs. They come lumber-
ing towards us. They know themselves to be
larger than the enemy and instinctively they hope
to overawe by sheer bulk and show of courage.
The dogs look to us. We are not afraid : — Jane
puts a brave face on it and sighs with thankful-
ness that the stream is between us and them — and
the day is gloriously hot, and the immediate busi-
ness is swimming.

Elisabeth's contempt for humanity leaves her
fairly reasonable, though rather viciously senti-
mental, about animals. She throws sticks for Billy,
and I find Jane gazing at the blue hills and the
flight of birds, and the little red house in the

109

The Happy Garden

distance, and there is sorrow in her eyes, sorrow
because she finds more beauty in the scene than
is comfortable to her, and she wants to share it and
hardly dares : she just touches me with her hand,
and with a fearful glance at Elisabeth, who is
behaving like a rowdy undergraduate, she says in
a whisper : " It is very pretty."

That wipes out Elisabeth's advantage. The
digression is proving valuable. It is possible that
before we are through with it, Jane will begin to
peck her way out of her shell, and perhaps in the
end the hungry little inward Jane starved by
John's perpetual Game, will light up her heart
and sing and — live. Perhaps for one tiny morsel
of a second she will not be afraid of happiness.

Who knows ?

But the Social Conscience, which is Elisabeth,
must first be squashed.

There is so much to see, so much to enjoy, but
Elisabeth hangs a curtain of books and figures, and
what she calls " facts " between herself and the
world. She is humane without being human, and
almost hysterically resents the humanity in Jane.
The light of the world is not to her the light of
the sun, but the light of' the brains of Messrs. Zola,
Sidney Webb, Nietzsche, Bernard Shaw and Co.
If it were the light of her own brain one could

no

Over the Hills and Far Away

sympathise with her and feel some pity : but her
imprisonment and self-mutilation are wilful, and
I have no patience with her.

How can she see my beech tree and talk of
chairs ? How can she see the whitebeam and not
clap her hands with joy, or the rhododendrons and
the marshy flowers and not laugh with delight ?
She scorns fantasy, and yet she is a thousand
times more fantastic than any invention of the
craziest writers.

She shall see everything, and in the end, I
think, she will not so mightily despise Jane's
simplicity.

Round the stems of the pine trees bracken
grows thickly, a green undergrowth sometimes
eight feet high. From the tops of the trees pigeons
dart and hover through the dim light : a religious
light, for here, where the trees are tallest, the woods
are like a cathedral decked for festival, where even
death is celebrated with brave colour, in the hope
and certain knowledge of new birth.

The ground slopes gradually down to the lake
where the herons dwell, mating and nesting in the
tree-tops in the early months of the year. Some-
times we count as many as twenty of them stand-
ing on one leg and fishing in the reeds at the
southern end of the lake, and every evening as the

in

The Happy Garden

sun goes down a heron flies over to the post-office
— so we guess — to fetch and send off letters, or
when the young birds are out of the egg, to despatch
telegrams and newspaper announcements : boy or
girl, as the case may be.

Clap your hands. They have a lovely flight
with legs outstretched and head and neck curled
back like the prow of a viking ship : wide wings
held still and taut after the first few beats, as they
swing up into the wind, hover and swoop.

Water-lilies grow, and in April there are sheets
of the beautiful bog-bean with its orchid-like
flower and cup-like leaves.

The lake is still, and in it you shall see the
trees mirrored and the sky : the moonlit night and
the stars : the flowering shrubs : the reeds. Out
of the weeds come little flotillas of wild duck :
frogs dive as you approach and the flies dance
crazily. It is such a place of places, a place so
seemingly forgotten, that it is absurd to think that
the lake is only a stone's throw away from the
house, for in all these peregrinations through the
woods you are never more than a mile away from
the house. Your furthest point, perhaps, is when
you are at the other side of the lake and cannot
cut through direct.

The most beautiful of all remains — it always

Over the Hills and Far Away

does. By the mossy path through masses of
rhododendrons, and birch, and beech, and oak,
and pine — pheasants rocketing and rabbits scurry-
ing at every turn — you come to a gate leading to
a water meadow, on the other side of which is a
mighty range of chestnuts and ancient plane trees.
The meadow is richly decked with kingcups and
flowers of Parnassus, buttercups and daisies, and
lords and ladies. It is only crossable in summer.
. . . Let it be summer, and we will cross it, scale
the iron fence, and find ourselves in the path under
the chestnuts along the wide stretch of the river
which flows by long windings to the Thames, and
so to London, where, as Elisabeth would say, it
becomes part and parcel of an economic entity,
and an asset in the nation's wealth. Here it has
a wealth of beauty beyond all price, as it moves
sluggishly in its broad bed, rich with flowering
reeds, and herbs, and flags, and tangled growth,
while the great trees hang down their arms and
dabble their green fingers in the water. Best and
most beloved of all are the giant chestnuts, which
together form a green-roofed house, cool and lofty,
at the final bend before the Georgian house and
the grey walls of the ruined abbey come into view.
The great branches sweep down within two feet
of the ground and the water, and there is a little
i 113

The Happy Garden

window through which a delicious peep of the
river can be seen and often the brilliant flashing
blue of the kingfisher and the sober navigation of
the water fowl.

The chestnuts never will become chairs. They
will never be swept into the commercial machine :
like so many men, they are too old !

Still the most beautiful of all lies before us—
the bluebell wood : a mossy bank rising from a
little backwater that runs through the withy bed,
up under giant beech and oak and pines. Even in
January there are flowers here, snowdrops are
spread in a sheet up and down and even over the
path. These give way to daffodils, primroses, and
celandine, then to blue bells : —

" 1 wonder if Tm awake.

Those trees never used to grow
Bathing their feet in a deep blue lake,
I can't make it out, yon know.

I ahvays thought of the sky

High lifted over my head:
So please can you tell me the reason why

It's under my feet instead 1

But the bellmen of Elfin Town

Ring out their delicate chime.
The world has not turned upside doicn,

It is only— Bluebell time."

And, as a last challenge to the marching seasons,
foxgloves raise aloft their spears and defy the

114

Over the Hills and Far Away

summer — in vain. They pass too, and the great
trees, secure in the entail of the estate on which
they have been wise enough to grow, hardly notice
all the wonders at their feet, for, by the time they
have accomplished their year's task, it is spring
again. Time is not the same for trees and snow-
drops.

Here, if anywhere, there should be nightingales,
but though the most exquisite nights are arranged
for them and the largest of moons are ordered,
they are not to be tempted — or I have not been
fortunate enough to hear them. One cannot have
everything and a nightingale is quite an easy thing
to create in imagination.

Incidentally, I may add that these giant trees pro-
vide the finest leaf-mould for the garden, and every
year we build a stack of it behind the glass-houses.
Now the word is " Home." Only half the
treasures have been seen, but enough to give the
flavour of the country-side, which is the setting of
my garden. On the other side the pines stretch
for a couple of miles over the hills and far away.
A Black Forest, relieved only by green rides and
glades and heather glens, where, in winter, the sun
is trapped so that we can lie and bask on one slope
while in the shade opposite the rime is still steam-
ing from the heather.

"5

The Happy Garden

Is the garden in keeping with the country ?
Is the art of it sufficiently in sympathetic contrast
with it ? Is it arranged with such skill as to
justify the purloining of the acres of wood ? All
things considered, is it so right as to seem inevit-
able ? ... In fine, am I a fit and proper person to
live in such a country and impose my will on it ?

If not, perish the house and every flower in the
place. Let the pines resume their dominion, and
I will go and live Avith Jane in her Kentish suburb,
or, worse, with Elisabeth in her flat in the Adelphi.

It was not, though it might have been, my
pines that were in George Meredith's mind when
he wrote :

" A wind sways the pines,

And below
Not a breath of wild air,
Still as the mosses that glow
On the flooring and over the lines
Of the roots here and there.
The pine-tree drops its dead:
They are quiet as under the sea.
Overhead, overhead
Rushes life in a race,
As the clouds the clouds chase :

And we go,
And we drop like the fruits of the tree,

Even we,

Even so.

i

He loved the pines, and used to envy me for
living among them, though Box Hill was beautiful

116

Over the Hiils and Far Away

enough even for a poet. He came here once in
a motor car, and sat out in the golden road while
I went into the garden to tell my flowers that a
real poet was on the other side of the hedge. He
and the pines had a great conversation, and under-
stood each other well ; they belonged to the same
generation and came into the world about the
same time, and the pines could understand all
that he had been and suffered, for often they, too,
have had those who have no eyes to see in their
midst, and always they have sung :
" Overhead, overhead ! "

to deaf ears.

And he, as he wrote of Shakespeare :

■•. . . knew thee, Mother Earth: unsoured
He knew thy sons, He probed from hell to hell
Of Jiuman passions, but of love deflowered
His wisdom ivas not, for he knew thee toell.
Thence came the honeyed comer at his lips. . . .

He was an old man when I knew him, and yet
he was the youngest man I ever met. His laughter
was a great shout of youth, his voice as free and
swinging as the wind in the pines. It was the
proudest moment of the garden's history when he
came to gaze on it ; and the pines often talk of
it, and he has become a legend among the herons
over by the lake, and more than once on my hill

The Happy Garden

I have heard the rhythm of the trees and the wind
and the clouds take shape in these words :

" Our faith is ours and comes not on a tide;
And whether Earth's great offspring, by decree,
Must rot if they abjure rapacity,
Not argument but effort shall decide."

My garden is my Effort, and in the making of
it George Meredith has counted for much. He
was my friend.

118

1

'' As a happy people

^comc,

[When the war has

trolled away,
With dance &, tabor,
pipe <^drum,
STTj And all make
holiday:"

Q/yc/ney Dobe/I.

VII

Annuals

To the indolent or the prideless gardener annuals
are a nuisance. When the tulips and the spring
flowers are over there is a hurrying and a scurrying
and a digging and a preparing of the soil for the
many hardy and half-hardy annuals that are so
useful for helping to keep the garden beautiful
in July and August.

My plan, aiming, as always, at bold masses of
colour, is to treat the annuals in much the same
way as I treat perennials, and to group them in
thick clusters. The ordinary dot-and-carry-one
method is an irritation, and, I am sure, must be
demoralising to the flowers.

Their parade ground is a wide double border
with a grass path in between, lying n^ar the house
so that the way lies through them from the orchard
to the peat garden — the two chief dwelling-places.
Following the gentle slope of the lawn, the borders
bend down to meet the herbaceous borders by the
croquet lawn and the cherry walk.

The Happy Garden

Border I., that nearest the house, is divided
by a low wall, made of loose stone, in which grow
iris, double arabis, primulas, and all the spring
flowers. Rosemary and lavender and the Scotch
brier-rose group themselves at intervals, and it
ends fantastically with a clipped cock, who, with
a peacock, guards the entrance to the little sun-
dial courtyard.

Beneath the wall is a narrow bed, where, in the
spring, grow tulips and purple violas, which, if the
dying blooms are picked, last far into the summer.
When the tulips die and the annuals are clamour-
ing to show themselves, being then but silly little
spikes and tendrils protruding from their native
earth, then the aforesaid hurrying and scurrying
and digging takes place. Weeds grow apace and
monopolise the boy's attention : Mr. Gardener is
engrossed with his lawns and vegetables ; all the
tall-growing plants cry aloud for their crutches :
and somewhere, somewhen, the annuals have to
be looked to, and there is nobody to do it. Every-
body accuses everybody else, tempers are lost,
blight descends on the roses, cuckoo pint is every-
where, copper beetles descend from nowhere and
devour the buds of the brier roses, the sky repents
of its deluges in the early spring, and rains no more
— and somehow the annuals have to be planted,

122

Annuals

It is the most wretched time of the year. Roses
are out, summer has really come, but the annuals
deny enjoyment of it all. And yet they are indis-
pensable. No annuals, no August flowers, and the
garden soon begins to look brown and dry. But
the reward is all the sweeter for the worry and
effort.

In my garden they are especially important,
since they are so placed as to give the first impres-
sion from the house — and the impression to be
aimed at is oiie of colour, brilliant, glowing, ablaze.
Without the annuals there would be no intimacy
in the double border. It would have to be more
distant from the house.

As it is, to walk down the grass path is to feel
something of the charm of the best cottage gardens.
On either side at the back of the borders rises a
blue wall of delphiniums, blue lupins, and some
few phloxes, pink and white, and Michaelmas
daisies, and a good many purple cranesbills.

A little low box-edging marks the border off
from the lawn, setting a trim formal boundary to
Nature's extravagance — Nature aided and abetted
by myself. . . . Left to herself, Nature does not
offend : but she has so little sympathy with or
respect for human aims ! She will even plant
yellow where yellow is taboo. She schemes for all

123

The Happy Garden

the world from China to Peru : my designs are
for my little plot of four acres. Thence comes
conflict in which I can by concentration, constant
effort, selection, elimination, and above all, by
compromise, concession, and yielding — as Mr.
Robinson and experience say we must — to Nature's
universal laws, enforce my will. There is a sort
of tacit chartei between us : each says to the
other :

" Thus far and no farther shall you go."
If either oversteps the limit, the result is in
the one case chaos, in the other trim ugliness —
villadom. That is not to say that I believe Nature
to be inimical to man or me. The point of cleavage
comes, to my mind, in this : that Nature is far
too busy to notice me or to try to discover what
I am doing ; so, if I wish to maintain pleasant
relations with her, I am forced to try to find out
what she is up to, and, wherever necessary, to
adapt myself to her. . . . Perhaps that is rather
grudgingly stated : such adaptation is always
necessary. And, though it feels very emancipated
to think that I buy my seeds in little packets, and
bulbs by the score from Holland, and heaths from
Derbyshire, and trees , from Japan and America,
yet my slavery is really only the more profound,
for I have to discover what provision Nature makes

124

Annuals

for each of my purchases, and re-make the soil,
and give them shade or sun, north or south aspect,
peat or clay, as the case may be. . . . There is
nothing like making things grow for putting you
in your place : and that is why the poor in London
and the other " gardens defiled " feed the hunger
which comes to them as they lose their sense of
orientation by growing geraniums and convolvulus
and daisies in pots on their window-sills, or if the
worst comes to the worst, mustard and cress in
little wooden boxes. That is why thousands and
thousands of children who have never seen green
fields, and clean trees, and the open sky, long for
flowers to remind them that all the world is not
hard and cruel and dull and grim : they long for
flowers to feed their dreams. . . . Green fields
and trees and sky, flowers and fruit, bring love
and pride into wretched lives : love in dreams,
pride in the knowledge that, in spite of misery and
sordid streets, and squalor, there is nothing more
lovely than the heart of man. . . . Lives in
which one faint youthful glimmer of romance makes
all the rest worth while, are fortified in their
sorrowful faith by these tokens that what little
gleam there was, was true, a spark of enduring
light. Flowers are poems to the inarticulate
millions to whom words have no music : and for

12:

The Happy Garden

whom the poets sing in vain. — God walked in the
garden of T. E. Brown, and another poet who
lived in wretchedness, has sung :

" While the trees grow
While the streams flow
While the ivinds blotc,

We will be free !
Free as trees growing,
Free as streams floioing
Free as xvinds bloiving,
Evermore free."

That is the sort of thing which is detestable to
Elisabeth, who is Puritan to the core. Hers is the
temper that looks forward to the day when she will
be enthroned in a crystal house and provided with
a telescope with which to look down upon and
gloat over the tortures of the eternal inmates of
the pit, as she gloats over the miserable victims of
society whom she pretends to reform. She is dis-
honest and immoral, and is really having a splendid
time with her conscience. She is one of those whom
the same poet transfixed with :

"Let those who stickle for a Hell
Have it — They deserve it well.

The which metaphysical excursion"^ must be for-
given me, because it is impossible for those who
have flowers not to think of those who have none,
and such thoughts do inevitably lead back to the

126

Annuals

region in which rich, and poor, and good, and bad,
and vice, and virtue, are all one, the region in
which the poets dwell, a region, not as is gener-
ally supposed, high above the world of actual
things, and commerce, and stocks, and shares, and
food, and household requisites, and law, and police,
and crime, and companies, and Harrod's Stores,
and music-halls and kinematographs, and slums,
but, as I have learned in the happiness of my
garden, in it, pervading it all. It is not a refuge
from the storm and stress of life : it is the region
nearest life, the depths on the surface of which
is everything, from Buckingham Palace to the
vilest slums in Glasgow.

Which brings me back to annuals. I fancy they
like being treated as herbaceous plants. It is a
sort of promotion. At any rate, they live up to
it nobly. ... I have known a pansy so obsti-
nately emulous that, having fallen under the
shadow of a mauve cranesbill, he grew a stalk
two feet long, and poked his head up out of the
thick green growth. He had outgrown his strength,
poor thing, and did not live long, but at least he
had asserted himself.

I am not certain whether it is bookishly correct
to end a border with an apple tree, as mine does :
an apple tree that bears the finest fruit of any in

127

The Happy Garden

the garden. Taking everything into consideration,
I am inclined to think it right in that particular
instance. It grows over against the rose and
honeysuckle archway that leads to the upper lawn,
and prevents a too abrupt end. Purple geranium
lives beneath it, and peers up into the branches,
so that the plants themselves have no rooted
objection to its presence.

A border has to be designed, like a piece of
sculpture, to be seen right and convincing from every
point of view. The apple tree is, of course, years
older than the border, and its presence gives the
sense of accident which both relieves and accen-
tuates design. It is bizarre, but it falls into place
as duly as the borders harmonise with the slope
of the lawn, and the general lie of the land. In
a garden where there is no view to build up to,
each little vista leading on and on to the final pur-
view out over the wide world and the kingdoms
thereof, each nook and corner has to be made an
independent principality exactly defined and yet
fitting so nicely into its place that the whole is
an empire of inter-dependent states; an empire
whose government is seated in the brain of the
designer, a government conducted with no rules
or laws save the first principles of Nature, who,
in the commonwealth, is Lord High Chancellor,

1 28

Annuals

Chief Justice, Executioner, and Lord High Every-
thing Else. The paid gardener is Chief of Police,
Nurse, and Conductor of the State Creche.

My garden is so situated that the world and
the kingdoms thereof lie outside and beyond, and,
therefore, it must be a microcosm, a world in little,
reaching not outward and beyond, but, like the
pines, directly upwards. That is a limitation that
makes excellence both easier and more difficult ;
easier, because the dimensions of the dream are
smaller ; more difficult because the standard and
the test are not to be had for the mere mounting
to an open place. There is a danger in the pines
as a background, for they give such a glow to
colour that even discord and disharmony will look
well, and even failure can give something of the
pride and triumph of success. There is the same
peril in a garden so enclosed as there is in the
mysticism of the poets who seem to lose their
sense of the visible world — and to devise systems
which are logically perfect though they have no
life. So might a garden, without becoming con-
ventional, suffer by the imposition of a new con-
vention and become as stiff and frigid, though not
quite so ugly as the old gardens of beds and patterns.
Another danger is the acceptance of failure and
the " good enough " as " good." That has a
J 129

The Happy Garden

horrible cumulative effect. Though gardener and
designer cease to work, Nature does not, and under
the constraint of designs half created, or plans that
have gone awry, she produces all sorts of mon-
strosities in her effort to force her way back to her
own rhythm and her own method of doing things.

Rhythm is perhaps the best word to convey
what it is in Nature that the designer has to catch
and feel, and it is precisely because the relation is
so subtle and so fine and exacting that rules and
general statements are so perilous. A statement
is not religion : codes of positive rules are certain
to be misinterpreted and to lead to misconception
and blundering action : certain things — a very few
— are wrong in all cases and for all people and all
gardens. I am no counsellor, hardly at all a
theorist, and I have no more science than necessity
bids. The aim here is to express my garden in
words and to give only such general laws as can
be argued from my particular case. . . .

The pleasure of a garden is to feel it growing
under your hand, and the greatest pleasure is to
be had when you feel that, given the soil, and your-
self, and your particular financial resources, and
the immediate surroundings, it must be so and not
otherwise : that is, when the garden grows with
your own growth.

130

Annuals

So it is with the annuals. Year after year I did
as I was bid and had narrow borders for them, or
put them here and there, wherever there was room
to spare, with the most unsatisfactory results, and
an amount of work and worry which was never
justified by the result. I wanted to be bold and
yet lacked boldness. . . . Then came a time of
greater intimacy with the garden, of a keener sense
of rhythm, and I took my courage in both hands,
wrestled with the new idea, resolved to have all
beds and borders as wide as possible, and invented
my double border with its grass paths, in which the
herbaceous plants should not only provide shelter
for their cousins, the annuals, but show off their
beauties to more advantage.

The result is that in these all-important borders*
so near the house, there are flowers right through
from April to September, and, in good seasons, even

later.

The annuals that I chiefly grow are antirrhinum,
pale yellow and pink and deep red; salpiglossis,
deep blue ; scabious ; nigella Miss Jekyll ; asters,
mauve and pink ; salvia patens— which is really
herbaceous, but not quite hardy, although it will
live through the winter in one of the borders—
these are put in in large clumps and go well with
the dark-blue delphiniums and purple cranesbill—

131

The Happy Garden

mignonette, phlox Drummondi, and poppy Miss
Sherwood ; planted in large groups, running in and
out of each other so as not to be too formal, and so
as to mingle with the bold patches of mauve and
white campanulas, English iris and pink mallow.

The beautiful blue phacelia grandiflora, of course,
is grown, but that is reserved for the border along
the wall, where it tumbles over the stones of the
courtyard. Canterbury bells are in the big borders,
but larkspurs are allowed among the other annuals.

Each aspect has its own individuality. At the
orchard end the borders terminate in lavender
hedges. Pillar roses — Rubens, Euphrosyne, Leuch-
stern and a white single rose — mark it off from, and
introduce it to, the lawn, where, at a little distance,
there is a great bush — four or five yards through —
of the single white polyanthus rose, the beloved of
Miss Jekyll, whose books are a necessary part of
every gardener's development. As Browning said
of his wife — a remark which has always curbed my
admiration for the poet — " To love her is a liberal
education " . . .To introduce Miss Jekyll's books
to a house is almost enough to make a garden
grow about it. To introduce them to a contented
gardenless woman is ' a social danger. ... In
practice there is only one reason to quarrel with
Miss Jekyll. She is merciless. With seedlings she

1^2

THE ANNUAL BORDER IN SEPTEMBER; TOBACCO PLANTS,
ASTERS, AND AUTUMN LILIES

Annuals

is ruthless, for she is a tidy housewife — or garden-
wife — who will tolerate nothing, be it never so
beautiful, out of its place. She has no more feel-
ing for a seedling Shirley poppy than for the
wickedest of weeds (which the French call so aptly
mauvaises herbes). Now, in my light, sandy soil,
everything delights to seed itself, and often when
some flower has ensconced itself in some entirely
inappropriate place, I have not the heart to pluck
it out. It may be weakness : but I confess it with-
out shame. I should never dream, for instance, of
uprooting anywhere Miss Jekyll's triumph, the
nigella or love-in-a-mist, the lovely blue flower
nestling in its frail foliage, almost like a patch of
sky reflected in the water of a green stagnant pond :
surely one of the tenderest and most intimate
flowers of all : and its sweet name is not half sweet
enough.

Sometimes too great a liberty is taken — poppies
especially are apt to take advantage of the least
indulgence, and then I am as ruthless as the most
professional of gardeners. If flowers will misbehave
themselves and grow like weeds, they must be
treated as such : —

" / will go root away
The noxious weeds that without jwojit suck
The soil's fertility from tcholesome floicers:"

*33

The Happy Garden

which are lines not among those thousand which

Ben Jonson thought Shakespeare had better have

blotted out, though they are not enough to justify

the disputants in saying that Shakespeare was

Bacon, or that the poet was at one time a

gardener by profession.

And here by the rose and honeysuckle pergola,

adorned also with kerria japonica (" old men's

buttons "), which is yellow, though inoffensive, since

it blossoms early when few other flowers are out, is

Jane murmuring to herself in a sort of hurt, rapt way:

" Woman is unutterably more wicked than man, and
more clever ; goodness in a icoman is a form of degenera-
tion."

Nietzsche !

She could not have remembered it if she had

read it. Elisabeth must have been talking to her.

Elisabeth wants to make her think. / want to

make her feel : —

" You must love the light so xcell,
That no darkness will seem fell,
Love it so you could accost
Felloivly a livid ghost . . .

(Even Elisabeth)

Light to light sees little strange

Only features heavenly new:

Then you toucJi the nerve of Change

Then of Earth you have the clue :

Then her tico-se.ved meanings melt

Through you, tved the thought and felt."

134

Annuals

And, since one is quoting for the benefit of Jane,
one may as well add the words of Ludwig Borne,
which Heine thought good enough to place at the
head of his Harzreise :

"Nothing endures but Change: nothing is
certain but Death. Every heart-beat deals a
wound, and life would be no more than a slow
bleeding to death were it not for poetry. It pre-
serves to us what Nature denies : a Golden Age
which does not perish, a Spring-time which never
fades away, happiness without a cloud, and ever-
lasting Youth."

Gardening is a sort of poetry, and a garden is
a poem written not in words, but in the changing
(and enduring) fairest forms of Nature.
Come, Jane !

i35

Toy

TVER-;

2W_-&^_ ; i

this is the house
of enchantment ,
Rpllon grinding
wheels of the world

You are

not heard here"

VIII

The Toy River

The ideal dress for work in the garden is the tunic
worn by girls in the gymnasium. This, with stout
knee-pads for protection against the damp ground
— for women can never, like "men, do all their
planting and weeding stooping — is business-like
and comfortable. I have not yet had, I confess,
enterprise enough to adopt it, and my customary
garb is a short skirt of serge bought for four-and-
sixpence, ready-made in Manchester. My con-
science, when it is allowed to speak, tells me that
it is the product of sweating, and, when I listen,
I am very sorry, though my sorrow takes no prac-
tical shape. Once one begins to think of the
injustice to others necessitated by his own existence
then there is no end to it, and it seems absolutely
certain that one ought to be abolished. . . . And
I am often almost sincerely convinced of the neces-
sity of my own abolition, and that I have no right
to sit down in my pine-wood, while others are ground
down that I may have food and clothing and the

i39

The Happy Garden

few luxuries that I need, and above all the price-
less boon of leisure. Why should I be free to choose
my own work and to do it in my own time ?

I confess that I thoroughly enjoy these specu-
lations (especially at moments when the weather
is oppressive, or the garden has been ravaged by
some pest) until I begin to perceive that they are
leading me towards Social Reform, and those
amiable people who wish to abolish everything but
themselves, beginning with human nature, which,
being human, they detest, and are quite deter-
mined that everybody shall have a thin gruel-fed
happiness, cut to their pattern, and not the sort
of happiness which they take because it is their
nature to.

The point I am coming to is the consideration
of Leisure, and the only question which seems to
me to arise is this : Are you, or are you not,
worthy of Leisure ?

That can only be answered by Life. In this
world either you have Leisure, or you haven't :
either you are ground down in the machine or you
are not. If you are worthy of Leisure you will
have it by hook or by crook, and money or no
money will matter very little. True Leisure is
not bought with money, which blows where it
listeth. It does not follow that those whom

140

The Toy River

money has lifted out of the machine will possess
Leisure : very often their last state is worse than
their first, and exhaustion is succeeded by the
even more cruel affliction of boredom. . . . The
boredom of the rich is infinitely more cruel than
the boredom of the poor. . . . Leisure is a thing
so precious that the unworthy lose it almost at
once by emulating the dog with the bone and the
shadow. To such people, Leisure means Doing
Nothing, which is the very last thing in the world
that it does mean. ... If it can be translated
at all it means Doing the Right Thing at the Right
Time, and the dream of the visionaries is of a
Golden Age when all shall have Leisure and all
shall be worthy of it.

"I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my srvord sleep in my hand,
Till toe have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."

When Blake wrote " Jerusalem," under the
influence of Swedenborg and the Book of Numbers,
he meant Leisure, as is shown by the note :

" Would to God that all the Lord's people were Prophets ! "

That is : people with leisure to prophesy in
words and stones and paint and houses, and every
art and craft, and trade and profession, at least,

141

The Happy Garden

such as there were left when human beings had
given up doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.

I may or may not be worthy of my own Leisure,
but if I am not, it is very certain that in due time
I shall lose it, and all that I have done with it,
including the river. If it is to be so, so be it. In
the meanwhile, let me take pride in it and discover
it from its source down.

There are two different waters on the estate —
three, counting rain-water. There is a spring from
which the best supply is drawn by a pump in the
kitchen. The rest comes chalky from the main
of the nearest company half a mile through the
woods. That is " laid on " both in house and
garden. The river runs from the top by the old
gate. Its source is overhung with honeysuckle and
set about with roses and lavender. . . . As a
matter of hard fact, it rises through an iron pipe
set in a gravel path.

It runs intermittently : that is to say, when
the water begins to stale, the hose is turned on
and a fresh stream flows to the delight of the gold-
fish and the water plants and the profit of the
company. (These romance-destroying details are
not for Jane and Elisabeth.)

The river has a history.

Time was when in the unregenerate past, the
142

The Toy River

south side of the garden between the nut walk
and the rock-garden was a waste of very indif-
ferent and useless lawn leading up a grass bank
to a tangled shrubbery, which it was impossible
to enter. The place was never entered, except
when there were wild raspberries on the bank.

It was a disgrace ! It was the slatternly bed-
room which suffers in so many houses, so that the
drawing-room can be crammed with useless and
obviously expensive bibelots. In those days it is
very certain that I had no leisure, and deserved
none. However, as the sundial remarks : " Time
can do much.'''' And in this case, time brought
energy and perception that the whole garden was
out of balance, while there remained that dis-
graceful tangle.

The first impulse was to destroy, but, before
destruction, it is necessary to have some construc-
tive idea, however vague.

My constructive idea was the wildest possible :
— to have a river where no water was : a river and
a lake.

With that determined on, the next thing was
to have the ground cleared and left as blank as a
painter's canvas. The grass was found to be bad
and was taken up. Upon practical reflection, it
was discovered that there was quite as much lawn

i43

The Happy Garden

in the garden as the gardener and boy could
manage without working twenty-five hours a day
during the summer. Therefore, the cleared space
should not again be sown with grass. It could not
be left in its sandy nakedness, and inspiration
supplied peat. . . . All through the miles of the
wood there is a carpet of peat and moss and pine-
needles two or three inches thick. Nothing was
simpler than to roll up as much as was required,
and lay it down again where the old useless lawn
had been.

The pine trees could have no cause of complaint
because they have very little else to do, when they
are not singing and shying cones at the squirrels
and each other, save to weave this self-same carpet.
Like Clotho, or Lachesis, or Atropos — I can never
remember which — they never cease weaving.

So then, the floor was clothed in a fashion
surely delectable to the lilies and the heaths and
the azaleas, who later on should take up their
dwelling there. The ground was not level. It was
banked on either side, and terraced where the
grassy bank below the shrubbery used to be.

Having two levels there must be steps : and
these were built of bricks left over from the court-
yards.

On either side shrubs were planted : rhododen-
144

The Toy River

drons to the left ; to the right, as a wall against
the green of the rest of the garden, were groups of
ribes, berberis, philadelphus and lilac. Along the
cherry walk, two steps down from the level of the
peat, grew in old days a hedge of Penzance sweet
brier. This was trimmed and bent to make a sort
of balustrade, low enough to give a free view down
into the croquet lawn, and not to hide the cherry
trees in blossom.

Here and there were planted special standard
rhododendrons, a silver fir, a group of tree
lupins, a catalpa tree, andromeda, various kinds
of daphne, Japanese roses, and white broom. A
tulip tree was left over from the old regime, and
made the best he could of the new order, which
was new enough to revolt him. . . . Heather was
brought in from the glens and throve : all except
one clump of white heather, which exhausted itself
in trying to squeeze out enough good luck for such
a tremendous venture. He was the only clump for
miles around, and was grossly overworked in in-
fancy. . . .

Just at this time the wave of energy which
cleared the old shrubbery and the useless lawn,
touched the male denizens of the estate, and the
visitors, and set them all felling trees, " seven at
a blow," like the little tailor of the tale.

K 145

The Happy Garden

These were exactly what I wanted. It is in-
accurate to say that the river was the genesis of
the peat garden. The first need was for a bridge,
and from that all sprang. A bridge, if there is any
sense in it, means a railway, or a road, or a river,
or a canal, or a lake. It is said that the Chinese
obviate engineering difficulties by building a bridge
and turning a river from its course to flow under
it. . . . My notion was to have a bridge from
the old garden into the new, or, if one must be
symbolical, from my old self into the new. The
bridge was to be built of pine trees, and, discard-
ing the railway and the road, I came to water and
decided on a river. It was designed and dug out
from its apparent source under a spruce tree down
to the lake (or pond) in which it ends before ever
the bridge was advanced beyond the stage of the
decision of its site. It was to lead from the lawn
to the top part of the peat-garden.

As the idea took shape, it seemed absurd for
the bridge to lead only from one garden to another
without the existence of any definite attraction,
and the gap was filled by the arrival of a catalogue
of trees and flowering shrubs. On the back of the
catalogue was a picture of a Japanese tea-house
overgrown with wistaria and laburnum, and set
about with azaleas. In half a second that tea-

146

The Toy River

house was transferred mentally to the corner of the
peat-garden opposite the bridge. . . . There was
the needed attraction, there was the corner-stone
of the scheme, the crown of the achievement.
Everything was to hand : logs, wood, wistaria,
laburnum, labour. . . .

It all sounds delightfully easy and magical, and
as though it was done with sleeves turned back, so
that there could be absolutely no deception. The
idea came, as ideas do— in spite of the Positivists
and Materialists and Comtists— rather like a con-
juring trick, in which the Great Conjurer, who
juggles with our brains and his old, old stock of
ideas, while he baffles us with his ironic patter,
really does demonstrate that the quickness of the
hand deceives the eye. But when the trick was
done, and I was left with a potential bridge, a
potential house, and a potential river, there
remained the conflict that follows on the advent
of an idea— the conflict with Things as they Were.
In this instance the arch-fiend was not deep-rooted
prejudice, but trailing or rather tuberous grass,
which is known as couch, quoitch, or witch-grass.
. . . It is of all weeds the wickedest. Leave but
a shred of it in the ground, and it will twist, and
wriggle, and thrust its way with the most vulgar
pertinacity into the choicest beds. It disguises

147

The Happy Garden

itself to look like any fibrous root, and it is no
respecter of persons. It has no manners, and when
it meets a bulb or tuber in the ground refuses to
go round, but bores its way straight through : while
with roots it will twist about, and over, and in, and
out, until it has strangled the life out of them. . . .
This plague, this serpent among weeds, this para-
site, had been left to do its very worst in the
shrubbery.

War was declared, and a campaign was carried
on as bloody as that of the feud of MacPherson
against the clan MacTavish. It was hard labour
and durance vile, and success was not complete,
for still the green blades peep impudently here
and there, through the brown carpet ; but enough
was done to leave the ground clear for the tracing
of the river's bed.

With the clearing of the shrubbery, wealth
undreamed of was unearthed. There were shrubs
enough to equip the whole new garden and all its
banks, and large enough to wall it off from the
lawn ; and there was a jolly little crab-tree, and
best of all, half an avenue of birches, in a direct
line with the gravel path which runs the whole
length of the top of the garden. It was easy to
complete the avenue ' by carrying it up to the
spruce tree, whence the river was designed to

148

The Toy River

spring, and beneath it, over the brown carpet, were
spread rugs of snowdrops, primroses, and daffodils
and bluebells. . . . This little patch of Spring
Paradise lies between the top of the nut-walk and
the spruce tree, which was given a mate so that
it should not feel out of it in the company of
strange trees.

Not to have the wood and garden meeting too
abruptly, Forsythia and Weigela and tree lupins
were planted in groups on the hither side of the
birches, and the Forsythia, bursting into bloom in the
early spring, prepared the pine trees for all that
they should look down on in the succeeding months.

Near the Forsythias a poor little cherry tree,
who had been half shrivelled all his life in the
shrubbery, was given a home and a comfortable
bed of good mould.

That done, the work of construction began in
earnest.

The winding bed of the river was dug out and
over the bank it fell into a wide pond, which, when
I think of it, becomes a small ocean. It is about
twenty-five feet by twenty, and irregular in shape.
In a little pool above it stands a terra-cotta model
of the Dolphin Boy of Verrocchio, which, as all the
world knows, is in the courtyard of the Palazzo
Vecchio in Florence. My rival quarrels with the

149

The Happy Garden

boy, and declares that he is out of place in his
surroundings, especially as he does not fulfil his
functions as a fountain. My rival quarrelled with
him when he was in the sunk garden, and did
practise his profession, and there, I am bound
to say, she was right : but here, in the midst
of a river which does not run, above a lake which
has no outlet, it seems to me that he is rightly
placed. He has a canopy of bamboos, and green
arenaria grows about his feet, and he gazes down
into the lake, standing on one foot, and leaning
slightly forward to try to catch his own reflection
in the water : which is sufficient occupation for
anybody. He is beautiful enough to be suffered to
be idle, though if the river ran he would have to
set to and earn his living. . . . But while the
water-rate is high, and an extra fee is charged for
all water supplied above a certain number of
gallons, it is improbable that the river will ever run.
Absurd though it is, I am as proud of it as was
.Naaman of Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of
Damascus. It is easy to sneer at it, but it is, at
any rate, deep enough to drown the moon and the
stars, as anyone may see who will come and stand
on the bridge at night. , It is deep enough for frogs
and fish and strange insects. ... In width it

varies from one foot to three feet. In depth but

150

" In a little pool . . . stands the Dolphin Boy of Verrocchio

The Toy River

wild horses shall not drag that from me. It is
constructed in three reaches, a pool, a waterless
waterfall, and a lake. The bed is built of bricks
and rubble cemented over so that with the inter-
mittent flow of water from the top there may not
be stagnation and foul gases.

The river is bordered by dense vegetation.
Rhododendrons hide the mystery of its origin, and
ferns and hanging plants conceal its banks. Giant
asphodel (eremurus himalaicus and e. himrob and
e. robustus), prickly rhubarb (gunnera), iris, heaths,
lilies of all kinds, megasea, bamboos, ceanothus,
the crab tree — all are mirrored in the river. . . .
Over the bridge trails wistaria, and hard by it
grow white lupins and budleia Veitchii, with its
handsome mauve heads. Stonecrop clambers about
the rocks under Verrocchio's Boy, and on either
side, along the wall that used to be the grassy
slope — a wall built of pine-logs, and topped with
flat stones — are iris, and love-lies-bleeding, and,
hanging over, cranesbill, pinks, sunroses, and iberis.

Behind it, between the steps and the bridge, is
a laburnum Adami, which bears yellow and purple
flowers together. It is a freak. The unfailing
Robinson describes it :

" L. Adami has long been a puzzle to botanists,
who even now cannot account for its peculiar

I51

The Happy Garden

character. It is supposed that it originated by-
grafting the purple flowered Cytisus purpureas upon
the common laburnum, a graft hybrid being the
result. The same tree and even the same branches
bear racemes of both yellow and purple flowers,
and sometimes the colour is a dull purple, like
yellow mixed with purple. Old trees of these are
singularly quaint, and not without beauty."

I must take my Robinson's word for it, for as
yet my youngling has refused to bloom. Possibly
it will be years before he will condescend to bear
a flower either of yellow or purple, or dull purple,
like purple mixed with yellow.

At the end of the lake is the Philosopher's Seat,
a log standing under a weeping ash. Here the
Philosopher, knowing nothing of gardening and
gardener's tricks, will sit and ponder the marvels
of Nature that causes rivers to flow and lakes to
spread in a sandy desert. He will commend the
faith that causes the wilderness to blossom like the
rose, and deny the existence of everything but his
•own thoughts. Or, like Hegel, he will gaze up
through the branches of the ash and declare that
the stars are only a " gleaming rash on the sky " :
or, seeing two moons, one in the sky and one in the
lake (or pond) at his feet, he will ardently debate
as to which is the real moon, and which is the

The Toy River

illusion : and, as likely as not, he will decide to
his own satisfaction that the moon at his feet is
the real, since it is the way of philosophers to
prefer things at their feet and to give more atten-
tive scrutiny to their own boots than to anything
else in the world. About him and about are fair
things growing, but he sees them not : not the
flowering andromeda, nor the rustling bamboos,
nor the yellow lilies, nor the nodding osmunda, nor
the iris, nor the polygonum, nor the bugle. He
sits there and sees nothing but his own boots, and
the roar in the trees is to him only the rushing
mighty wind of his own thoughts. . . . " / am
that I am " is not for him, though it is for all that
lives and grows : for him is only a blind longing
to say : " I am that I am not." Why then admit
him to the garden ? . . . It is for all and sundry,
and the uneducated and illiterate are flattered when
I point to the tree, and say : " There is the
Philosopher's Seat."

There are fish in the lake by way of making
it convincing. The water is quite as wet as other
water, but, without fish, there is a danger of its not
being taken seriously : and thereby hangs a tale
— a live-stock tragedy which shall serve for a
short interlude.

i53

Alarming

^ liNM^E/Ri/LIDE

Nature sets

all her children
to live by devoun
ino" one, another."

femes TTiomson.

IX

An Alarming Interlude

Whether it is that flowers are not enough — as
they certainly are not — or whether it is that there
is an instinct left in us traceable back to the
patriarch Noah, who so loved the beasts that he
had to have them with him on board ship, I do
not know : but give a normal healthy being a
piece of land, and very soon he (or she) will set
about peopling it with animals. Most novices will
begin with a dovecot, as I did. . . . That is to
invite tragedy and cats, and it is no consolation to
know that the life of the cat is fortified by the
lives of the doves. . . . Pigeons are even more
disastrous, for, as like as not, they will hatch an
egg and then shake off their parental responsi-
bility by flying away to return no more.

Nine out of ten dovecots of my acquaintance
are empty. I have known people who have " gone
back to the land," and have been so infected with
Nature's frenzy for propagation that all their days
are given to setting birds and beasts and plants

157

The Happy Garden

a-breeding, to the great horror of the shade of
Malthus and the destruction of their own charming
social qualities. I have known at least one woman
who surrendered completely to the vice of Dumb
Friends' Friendship, and, when she died, her house
contained ninety-six cats, thirty dogs, forty-nine
birds, a parakeet, a dish of turtles, two snakes, three
salamanders, and a monkey, together with an in-
describable litter. It did not contain another
human being, and, indeed, her dumb friends had
alienated all her others.

These are, of course, extreme cases.

Less extreme was the case of a family in London,
who could bear no thought of cruelty to animals,
and when some relations sent them some live
lobsters from Scotland, they, hearing that lobsters
scream when they are boiled, spared their lives and
laid them in a fresh-water stream, where they died
horribly and slowly of suffocation.

The same sort of tender-heartedness makes other
people gorge their cats to biliousness with salmon,
and feed their dogs until their skins are blown out
as tight as a drum. There are women who will
hug their cats and slap their children : ladies who
will take their dogs a-visiting, and to the panto-
mime, and never go near their nurseries. And to
such a pitch has the craze for animals grown that

158

An Alarming Interlude

there is actually a shop in a West -End arcade
where there are sold coats, and collars, and boots,
and handkerchiefs, and walking-sticks, and ties,
and jewelled tie-pins for dogs.

It is no new thing, and almost all the follies
to which the alliance between dogs and men has
given rise are recorded in a certain chapter of
Montaigne.

Dogs and other animals, it is to be observed,
take their character from their masters, or, as the
Theosophists put it in their transcendental way,
dogs and beasts can be helped upward in the scale
by those with whom they live, who then are
weighted with a certain karmic responsibility. One
thing is certain, that no dog can be turned into a
religious animal by contact (or anything else for
that matter) : that is, it cannot pass beyond the
line of demarcation between dumb consciousness
and the consciousness which is so acute that it
must speak. Dogs at their very best can sympa-
thise with men only up to a certain point : beyond
that they are baffled : for beyond that lies all
— because they do not understand — that makes
them regard men as Gods.

As to cats, it is impossible to theorise.

All this is not so far from the subject as might
appear at first sight. It serves to indicate that,

i59

The Happy Garden

though there is a growing animal population in the
garden, I am under no sort of infatuation, nor
attacked by any dizzy craze as a result of leaving
London for the country.

I be^an with the assertion that flowers are not
enough and I adhere to it.

A cat is necessary to keep down rats, mice,
and moles, and also to show the birds that they
cannot have things all their own way.

Dogs are necessary for themselves. Also it is
difficult for any man or woman to reach old age
without ever having possessed a dog. They happen.
They attach themselves to you, or they suggest
occultly to their owners that they should be given
to you, or you find their captivity in a small cage
in a shop window unendurable ; — there are a
thousand and one ways of acquisition, a million
and one points at which the paths of particular
men and particular dogs cross.

Beyond dogs and cats, the beasts proper to a
place are dictated mainly by circumstances and
growth.

When the rest of my garden revolted against
the shrubbery and the old useless lawn and forced
me to make a peat garden and the river, lake, and
bridge, and when the transplanted trees and shrubs
were slow in coming to lea!: it became necessary to

160

An Alarming Interlude

have something moving to enliven the place. . . .
First imported were the fish, the gift of Hookie's
father, who is, like Polonius, a fishmonger. Gold-
fish, he tells me, are the albinos among fish, and
the first batch of a dozen with which the lake was
stocked were Gold Orfe, which are said never to
die of a change of water.

They died !

Inquisition and cross-examination revealed the
fact that they had been tipped straight from their
own cool can into the rather warmer waters of the
lake, and the sudden change was too much for them.

Hookie's father tried again — there were two
survivors of the Orfe to show that the pond was
not poisonous — and this time presented me with
about thirty carp. With infinite care these were
installed in the pond and the three reaches of the
river, and all seemed well.

They were fed on ants' eggs, semolina and
worms.

The lake gained in dignity and importance.
It was large enough and sound enough to support
life in a shoal of carp.

Encouraged by this success we learned that the
land was envious of the water. Why should it not
also support animal life ?

With the heat of the sun striking up from the
l 161

The Happy Garden

peat, and the pine-log wall, and the stones of the
waterless waterfall, the kind of beast to be invited
was easy to decide.

Six lizards were ordered from Gamages.

Four were let loose in the peat garden, and two
in the rock garden over beyond the hedge of flower-
ing shrubs. They were eighteen inches long and
brilliant green in colour. Three of them took
possession of various crannies under the rocks ;
one was last seen among the peas at the farthest
extremity of the kitchen garden, and the rest ">are
not," as the Bible says.

Those who are left seem to have so many
household duties to perform in the morning that
they never appear until the long shafts of the late
afternoon sun fall across the garden, and from four-
thirty onwards it is regularly part of the day's
programme to hunt the lizards. . . .

When bog-bean was fetched from the lake in
the woods for the toy lake, unwittingly there was
brought with it frog-spawn, and, one morning, it
was seen that the water was black with tadpoles
enough, if they lived, to stock the Caspian Sea with
frogs.

Strange insects appeared, and, though the water
comes from a tap, it 'seems to be inexhaustively
fruitful.

162

An Alarming Interlude

The tortoise has been mentioned, and he plays
no part in this tragedy or comedy.

All was peace and fruitfulness in the lake, and
every day a lizard that had taken possession of the
waterless waterfall came out to bask in the sun on a
cushion of moss, and to survey the kingdom of which
she seemed to be persuaded that she was queen.

Here, at last, was peace on earth and perfec-
tion : a little outcrop of the Golden Age, and all
was gold and summer-green. Peacefully the golden
carp swam and darted in the lake : peacefully the
lizard basked, and all around the shrubs and trees
put forth leaf and blossom.

Then I overstepped myself.

On a visit I made the acquaintance of two
small ducks — Indian Runners : one black, one
brown, with a white ring at the base of his neck.
These ducks had never seen water in their lives.
They were, I was told, the very paragon of ducks,
the very ducks for a peat garden. They had all
the charm of ducks, with none of their vices. They
would not eat seeds, or flowers, or young vege-
tables : they would devour only grubs, and slugs,
and worms, and noxious things. . . . Nothing,
I was told, would induce them to murder or even
to assault an innocent fish, and they would treat
lizards with deference and respect.

163

The Happy Garden

I believed it all, and carried away the ducks.
That was a Thursday.

They were brought home, installed, given a
little green house by the lake, surveyed, admired,
chortled over. They were very pretty and had
tremendous washings in the water.

On Friday they were even more charming, until,
in the evening, I saw the brown bird with the white-
ringed neck with something long and gleaming in
his beak. . . . Gulp — gobble : and it was not for
a moment or two that I realised that I had been
cozened and cheated and betrayed. . . . These
were no innocent ducks that I had introduced to
my Eden, but ravening monsters, who, instead of
the idyllic comic opera names I had given them,
should have been called Gorging Jack and Guzzling
Jemmy, and that poor Little Billee would never
live to be made Commander of Seventy-Three.

Once I have been taken in, I have great diffi-
culty in being undeceived, and I was still foolish
enough to think that the golden carp might have
found its way into the duck's beak by accident, or
misadventure : and I left the ducks on the pond
and slept on the problem.

Ducks or Gold-fish ?

Next day, Billy, the sheepdog, solved it.

He is well born, well bred, well mannered, but,
164

An Alarming Interlude

like all persons of character, there is a streak of
aboriginal savagery in his composition, and when
that overmasters him, like Synge's Play-boy, he
loses all sense of the difference between " a gallons
story and a dirty deed." ... It is one thing to
dream of slaughter, another in cold blood to carry

it out.

Something in the scent of the ducks roused the
savagery in Billy. It haunted his dreams, and he
brooded over it through the day.

After tea there was an uncanny stillness over
the garden. The very air was affrighted and stood
still. No leaf stirred. Not a breath of wind. A
dark cloud came up from nowhere, and hid the sun.

I knew and yet I did not know. I was afraid,
and yet some mysterious force drew me to the

lake.

The black duck had disappeared, while Guzzling
Jemmy lay in the middle of the lake under Billy's
paws! Lilies were broken, the peat-carpet was
torn and ruckled, every plant in the water was
wrenched from its bed— a scene of carnage and
devastation.

Gorging Jack had been buried alive in the nut-
walk, but had escaped, and was sitting paralysed
with terror in the heather, the most mournful
travesty of a duck that ever I saw.

165

The Happy Garden

The would-be murderer was driven away, beaten
and chained up so that his lust for blood might
pass : the victims were captured and penned up
in their little green house : there was not a fish
to be seen.

No matter : it was the end of the ducks. Fish
or no fish, the one thing needful was peace.

Sentence of punishment was passed, and there
and then the ducks were removed to the further-
most end of the garden : and there they are to
this day, living the ordinary, dull, grubby farm-
yard life of which alone they are worthy :

" The sly, slow Jiours shall not determinate
The dateless limit of their dear exile"

In the upshot, it transpired that their coming
had not been so disastrous as had at first appeared.
Their illicit menu for their two days' stay at the
lake was this :

5,000 tadpoles.
11 gold fish.
1 lizard's tail.

They have been presented with the bill, and
have paid it without a murmur.

Still the desire for beasts is not quenched, and
there are dreams of a stork, or a peacock, or a

1 66

An Alarming Interlude

Bush baby, or perhaps all. . . . Probably they
will never materialise, for the tragic experiment
with the ducks stands as an awful warning : though
I am left wondering how country life can ever be
thought dull, or why peasants ever go to seek
adventure in the towns. Probably because they
are peasants and can live through live-stock
tragedies unmoved, just as human tragedies can
pass over townsfolk without their turning a hair.

It is all a question of nerves, and London has
not left mine strong enough for such raw brutalities,
and I do not easily forget them.

But surely a stork could be trained not to eat
fish ? . . . I wonder.

In my youth I was taught and believed that
my prayers were answered immediately. If I
lost a thimble, I prayed and found it.

Hardly had I uttered a devout wish for a stork
than, having slept on the wish, a heron descended
from the heavens ; and, as usual with the gifts
of heaven, we clipped its wings.

We were at breakfast when the maid appeared
holding in her arms a long-necked, long-legged
creature at which she was gazing in breathless,
fearful pride.

" Good gracious ! " said I. " What is it ? "

I had half forgotten my devout wish.
167

The Happy Garden

" A heron, ma'am," said she.

" Oh, we can't keep it."

Her face fell.

" It will fly away."

" Its wings 've been clipped, 'm."

I was thinking of an infant thrush which we
had found a few days before in the garden and
had given a home in a cage. It sang cheerily for
three days ; sadly for two ; and then it died for
want of company. And I had vowed in future to
avoid all such tragedy. My vow had been put into
practice in the case of a woodpecker which had
been found in a similar plight in the courtyard.
It had aimed at the roof of the study, but, the
wind being too strong for its wings, it had missed
its mark and been carried down to earth, where
it lay cursing and blaspheming. It was taken up
into the woods and left clinging to a tree, and,
for all I know, it has made good use of its liberty.
. . . Among woodpeckers I fancy our reputation
must stand high.

How we stand with the community of the
herons over the road, I do not know. They fly
over the garden, but pay no attention to their
young relative standing solitary by the pond. . . .
And he gives no heed tb them.

For we kept him. There seemed no other
1 68

An Alarming Interlude

course open to us. He had fallen from the heavens
into the garden in his first flight from the nest,
and, by clipping his wings, we had incurred a
certain responsibility for him.
There arose the old problem :
" Heron or fish ? "

His first night was spent miserably enough in
the fruit-garden, where he refused to eat or drink.
He moped and scowled, and scorned the delectable
frogs which were provided for him.

He was .released next morning, and made
straight for the pond. There he was headed off
until the fish could be caught and placed in the
pool under the bridge, and caged in with wire
netting. . . . That done, the whole garden was
placed at his disposal, and for a few days he had a
glorious time frog-hunting. We tried him with
toads, but he despised them. Frogs were his
game, and he was such a mighty hunter that very
soon he had destroyed them and their seed for ever.
The lizards kept well out of his way, and there
was an anxious moment when it seemed as though
we should have nothing wherewith to feed him.
So acute was the crisis brought on by the frog-
famine that there were moments when we were
tempted to remove the wire netting from the pool
and let him loose among the fish ; but, the garden

169

The Happy Garden

being conducted on humanitarian principles, the
temptation was resisted.

Meanwhile, the bird had acquired a taste for
company. He would follow the garden-boy round
while he was weeding, and in the morning, when he
heard our voices, he would come down and stand
on the threshold of the drawing-room window and
gaze at his reflection in the panes. He often stands
there brooding and striking attitudes, like Sir Henry
Irving, and his back view is like that of a pompous
parliamentarian. He never speaks, but he can put
whole worlds of expression into the shrug of his
wing. Sometimes he becomes conscious of his
Japanese effect in the decorative scheme, and
stretches out a wing and a leg, and brings them
round in a wide sweeping gesture. . . . These are
in his soulful moments. When he wants food
he is blunt and direct. He stretches his neck to
its full height and opens his beak.

He has a hard, glittering eye, and for that reason
has been called after a celebrated lawyer, who
• shall be nameless.

Twice a week there arrives food for the dogs
— sheep's head, and certain unprepossessing tit-bits.
When the bird's natural food gave out, he was
tried with these, and, like Oliver Twist, he asked
for more.

170

An Alarming Interlude

He is a lovely bird, and stands three feet high
when his neck is craned, and he has a beautiful
speckled waistcoat of dark-grey and white which
would rouse envy in Bond Street. He sleeps on
the top of a weeping elm at the end of the cherry
walk, which he reaches by scrambling from branch
to branch, and he puts himself to bed regularly
at eight o'clock each evening.

Seeing him eat their food, the dogs have wel-
comed him as a brother, and the cats regard him
with awe and respect. Often in the morning they
are all to be found outside the kitchen door waiting
for scraps ; and sometimes, when one of the dogs
has had an especially fine meaty bone, the bird
has been known to commandeer it with an imperious
peck.

He can fly just enough to reach the rail of the
bridge, and there he will stand for hours together
with his neck low down on his shoulders, brooding.
I think he never dreams of higher flights. He
has flung away ambition.

Is he happy ? Is a bird that cannot fly happy ?
. . . He has more food than he would ever have
in the wild state, and he likes to walk on carpets.
He will come into the house and tread daintily,
caressing the thick pile of the Donegal carpet with
his feet. He follows us about, and has more than

171

The Happy Garden

once evinced a desire to go for the morning walk
with the dogs. . . . Some day I shall allow it.

But is he happy ?

I fancy there are no great domestic ties in heron
families. Children easily forget their parents, and
the bird has probably lost all thought of his kindred
in the tree-tops not half a mile away. . . . And,
then, does not happiness consist in making other
people happy ?

The heron has made me so. He has blotted
out the baleful memory of the livestock tragedy,
and given me the very finishing touch I needed for
my brown garden with its toy river and Chinese
bridge.

He plays a part in life, and beast and man can
ask no more.

172

gardeners
Faith

UL

□ C

This invisible gold docs not
necessarily diminish in spending.
Political economists will do well
some day to ta.ke heed of it,
though they cannot take measure

Unto This last

X

Gardener's Faith

In the industrial centres, children are regarded as
a commercial asset, to be turned to profit as wage-
earners in the years between the day when they
leave school and the day when they marry, and
to provide a pension for their parents when they
are past work. . . . The analogy, like most
analogies, is false. There never arises a point in
the career of a garden when it becomes self-sup-
porting, but after a certain period there does
come a time when waste and mistakes may be
turned to profit. There is probably no corner
which does not contain some plants, or trees, or
shrubs, living in obscurity, and denied their full
effect, and when there is a new scheme toward the
result is infinitely more satisfactory if it be achieved
with materials ready to hand rather than with
costly and rare plants purchased at vast expense,
though, to be quite honest, I am aching to order
from Gauntlett's some of his wonderful and lovely
Japanese trees, etc.

i75

The Happy Garden

As it is, with the peat garden, outside the
cement, a few bulbs, a few lilies, a hundred heaths,
the Adami laburnum, and the catalpa, the expense
was nothing, and four pounds would cover the
" dem total," as Mr. Mantalini would have called
it, and for this " ridiculously small sum " the design
of the garden was accomplished, and, with the toy-
river, the lake, the bridge, the tea-house, and the
succession of flowers, a place of enchantment was
provided — the fantasy and poetry to the prose of the
rest of the garden : just such a garden — in miniature
— as that in which Heine first read " Don Quixote":

" And, as I pronounced every word aloud, being
still unpractised in reading, birds and trees, stream,
and flowers, were able to hear everything, and, as
such innocent creatures, like children, know nothing
of the irony of the world, they too, even as I, took
everything in earnest and wept with me for the
sorrows of the unhappy knight, and an old veteran
oak sobbed, and the waterfall wagged his white
beard the more and seemed to cry out upon the
wickedness of the world. ..."

But, in the brown garden, it is possible to forget
the wickedness of the world, or, rather, to feel that
it is no great matter after all, since, with all the
muddle, and confusion, and meanness, and gossip-
ing, and worrying about other people's business,

176

Gardener's Faith

there is a remarkable amount of good in it, and one
ray of truth, one word of honest friendship can
banish evil and relieve oppression. . . . And I
have told what a brave time Don Quixote has of
it hunting down the villains of romance, and best
of all for him is when he pins to earth all the
imitation Quixotes who have been let loose upon
the world since he laid down his lance, and passed
into the regions of immortality with all the mighty
heroes and warriors who have fought the good
fight of the world's youth and purity :

"Here shall you see
No enemy,
But winter and rough weather . . ."

Winter is no such great enemy neither. There
are red berries on the berberis and the briar hedge :
certain old flowers bloom persistently, and certain
others hurry forward and arrive breathlessly to
announce the coming of the distant army. There
is such shelter that the winter sunbeams are caught,
and those of summer do not all escape. . . .
There is no need to make a costly journey to the
South of France or Italy, for a walk across the
garden is just as good. Two minutes will take you
to Nice, and in ten, you will find, over the hill,
such a sun as you would have to go as far south
as Sorrento to come by.

M 177

The Happy Garden

And for rough weather : rain does but bring
new mystery to the pine-woods, and snow is an
added glory. I have seen the pines in a blizzard
white and black in halves like the old bisected poster
of the "Spider" in "The Silver King," that
villain who was swell by day and ruffianly murderer
by night. . . .

In the cherry-walk on the other side of the
brier hedge are Jane and Elisabeth, and I hear the
severe Fabianish voice declaring that beauty is a
snare and happiness a delusion.

That sort of jargon is intolerable in the cherry-
walk : how the trees and the roses must despise
humanity when they hear it. Jane and Elisabeth
must be brought back into the book for safety.
Heaven knows what they have been up to, or what
sociological proselytising Elisabeth has wrought
among the flowers. . . . Jane is trying to look
unhappy. Good gracious ! " Because you are
virtuous, are there, then, to be no more cakes and
ale ? "

Elisabeth shows a disposition to argue, and
Jane looks scared, for she has a fatal facility in
grasping points of view and is inclined to agree
amicably with both of us — severally. With the
two of us she is torn asunder and her poor little
head begins to ache.

178

Gardener's Faith

I will not argue. They shall be led round the
garden and made to admire and smell every flower
separately, and if Elisabeth becomes restive, she
shall be presented with facts and figures of the
cheapness of it all, and she cannot help but appre-
ciate that.

Economy does not mean thrift. Economy, I
take it, means getting twenty shillingsworth for
every pound, and with skill and knowledge it is
possible to make a sovereign carry the purchasing
power of a five-pound note. The only valid rule
of economy is this : " You cannot both eat your
cake and have it."

Strict observance of this rule puts money in
your purse and leads you almost automatically to
the selection of the right and best sort of cake :
with the result that energy, which is the only real
capital and wealth, is economised and waste is
reduced to a minimum.

" Energy," I find in the dictionary, defined as
" Interest, power, vigour, spirit, life."

When that is considered and digested, it will be
seen that to translate energy into terms of pounds,
shillings and pence, is to go round two sides of a
triangle instead of from point to point. Economy
in money is impossible without economy of energy ;
and here we touch the root of Elisabeth's fallacy,

179

The Happy Garden

From much and overmuch reading of books she has
come to regard people as things definite between the
first word, which is birth, and the last word, which
is death. She shuts her eyes to energy, and drops
the thing for the symbol under a mistaken notion
that she cannot have both. Both are absolutely
necessary. The symbol is useless without the thing,
and the thing cannot be brought into action and
practical existence without the symbol. Elisabeth,
in fact, can only see one side of a thing, one side
only even of a coin.

As an illustration of what I mean, when I had
led them from the cherry-walk to the tree lupins,
and had made Jane sniff their honey-laden scent,
Elisabeth drew herself up very stiffly and waggled
her neck inside her hard linen collar, and said :

" Yes, I know, it is all very well, this old-
fashioned talk about the Sense of Beauty : but
what I want to know is why nothing is ever said
about the Sense of Ugliness ? "

She was delivered into my hands.

" The point is," said I, " that you cannot
have a Sense of Ugliness without a Sense of
Beauty."

Elisabeth made no reply, and Jane sniffed
luxuriously at the tree lupins, and I explained my
theory of economy at greater length.

1 80

Gardener's Faith

In the garden, the whole aim and endeavour is
to get the maximum effect out of the energy of the
flowers, and trees, and plants, and the earth, and
the gardener, and yourself : to get the maximum
effect without exhaustion, so that there is an
infinite reserve to draw upon. Waste of time,
waste of money are as nothing : time and money
are only symbols of energy, which is life, and life,
as Samuel Butler has observed, is an opportunity :
a thing not to be wasted, since there is no certain
knowledge that it will occur again, and it is known
that an opportunity disregarded brings its own
punishment.

Fortunately it is not necessary to digress into
theology to confute Elisabeth. The garden as it
stands is answer enough for her. The garden
as it will be should once for all squash her
desire to reduce all classes to the level of the
derelict class, which has excited her sentimental
pity.

Almost all the plants and shrubs in the brown
garden were transplanted from some other position
in which they were languishing in obscurity. The
rhododendrons were thinned out from those joining
the croquet lawn to the wood, the lupins were
wherever they had seeded themselves, and the iris
were tucked away under the plum tree by the

181

The Happy Garden

garden shed. The cost of the whole thing, was in
detail :

s.

d.

100 Heaths .

. IS

0

50 Lilies .

. 30

0

Catalpa

. 3

6

Laburnum

. 3

6

15 Gold fish

. 4

0

6 Lizards .

. 9

0

£3 8

6

The gold fish were bought to replace those eaten
by the ducks. The tragedy has been kept a close
secret from Hookie's father, and I hope that he
will never know the fate of the greater part of his
generous contribution to the new garden. Wear
and tear and labour do not figure in the account,
for they were a matter of love, and cannot be
translated into terms of money.

The building of the bridge was accomplished
without loss of life, except that of such weeds,
slugs, worms, wire-worms, and grubs as were
unearthed in the process. It forms the main
entrance to the garden, and was opened with
ceremony by the Newfoundland who marched to
and fro across it three times, and in a neat little

182

Gardener's Faith

speech declared it available for public use. It spans
the widest reach of the river, and at night there
is to be seen a romantic vista up to the source
and down to the lake. By day the illusion is not
so potent, and the river has to be taken as a sham

or not at all.

The tea-house is a noble edifice. It is hexa-
gonal :

" In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree . . •

It has a rough conical roof of wood covered in
with tanned felt. Six posts support the roof, and
these are bound together with pine-branches. Up
two of the posts grow wistaria : up two more grow
laburnum, and the other two are held in no
embrace. . . . Outside, facing the bridge, is a
cluster of azaleas, and behind, looking through the
birch avenue, are daphnes, which are almost first
in the field with their mauve-pink blossoms arriv-
ing before their leaves, so that they may be ready
with the scarlet berries against the coming of the

summer.

Inside the tea-house is shade and very little
else : but, of all things in a garden, shade is one
of the most desirable.

The floor is paved with stone, and in the centre,
sunk deep in the earth, is a mighty log of larch

183

The Happy Garden

which serves for table. Deck chairs painted green
mark the tea-house as a human habitation, and,
for cosy untidiness, there are cushions, often a bag
of semolina for the gold fish, and the butterfly net
with which the surface of the pond is skimmed.

Here everybody sleeps. There was a spell cast
on it in the building, and whosoever sits for twenty
minutes in the house, nods, nods, and passes into
the land of dreams. Sweet dreams hover there,
and it is their allurements which entice to sleep.
One who knows has said that we are such stuff
as dreams are made of, and true economy, wasting
nothing, gives liberty to sweet dreams. Every-
thing done right begets a pleasant dream, and every-
thing done wrong produces shocking nightmares.
There may be one or two horrid little nightmares
skulking about the tea-house, but they are so tiny
and so outnumbered by the lovely dreams, that
they can never do more than sit on the top of the
roof and drum with their heels. . . . They and
all evil spirits are scared away by the blue-glass
ball in front of the house, which is neither more
nor less than a Witch's Eye.

(" Fudge ! " says Elisabeth.)

It was bought in the market-place at Cabourg
in Normandy, and is more potent than philtres, and
charms, and pentagrams. All evil spirits, and

184

Gardener's Faith

enchanters, and witches, and dragons, fly shrink-
ing away, because they cannot bear to see their
own images reflected in the shining ball. It gives
a picture of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the
earth. . . . It is really there, because it is very
pretty : for I had no notion of its magic when I
purchased it.

In Russia, I am told, every garden has its
witch's eye, a globe three or four times larger than
mine ; and I am covetous.

In summer nights the tea-house and the bridge
are hung with Japanese lanterns, and then the
spirit of youth comes down, and there is an end
of being grown up, and the most hardened Londoner
becomes a child ; a process which I hold to be the
very be-all and end-all of economy, for that state
of childhood in wisdom is the surest happiness, the
state in which, such as we are, we can look round
on life, and the world, and say that they are very
good, and know that amid all the beauty that is in
earth, and sky, and sea, there is nothing more
wonderful, and lovely, than human lives.

That, dear Elisabeth, is where my economy
leads me : yours is sordid and leads you only to
ghoulish gloating over misery, which, except you
are happy, you can do nothing to combat. . . .
.... Jane has been to sleep. Sweet dreams

185

The Happy Garden

found her, and she dreamed that she was young
again, and everything was tremendously alive, and
trees were in blossom. Blackbirds fluted and out
of the woods there came a lovely creature who sang
a song to which there were no words, for none were
needed. Into Jane's heart the note of the song
sank, and she glowed all over and flew through the
air until she came to a city, and there in the count-
ing-house she found the King counting out his
money. She said : " I love you ! "

He gave her a gold ring and went on counting
out his money, and said : " Now we are married."

Jane was hurt, but, because she loved the King,
she was anxious to do what was best for him, and
so she let him go on counting his money, and said :
" Yes, I suppose we are married."

But the song of the wood-nymph did not die
in her heart, but rang out and out and filled the
counting-house until the roof of it cracked and
let in the sun, and the gold looked dull and vulgar,
and it rolled away into the chinks and crannies of
the floor. At this the King was greatly surprised,
and he looked up, and for the first time in her life
he saw Jane's eyes. Then Jane knew that he had
heard the song that was in her heart, and she
almost choked with happiness when the King set
his golden crown rolling after the sovereigns and

1 86

Gardener's Faith

took out his watch, and looked at the sun, and

said : —

She never heard what he said, but she had
been very happy, for she knew that she had not
waited in vain, and that what she had always
known in her heart of hearts was true. . . .

A lovely dream : but the King is still in his
counting-house, and the brightness fades from
Jane's eyes as the true knowledge in her heart is
crusted over once more with the knowledge of

everyday. •

She has gained something : she has won a
little of the happiness of the garden, and made it
her own.

Another triumph for economy.

187

■Wi*^.C&*tf

uVIi

This is an art whicl
docs mend Nature
- chande it rather:
but the art itself i6

Nature? Tjrr. , , ~ ,
yy/nters I ale.

XI

Sun Rose and Spiraea

Let me confess to direst failure !

Near the bridge in the lawn is a sunk garden
that was once like a sarcophagus. Failure was
written all over it. In the earliest days, to the
right of it was an avenue of apple trees, and in
my inexperience I had a notion of breaking up the
wide expanse of lawn by a sunk garden grown
over with a pergola of roses.

Through one winter the gardener dug and dug
and after many months created a tomb. . . .
Four little steps at one end of it led down to a
wall and a seat. Roses grew and flourished all
over the tomb, but it was useless : it was a failure,
and it remained for years an object of scorn and
derision. Nobody cared to sit in it : nobody could
see in it the first blundering sketch of an idea.
I did not see it myself until circumstances con-
spired to make the idea grow to maturity. . . .
Then, in a flash, it became apparent that I had
never really planned a tomb, but all unconsciously

191

The Happy Garden

had been devising a means by which an Alpine
garden could be introduced without too violently
offending Nature, for there is not a stone within
several miles.

An unnatural and ungeological fissure in the
ground might, in the order of things, reveal a
sudden outcrop of stone, in which to grow sedum
and sun - rose, and saxifrage. And this with a
little persuasion the unnatural fissure did.

At the end by the wall the roses were cut back,
and the ground was dug out and away on either
side to give slopes facing north and south. It was
roughly planned and left to the old gardener, who,
of course, did it all wrong. His notion was that
of a rockery, which is a very different thing from
a rock-garden. He dug his slopes carefully, and
laid his stones here and there in the mould in such
a way that they served no purpose at all. Now,
in building a rock-garden, even where the introduc-
tion of rocks is in flat contradiction to Nature, the
aim is, or should be, to build so that the rocks
support the earth and pockets are left for the
plants. The easiest construction is to build a
rough winding path and steps down the slope, and
on either side of that to erect cliffs in miniature,
in the crannies and crevices of which the earth
will seem to have been left. . . . Strictly speak-

192

STEPS DOWN THE ROCK GARDEN

Sun Rose and Spiraea

ing, it is, of course, a fraud, but between having
alpine plants and having none, I do not think the
most scrupulous person need hesitate : and to have
these lovely things growing in an ill -constructed
place is to make them feel outlandish and unhappy.

I had to obliterate the rockery, and for three
days I toiled to perpetuate the existing fraud upon
Nature, who has been entirely deceived by it. The
result has for three years been the greatest joy in
the garden, and the very pride of the English
spring. The tomb has become a dell.

At the bottom is a little pool, about which ferns
and spiraeas and other water plants grow, and toads
and frogs live in the pool. The tortoise keeps his
lettuce there, and the lizards have been seen
drinking. Its waters are cooler than those of the
river and the lake, and the dogs prefer it when
they are consumed with thirst.

You may enter from the lawn on the north,
or by the bridge on the south, but best of all is to
descend the steps under the roses and walk along
so that the " cliffs " rise above you on either side.
They are much taller than the tallest man and,
therefore, may be called " cliffs " without too wide
a stretch of truth.

Above the pool rises a sheer wall of quite twelve
feet. One side of this is damp, the other is not.
n 193

The Happy Garden

Therefore, one side is rich in arenaria, that lovely
green climbing plant that stretches a mossy sheet
over stones from which, in spring, rise thousands
of little white starry flowers. It grows a-pace, and
six inches of it will in a very short time remove all
reproach of barrenness from a new rock garden.
Six inches was my original stock and now I could
give away a yard or two without noticing it.

Phlox Drummondi vies with the sun-rose in
making large cushions on the stones over which
they fall luxuriantly. I have seven different kinds,
and when in flower they are a sheet of bloom.
Aubrietia of many colours, the double arabis,
androsace, anemone, potentilla, campanula,
Japanese iris, are only a few of the plants that
have made themselves so much at home that it
is with difficulty that room is found for their more
fragile and therefore the more treasured brothers.
There is endless charm to be found in the
sedums, the azaleas, the tiny rhododendrons, sem-
pervivum, the various gentians, and their rival
in colour, lithospermum, whose wonderful blue
is only the more vivid when hanging over a large
stone. At the top of the rock garden giant spiraeas
grow, and beneath them is the osmunda fern,
revelling in the shade, and, in the spring, while
these are still under the ground, bulbs of many

194

Sun Rose and Spiraea

kinds peep in and out of the stones, and one
never knows where next a snowdrop or a scilla
or muscari, may force itself in its desire to
greet the sun. Indeed, so well have the plants
thrived that this year I contemplate enlarging the
rock-garden, so that I shall have room for the new
things that a visit to the flower shows and my
friends' gardens make me cry out to possess.
Every afternoon there is a search for lizards,
which, if they are abroad lie on the rocks above
the cistus. At an unfamiliar or threatening tread
they hurl themselves, regardless of consequences,
into the shrub below. Very often, though, they
will lie quite still while I am planting, or weeding,
or doing some of the many, many needful things
that a garden is always asking for. They are very
good-natured, and generally are " on show " when
required. One is there for Jane and Elisabeth,
the poor wretch whose tail was lost. He lies there
like a broken toy.

Jane moves round to the south side for another
view, and I go down to see if its fellow is anywhere
to be found. Not he !

So I stand with Jane above me on one side and
the stern Elisabeth on the other. It seems to be
an excellent opportunity for settling all differences
between the three of us. Jane shall stand on the

x95

The Happy Garden

south side, Elisabeth on the north, and I will
stand between, down in the pit :

"It matters not Jww strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul."

Henleyism hits Elisabeth hard. It hits her fan-
tastic bureaucracy in the wind and shatters her
dream of an England which is a gigantic work-
house. If they want to tax me out of existence,
and drag me off to the State alms-house they will
have to take my garden too. ... If they destroy
my garden, as it was long ago prophesied that
Demos would destroy everything fair and lovely,
they will be hard put to it to keep me from making
another, toy-river and all, in my cubicle. . . .
Nothing will induce me to wear a uniform, and one
outstanding rebel will sweep away all the drab
schemes of substituting an Inferno of Negation for
the existing slums. . . . My faith is that nothing
but gardens and the atmosphere of gardens can
do away with slums. There is a slum in the soul
of almost everyone, and until those slums are
abolished, there will be no means of doing away
with the black spots of bricks and mortar in the
towns. . . .

" Have you a slum in your soul, Jane ? "
196

Sun Rose and Spiraea

"I . . . I don't know. . . . Perhaps I have."

" Have you a slum in your soul, Elisabeth ? "

" Certainly not ! "

Elisabeth !

Denial is useless. There is certainly a slum in
my own, and I don't believe I am much worse (or
better) than other people.

You have seen all the garden now, and confess
that there is a glimmer of light in your darkness :
confess, Jane, that your code does not seem so
easy to apply as it used to do : and confess, Elisa-
beth, that the reformation of the human race is
not the trifling task you thought it ; confess that,
if your schemes are to succeed, you must first
abolish the human race. . . . What do you say ?

Jane coughs.

Elisabeth plucks at her gloves and clucks in
her throat : " Well ! " she says, " I must admit
that there is something . . . ! "

" Very good," say I, and on that we leave it,
and more or less agree that life is a garden full of
colour and joy if it be tended with humanity and
a due observance of Nature's laws : else, if these
be neglected, and amid unceasing change it be
sought to implant a fixed idea, it becomes a barren
waste. . . . Let that stand for the moral of this,
my Happy Garden. Now we are all happy, or as

197

The Happy Garden

happy as one is permitted to be. We have all
admitted the slums in our souls and smashed the
idol of immaculate perfection which most of us
carry about with our indispensable luggage, and we
can be honest and jolly, and make brave and pre-
posterous plans, and waste no time in trying to
make life different from what it is. As it is, we
must accept it, and in the allotted span make as
beautiful a garden as possible. . . .

It is odd how differently the same thing will
affect different people.

Jane, having succumbed to the Garden Faith,
resigns herself to her conversion, and lies back in a
hammock, feeling really very comfortable, and
goes back to her dream of the King in his Counting-
house.

Elisabeth, on the other hand, smashes her old
ideals, rushes into her new faith, and cannot rest
until she has begun to proselytise.

" I must go ! " she says.

" Not yet," say I.

" Yes ! . . . " she says, and her eyes gleam.
" I must go up to town at once — at ONCE ! — to
tell everybody."

She went.

198

WtlENDIX

Ah,Sprinc? was sent

forlass^lad,

Us now the blood runs

-gold,

$nd man and maid

had best be dlad ,

Before the wond is old .

Jtf Shropshire l^cl

XII

Friendly Flowers

No gardener can be happy, nor can a garden be
successful, while flowers are handled unsympathe-
tically, regarded as no more than so much coloured
material or pigment for the creation of a picture.
The Philistine and the Ungodly will scoff at any
assertion that flowers have souls, and yet until it
is admitted there can be no real or lasting suc-
cess in the garden, and certainly happiness will
wither there.

Darwin no more invented or discovered the
Theory of Evolution than Buffon did, he made it
popular and impressed it on the general imagina-
tion : and yet, so obstinately do old prejudices
and conceits linger and hold currency, that the
plain person who wishes to make an assertion of
faith that smacks of Pantheism, and shows a
reverence for dumb creation, must defend himself
with authority and quote. Therefore, let me take
refuge behind inverted commas (without acknow-
ledgment) :

20 1

The Happy Garden

" The flower has an inner meaning, hopes and
fears that inspire its brief existence, a scheme of
salvation for its species in the struggle for survival
that it has been slowly perfecting with some
insect's help through the ages. It is not a passive
thing to be admired by human eyes, nor does it
waste its sweetness on the desert air. It is a
sentient being, impelled to act intelligently through
the same strong desires that animate us, and
endowed with certain powers differing only in
degree, but not in kind, from those of the animal
creation."

In their love affairs all flowers are perfectly
abandoned, and they glory in it. The bees come
chanting and the tenderest and most frail of them
swoon away. . . . Their shamelessness makes
their charm. Their flaunting colours are in cele-
bration of their nuptials, and all their defiance
makes for innocence. Prose has no measure that
is not too solemn for the brief brilliant life of the
flowers above ground : no doubt under the earth
their days are as unromantic as the humdrum
existence of the average human, and no one has
ever described in lyrics their hibernation or their
early struggles in the spring. Sermons might be
made of them, though, if they were, I doubt if
any flower in the world would ever show its head

202

Friendly Flowers

again, and, fortunately, those who make a trade
of preaching have most often a plentiful lack of
knowledge of the wonders of the world. But we,
whose lives flicker, and glow, and sputter through
sixty years and ten, are very properly grateful for
these other creatures whose real existence is a
matter of days, sometimes of hours. Something
that perhaps we have lost is theirs : much that we
have gained they never know. That there is kin-
ship between us all I have no doubt, for not other-
wise can I explain the delight that everyone of us
can gain from even the humblest flower.

Some flowers there are so joyous that they
invoke a dancing spirit, and it is recorded of
Linnaeus — who was by no means without a sense
of humour — that, when he first saw the gorse in
bloom, he wept. So the first sight of buttercups
and daisies will make a grimy-minded London
child kick and leap and yell. . . . On my south
wall is a blue convolvulous major (ipomcea) that
every day in June hangs out its brilliant trumpets
of a colour so pure, that Jane wept when she saw
it, and Elisabeth was moved, and I surfer always,
for what I feel could only be expressed in verse or
music, and in neither have I any skill. . . . And
it is known how often flowers have helped the
sick to recover, while the red rose has told many

203

The Happy Garden

a true tale of love, and many, many a foolish one.
The joy of blue delphiniums is proof against dull
care, and the peevish boredom of the grey, damp,
English winter vanishes with the first peeping
snowdrop.

The happiness of a garden shall be judged by
the joy of the flowers. Do they grow in great
masses unhampered and untrammelled ? You
shall know that in mind and heart the gardener
was free to feel the loveliness of their glowing life.
Do they grow stiffly, and according to some pattern
formalised by books and convention ? Then the
gardener has felt no kinship with them and his
plot of land has brought him no more delight than
a chess-board. He has been playing a game to
fill idle hours, and the flowers are not in his life,
but outside it, and serve no purpose higher than
that of a spectacle or gallanty show.

Garden and gardener act and react upon each
other, and the tending and cultivation of flowers
is^ as self-revealing, and therefore dangerous to
tackle, as any other art : for it is an art, as even
so respectable a poet as Wordsworth has witnessed :

" Its object, like that of all the liberal arts,
is, or ought to be, to move the affections under the
control of good sense."

My flowers are my friends, and I am loath to
204

Friendly Flowers

cut them, except where it is patently for their
good.

The best kinds of garden roses are not very
happy in my sandy soil, and until this summer
have withstood all my efforts to make them put
forth blooms sufficiently good to repay the labour
and care bestowed on them. They, and I, had
decided to part amicably, when there came a
sudden rapprochement. Without either of us know-
ing how, we suddenly understood each other.
They delighted to blossom in my company, and
I, in return, rushed enthusiastically ahead and
issued invitations to all their relatives and friends,
and distant cousins, who are neither relatives nor
friends, to come and join them.

Ramblers, on the other hand, manage to live
triumphantly, and in two years a Dorothy Perkins
has clothed completely the tall trunk of a dead
apple-tree.

Lilies and all their tribe flourish and wax great.
Delphiniums have prospered, even unto the tenth
generation, and from about twenty roots I have
now anything from two to three hundred, and
every autumn have to cast out a number. So
with larkspurs (the annual delphinium), and monks-
hood, which it is so difficult not to call aconite. . . .
It is pretended in favour of catalogue Latin that

The Happy Garden

it is a sort of shorthand for the classification of
sub-species among gardeners : but my experience
is that it is a vice which may attack even the most
devout lover of flowers. . . . For instance, I my-
self always say Nigella Miss Jekyll, when it would
be infinitely prettier and more appropriate to say
Miss Jekyll 's Love - in - a - Mist, and, when an
enchanting flower has an enchanting name, it is
nothing short of barbarous to say Thalicirum
instead of meadow-rue. This arbitrary Latin is,
no doubt, useful (though at its best it is cumbrous
and jaw-cracking) to professional gardeners, garden
journalists, and those who write severe botanical
primers ; but on the lips of the amateur in the
presence of " the friend from town," it is flat
pedantry. There is a value in the music of a name,
and if a rose by any other name would smell as
sweet, it must lose half its tender charm for the
unlearned who is told that its proper name is
Rosa bracteata or Innocenta Pirola. . . Where,
however, you drop into French, a new charm is
gained, and there is some pride in making the
acquaintance of the Comtesse de Frigneuse, or
Madame de Watteville, while the tenderest senti-
ments must be aroused on an introduction to
Ma Capucine. On the other hand, a drop into
plain English dashes the ardour of the ignoramus

206

Friendly Flowers

who will be disappointed in the presence of Mrs.
W. J. Grant, though his mouth will water at the
prospect of being introduced to Baroness Roth-
schild.

A rose catalogue is great fun, much more enter-
taining than any novel ; it is a liberal education, for
it leads you into every class of society, and stirs
every sentiment from patriotism to greed of gold.
Occasionally, too, one learns something startling
about one's friends; for instance, I read that
Mr. Maurice Hewlett is " large and bright with a
white ring around the centre," and that Lord
Rothschild has " a white eye, covered with yellow
hairs, and is very beautiful and quaint."

And, for romance, consider the ancestry of the
Damask rose. No family in England is older. . . .
" It is a native of Syria (like several old-established
English families), whence it was brought to Europe
about 1270 by Thibault IV., Count of Brie, return-
ing from a Crusade in the Holy Land " ; and what
Byronesque visions are conjured up by the know-
ledge that the scarlet Martagon lily is a native of
Greece and the Ionian Isles ! . . . The flowers
in the humblest garden come from all quarters of
the world, and they bring romance and tales of
derring-do in their train.

Hollyhocks, natives of Southern Europe and the
207

The Happy Garden

East, are so associated with cottage gardens that
they bring only homespun romance. Alas ! In my
garden they will not grow well. They want richer
sandy soil, and nothing that I can do will make it
acceptable to them. They are susceptible to disease
and perish miserably. This year we are making a
supreme effort, and up to now the care bestowed
upon them is meeting its reward. They have been
planted in lines the length of the fruit garden,
where they look like sentinels guarding the fruit ;
but I must confess, I have very little pleasure in
them, or any plant grown like this ; I would have
every flower looking as though it had chosen its
own dwelling-place, and hollyhocks, brilliant against
the background of the pines, are not the same
thing as hollyhocks planted in line along a gravel
path.

Other flowers are difficult, and there was a time
when clematis seemed to present an insolvable pro-
blem. I tried them everywhere, in borders, on walls
facing east, west and south. All in vain. They
grew to about six feet each summer, and then
withered, as though some awful blight had de-
scended on them. ... At last, when I built the
south wall, I planted clematis Jackmanni on the
north side of it, and trained it up to creep into the
sun. That satisfied it, and it has done bravely.

208

Friendly Flowers

In many ways a sandy soil, though it is often
cursed, is an advantage. Given rich soil, many
flowers will be coarse and over-fed, like vulgar
plutocrats : but when there is a struggle for
existence, they put forth a more delicate and finer
growth.

Larkspurs will seed themselves all over the
garden, and columbines, of a frail growth, have a
butterfly poise that is never granted to my rivals,
who swagger about their clay soil.

It means, of course, much top-dressing, and
use of chemical manures. In the autumn, basic
slag is dug in, which is supplemented in the spring
with superphosphates and sulphate of ammonia.
Chalk and clay are already there and a liberal
supply of manure water is frequently given. Soot
also finds its uses, and the grass and yew hedges
soon recover their colour after a dressing of it.
Constant thought and attention has to be expended,
but for the effects aimed at — broad schemes of
colour against the dark background of the woods
— there is very little cause for complaint. And
success is infinitely sweeter if it be won in the
face of difficulties.

With such infinite variety, how shall I choose ?
One day I could swear that of all the flowers, the
lily is the noblest and most satisfying : another day

o 209

The Happy Garden

it is the rose : and then, another day, the giant
asphodel puts out his blossoms, and I could declare
that nothing in all the world was ever half so
beautiful. . . . In the spring, I vow that the apple
trees are unforgettable, and yet, their blossoms are
not a fortnight gone when I remember them no
more.

I tire of splendour and seek intimacy, and then
the cinquefoil is my joy, or I bend over the various
families of rockfoil and mark their doings. . . .
Everything satisfies. Nothing satisfies. Spring is
the most lovely season of the year : then autumn
has that privilege. In summer, it is very certain
that neither can hold a candle to the full glory
of the year. . . . And even, so changing is one's
mood, there are moments when one longs for winter
and heavy skies, and the frozen sun hanging like
a red ball in the sky.

Best of all flowers are those which continue
through the summer, and those which have another
life in autumn : — sweet peas, and roses, and lupins,
and delphiniums. ... All is best, as good as it
can be, and much better than any of us deserve.
To have a real love for the earth, a love uncon-
taminated by books or sentimentality, to rejoice
in the buffeting of the wind, and the beat of the
rain, to delight in the sun and the sailing clouds,

Friendly Flowers

is to possess the rarest of treasures and a secret
which sweeps away all the mists of the brain and
all the confusion of life as in towns we so lament-
ably fail to live it.

Of that hidden treasure, of that secret of happi-
ness, flowers are the outward and visible sign.

21 I

Excuse cl
epilogue, -

Great things are done

when men ^mountains

kmcet,

This is not done hy„

jostling mthe street"

J ° 3/*ke

XIII

Excuse and Epilogue

Turn to the map within the covers of this book. It
conveys an idea of the garden as accurate and inac-
curate as the representation of the British Empire
in the All-Red maps of the Navy League. That is
to say, it leaves out all that matters : but for the
purpose next to hand it will serve.

It represents the garden as it is, a sound basis
for building the garden as it might be. It must
be changed, for, if it does not grow better, it will
certainly grow worse, and the prevention of decay
and deterioration is the point upon which every
gardener's honour is staked. It can never attain
perfection ; but it can and must, year by year,
reach the best possible.

It was 1910 which saw the completion of the rock
garden : 1911 was made memorable by the opening
of the bridge, and the creation of the river and the
peat garden, by the laying down of the brick-court
at the front, and the greater discipline generally im-
posed upon everything in the four acres. . . .

215

The Happy Garden

But, on the whole, it has been little more than a
thorough spring-cleaning ; the real decoration is
yet to be achieved, the final form is still unaccom-
plished. The map must be modified to conform
with the ever-changing plans which crop up, and
lead from one to the other like pieces in a puzzle.
Indeed, a garden is very like a jig-saw, without
any definite design as a guide in fitting the pieces
together. . . . And that is where the fun comes in.

On two sides the garden is to be yet further
taken into the wood. The peat garden is to
become a Japanese garden, and a rough path is
to be cut through the rising ground by the wood ;
and, on high banks, on either side of it, azaleas
and lilies (of the most rare and consequently the
most expensive kinds) are to be planted. This
path will lead to a part of the wood — where already
the trees have been felled to make way for it —
and a real wild garden is to grow up, a garden of
happy flowers, for they will be housed as carefully
and hospitably as friends : and friends they are, to
be welcomed and treated kindly and with reverence,
as all who do truly seek their company come to
understand. So Linnaeus, watching a flower unfold
its petals, said :

" I saw God in His Glory passing near me, and
bowed my head in worship."

216

Excuse and Epilogue

In the wide open space of the wild garden will
be growing some of the nobler of hardy foliage
plants, yuccas, Rodgersia podophylla, Acanthus
Latifolius, kniphofia, Petasites and lupins and
delphiniums and campanulas. From these large
groups a path will wind down through the wood
to the entrance to the lower lawn, carrying with
it bluebells, primroses, anemone Japonica, iris
Siberica, primula Japonica and Cashmeriana, and
the many flowers that will grow naturally in a
wood with plenty of room in which to increase
themselves. There is no end to the lovely wild
things that — as if by magic — will spring up, given
but the smallest encouragement on my part. And
then, on the north, another piece of the wood is
to be taken in to make a tennis-court at the foot
of the heather-ride through the pines. Here again
there shall be a wild garden of as many flowers
as care to grow in it, and perhaps a row of bee-
hives and a place for such strange animals as may
be imported in the future. . . . There, so far as
I know at present — one can never vouch for the
expression that accumulated energy will choose —
structural improvements end. . . .

Even a gardener is an economic entity — ex-
ploded fiction though the economic man may be —
and suffers from fluctuation in the markets, and the

217

The Happy Garden

general uncertainty of income : an affliction so
general that it can be confessed without shame.
The brown garden clamours for rare shrubs, but
the Almighty Purse says :

" No."

Timidly I whisper :

" Just one magnolia ? "

The Almighty Purse is inexorable.

By hook or by crook — and this book is either
a hook or a crook — a magnolia must be procured :
and one solitary magnolia is unthinkable. There
must be at least four, and to keep them company
there must be azaleas, gorgeous masses of them :
and the lake will never really be a lake until it is
surrounded with Japanese maples. . . . There
are catalogues that make the mouth water, and

much trouble has arisen from 's show of

rhododendrons, and the Temple Show sows seeds
of discord every year. Flowers and frocks in the
harm they wreak by their subtle temptation to
extravagance, are as Woman and Man :

" But if all the harm that's been done by men
Were doubled and doubled and doubled again,
And melted and fused into vapour and then
Were squared and raised to the power of ten,
There wouldn't be nearly enough, not near,
To keep a small girj, for the tenth of a year."

And then, the delights and treasures revealed

218

Excuse and Epilogue

by the Japanese Exhibition, stone lanterns, and
wells, and red gates. . . . !

Financially speaking, no gardener should ever
go near the Horticultural Society's Gardens at
Wisley, or to any of the shows, or journey on the
South Western Railway past Messrs. Barr's, or on
the Great Western, by Sutton's, or admit a cata-
logue to her house, or discuss these things with
any other woman who has a garden. . . .

They waken desire, and though scientists assure
us in their delightfully naive way that "desire
results in form," yet that is little consolation when
desire is thwarted and instead of " form," there is
produced only " envy, hatred, malice and all un-
charitableness." To an independent spirit, these
states of mind are intolerable, and, therefore, as
soon as may be, I propose to succumb to all the
aforesaid temptations held out by the various
catalogues, and to purchase magnolias, and
Japanese maples, and all costly and rare herbs:
lilies that toil not nor spin, and yet are more
beautifully arrayed than Solomon in all his glory :
anything and everything that may bring more and
more colour and life to the garden. . . .

For that, and that alone, I have conducted
Jane on her zigzag tour, and, since it is the custom
to apologise for a book, I offer that as my excuse,

219

The Happy Garden

and I venture to think that no better has been put
forward for the production of many better books.
After all, the whole affair grew out of the visit of
John Smith, who, in his automatic altruism, said :

" Ah ! If only Jane were here 1 "

Since all the Janes could not come to the
garden, the garden must be taken to them by
the medium of ink, pen, paper, printing-press,
photographs, book-binding, the publishers and
the booksellers' shops.

In each stage of that elaborate process it is
obvious that much can trickle away, and, in the
end, it is doubtful whether all the Janes will be
in possession of what my garden really is. If they
can divine and grasp to a certain extent what it
is to me, then they will have something that is a
clear gain. ... If, on the other hand, they have
but a blurred impression of colour and a dim
memory of the wind in the pines, then also they
will have gained a little, for the lack of colour and
the sounds of Nature is what the dwellers in towns
do most suffer.

It is difficult for a gardener to realise that there
can be any real satisfaction in reading about a
garden, but I am told that such a state of mind is
common among writers of books, who, when it is
finished, and they have exhausted their impulse,

220

Excuse and Epilogue

lose all interest in it and find it incredible that
there should be found others with a desire to read.
. . . Such a feeling is quite proper with regard
to a book, which, when all is said and done, is but
paper, and ink, and pasteboard, and a deal of
vanity : but a garden — even the most distorted
and maltreated — is a living thing, a vital possession,
and, therefore, to be shared with all who have a
mind to do so, and real friendliness in their hearts.
Towns are but gardens defiled, and those who live
in pure gardens should let all and sundry peep
into them for comfort and delight. . . . First and
last, for foreword and epilogue, I would write with
Montaigne :

" Reader, loe here a well-meaning booke."
On the other hand, I fancy that no one can
write a book without dreaming of Castles in Spain,
and of all the wonderful impossible things that it
is to lead to. . . . There you come to the region
between the dream and the business, in which
words cease to be available and become meaning-
less. When all is told of the garden, what I have
made of it, and what it has made of me, there
remains this hope, that the pleasure won from it
and the lessons learned may be profitable elsewhere
in the world than in my own small parcel of the
earth.

221

The Happy Garden

And now we come to that awkward moment
when the guest has all but outstayed her welcome.

Dear little Jane !

She has been good and patient, and though her
instinct bids her distrust happiness and suspect
beauty, she sighs as she rises from the hammock
where she was left in Chapter XI., and says :

" Oh ! dear ... I have been so happy. . . .
If only John were here ! "

We are both amused at that, but dare not
say anything, and so in silence we walk to the
gate. There we kiss, in silence Jane presses my
hand, and she climbs up into the car and is borne
off up the hill, and away to London.

I think she will come again.

222

APPENDIX

Most of the flowers and plants mentioned in the
foregoing pages have nicer names than those I have
given them. In most cases catalogue names were
used and, to avoid the perpetual awkwardness of
parenthesis, it seemed preferable to me to append a
list of English and Latin names side by side than
to give both in the text.

Acanthus latifolius

Aconite

Ageratum

Alstrozmeria

Anchusa

Antirrhinum

Arabis

Arenaria

Aubrietia

Berberis

Campanula

Ceanothus

Cheiranthus

Chelone Barbarta

Daphne

Delphinium

Eremurus

Bear's Breech

Monkshood

Floss-flower

Peruvian Lily

Arkanet

Snapdragon

Rock Cress

Sandwort

Purple Rock Cress

Barberry

Bellflower

Mountain Sweet

Wallflower

Turtlehead

Garlandflower

Larkspur

Giant Asphodel

223

Appendix

Forsythia

Gaillardia

Gladiolus

Gunncra

Iberis

Kniphofia

Lilhospermum

Lychnis

Megasea

Monarda

Muscari

Nigella

Petasites

Philadelphus

Polygonum

Polenlilla

Pyretlirum

Ribes

Salvia patens

Sedum

Sempervivum

Spirsea

Thalictrum
Verbascum
Veronica
Weigela

Golden Bell

Blanket-flower

Sword Lily

Prickly Bhubarb

Candytuft

Torch Lily

Gromwell

Campion

Saxifrage

Sweet Bergamot

Grape Hyacinth

Love-in-a-Mist

Winter Heliotrope

Mock Orange

Knotweed

Cinquefoil

Feverfew

Flowering Currant

Sage

Stonecrop

Houseleek
I Meadow-sweet
\ Goat's Beard

Meadow Bue

Mullein

Speedwell

Bush Honeysuckle

Printed by Cassell & Co., Limited, La Belle Sauvage, London, E.C.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

Los Angeles
This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.

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