I like to go into the garden these warm latter days, and muse. To muse
is to sit in the sun, and not think of anything. I am not sure but
goodness comes out of people who bask in the sun, as it does out of a
sweet apple roasted before the fire. The late September and October sun
of this latitude is something like the sun of extreme Lower Italy: you
can stand a good deal of it, and apparently soak a winter supply into
the system. If one only could take in his winter fuel in this way! The
next great discovery will, very likely, be the conservation of sunlight.
In the correlation of forces, I look to see the day when the superfluous
sunshine will be utilized; as, for instance, that which has burned up my
celery this year will be converted into a force to work the garden.
This sitting in the sun amid the evidences of a ripe year is the easiest
part of gardening I have experienced. But what a combat has gone on
here! What vegetable passions have run the whole gamut of ambition,
selfishness, greed of place, fruition, satiety, and now rest here in the
truce of exhaustion! What a battle-field, if one may look upon it
so! The corn has lost its ammunition, and stacked arms in a slovenly,
militia sort of style. The ground vines are torn, trampled, and
withered; and the ungathered cucumbers, worthless melons, and golden
squashes lie about like the spent bombs and exploded shells of a
battle-field. So the cannon-balls lay on the sandy plain before Fort
Fisher after the capture. So the great grassy meadow at Munich, any
morning during the October Fest, is strewn with empty beermugs. History
constantly repeats itself. There is a large crop of moral reflections in
my garden, which anybody is at liberty to gather who passes this way.
I have tried to get in anything that offered temptation to sin. There
would be no thieves if there was nothing to steal; and I suppose, in the
thieves' catechism, the provider is as bad as the thief; and, probably,
I am to blame for leaving out a few winter pears, which some predatory
boy carried off on Sunday. At first I was angry, and said I should like
to have caught the urchin in the act; but, on second thought, I was glad
I did not. The interview could not have been pleasant: I shouldn't have
known what to do with him. The chances are, that he would have escaped
away with his pockets full, and jibed at me from a safe distance. And,
if I had got my hands on him, I should have been still more embarrassed.
If I had flogged him, he would have got over it a good deal sooner than
I should. That sort of boy does not mind castigation any more than
he does tearing his trousers in the briers. If I had treated him with
kindness, and conciliated him with grapes, showing him the enormity of
his offense, I suppose he would have come the next night, and taken the
remainder of the grapes. The truth is, that the public morality is lax
on the subject of fruit. If anybody puts arsenic or gunpowder into his
watermelons, he is universally denounced as a stingy old murderer by the
community. A great many people regard growing fruit as lawful prey, who
would not think of breaking into your cellar to take it. I found a man
once in my raspberry-bushes, early in the season, when we were waiting
for a dishful to ripen. Upon inquiring what he was about, he said he was
only eating some; and the operation seemed to be so natural and simple,
that I disliked to disturb him. And I am not very sure that one has a
right to the whole of an abundant crop of fruit until he has gathered
it. At least, in a city garden, one might as well conform his theory to
the practice of the community.
As for children (and it sometimes looks as if the chief products of
my garden were small boys and hens), it is admitted that they are
barbarians. There is no exception among them to this condition of
barbarism. This is not to say that they are not attractive; for they
have the virtues as well as the vices of a primitive people. It is held
by some naturalists that the child is only a zoophyte, with a stomach,
and feelers radiating from it in search of something to fill it. It is
true that a child is always hungry all over: but he is also curious
all over; and his curiosity is excited about as early as his hunger. He
immediately begins to put out his moral feelers into the unknown and the
infinite to discover what sort of an existence this is into which he has
come. His imagination is quite as hungry as his stomach. And again and
again it is stronger than his other appetites. You can easily engage
his imagination in a story which will make him forget his dinner. He
is credulous and superstitious, and open to all wonder. In this, he is
exactly like the savage races. Both gorge themselves on the marvelous;
and all the unknown is marvelous to them. I know the general impression
is that children must be governed through their stomachs. I think they
can be controlled quite as well through their curiosity; that being the
more craving and imperious of the two. I have seen children follow about
a person who told them stories, and interested them with his charming
talk, as greedily as if his pockets had been full of bon-bons.
Perhaps this fact has no practical relation to gardening; but it occurs
to me that, if I should paper the outside of my high board fence with
the leaves of “The Arabian Nights,” it would afford me a good deal of
protection,--more, in fact, than spikes in the top, which tear trousers
and encourage profanity, but do not save much fruit. A spiked fence is
a challenge to any boy of spirit. But if the fence were papered with
fairy-tales, would he not stop to read them until it was too late for
him to climb into the garden? I don't know. Human nature is vicious. The
boy might regard the picture of the garden of the Hesperides only as
an advertisement of what was over the fence. I begin to find that the
problem of raising fruit is nothing to that of getting it after it has
matured. So long as the law, just in many respects, is in force against
shooting birds and small boys, the gardener may sow in tears and reap in
vain.
The power of a boy is, to me, something fearful. Consider what he can
do. You buy and set out a choice pear-tree; you enrich the earth for
it; you train and trim it, and vanquish the borer, and watch its slow
growth. At length it rewards your care by producing two or three pears,
which you cut up and divide in the family, declaring the flavor of the
bit you eat to be something extraordinary. The next year, the little
tree blossoms full, and sets well; and in the autumn has on its slender,
drooping limbs half a bushel of fruit, daily growing more delicious in
the sun. You show it to your friends, reading to them the French name,
which you can never remember, on the label; and you take an honest pride
in the successful fruit of long care. That night your pears shall be
required of you by a boy! Along comes an irresponsible urchin, who has
not been growing much longer than the tree, with not twenty-five cents
worth of clothing on him, and in five minutes takes off every pear, and
retires into safe obscurity. In five minutes the remorseless boy has
undone your work of years, and with the easy nonchalance, I doubt not,
of any agent of fate, in whose path nothing is sacred or safe.
And it is not of much consequence. The boy goes on his way,--to
Congress, or to State Prison: in either place he will be accused of
stealing, perhaps wrongfully. You learn, in time, that it is better to
have had pears and lost them than not to have had pears at all. You
come to know that the least (and rarest) part of the pleasure of raising
fruit is the vulgar eating it. You recall your delight in conversing
with the nurseryman, and looking at his illustrated catalogues, where
all the pears are drawn perfect in form, and of extra size, and at that
exact moment between ripeness and decay which it is so impossible to
hit in practice. Fruit cannot be raised on this earth to taste as you
imagine those pears would taste. For years you have this pleasure,
unalloyed by any disenchanting reality. How you watch the tender twigs
in spring, and the freshly forming bark, hovering about the healthy
growing tree with your pruning-knife many a sunny morning! That is
happiness. Then, if you know it, you are drinking the very wine of life;
and when the sweet juices of the earth mount the limbs, and flow down
the tender stem, ripening and reddening the pendent fruit, you feel that
you somehow stand at the source of things, and have no unimportant share
in the processes of Nature. Enter at this moment boy the destroyer,
whose office is that of preserver as well; for, though he removes the
fruit from your sight, it remains in your memory immortally ripe
and desirable. The gardener needs all these consolations of a high
philosophy.