strewing the path with big clumps of roots in which a careful hand had
stuck a label.
I was divided between joy and reproof.
"How kind of her! But you should not have bothered her. How nice to
have such big, ready-grown plants! But why did you do it?"
"Mayn't I help the garden to grow? My mother promises more in the
autumn; it appears flowers like to move just before winter."
"It is kind of you. This border is such a weight on my mind. It needs
so much, I think. And what a lot the hamper holds!"
"Let me do the dirty work," cried the Young Man, as I hauled out a big
root. "You shall tell me where to plant them."
"The earth isn't dirty, it is beautifully, healthily clean; and don't
you love its 'most excellent cordial smell'? Shall I get Griggs and a
spade?"
"Oh, why bother Griggs? Won't I do as well? I know nearly as much and
am twice as willing."
"Yes, but think of--"
"Don't say parish. There is only old Mrs Gunnet and she will keep.
These plants demand immediate attention. My mother was most emphatic
about that."
It is very difficult to have a conscience as well as a garden and to
keep both in good working order. I could not think Mrs Gunnet and her
rheumatism as important as my garden; moreover, I felt I was carrying
out the teaching of Tolstoy in bringing man and his Mother Earth into
direct contact.
"Griggs could not come anyhow, he is digging a grave," I said
conclusively. "Let us do it."
So the Young Man fetched a selection of gardening implements and we
both set to work, he to dig and I to instruct.
"This is delphinium," I cried joyfully, handing him a big clump, "dark
blue, I want it badly." And in answer to an inquiring look, for the
Young Man knew less, much less, than I did, "That is larkspur and it is
a perennial, and this jolly big root means plenty of spikes."
"Spikes!" he echoed, patting the roots vigorously.
"Those tall spikes of flowers, you know, very blue. One looks so lonely
all by itself."
"Ah! that is a way we all have, we poor solitary ones."
"These are penstemons. They are, well, I forget, but I know I want
them. Suppose we put them further forward; they don't look like growing
so tall. Gaillardias, ah! I know, they are brilliant and effective. I
bought some seeds to suit the others. These will save time. Now, a big
hole; this is Tritoma. What on earth is that? I have heard. Grandis
means big but Tritoma?"
We both studied the label.
"Must it have another name? Is that the rule? I told my mother the
gardener was an Ignoramus. She might have written in the vulgar tongue."
"Did you mean me or Griggs?"
"Griggs, of course."
"Then you were wrong. But I remember now, I was studying its picture
this morning in the catalogue. Tritoma stands for red-hot poker. It
will look fine at the back."
"Well, you are getting on," said the Young Man, in tones of admiration.
"But why won't they say 'poker' and have done with it?"
"I wish they would. It is very trying of them. See what a lot you are
learning. This is much more improving for a son of Adam than visiting
old women and babies."
"_Much!_ And I like it much better, which shows it is good for me."
"Ah, I don't know about that. Still, it does strike me as absurd to
send a young man fresh from college to visit old women and babies. I
can't think what you say to them."
"I say 'Did ums was ums' to the babies. But I am not quite fresh from
college, you know. I talk some kind of sense to the mothers; at least,
I hope so."
He was making a big hole and I was holding out a big root to fill it.
"This is galega. It is rather tall and so must go at the back. I don't
mean you never talk sense, though I consider it insulting to address
a baby like that. They look so preternaturally grave that Greek would
suit them better. But I mean it isn't a man's work, it is a woman's."
"Galega! that means pok--no, larkspur! You see I am getting quite
learned. There, it fits in beautifully."
"Press the roots firmly or they don't take hold," I observed.
"So. I always find your conversation very improving. My mother says the
same things to me, I mean about old women."
I had walked down the path for another root. He went on when I came
back,
"But you know the old women, and young ones too, like a visit from
their clergy. The clergyman and doctor are great boons in their lives."
"Poor souls, I know they are very hard up. Even I am considered a boon,
especially when I go round with puddings and things."
"Or without!" and he looked up quickly, "_I_ should think so
if--but"--and his voice changed--"I do understand what you mean. _This_
is Adam's work, eh? Only the other is the vineyard too, and we, I--I
mean, need the experience it gives me. They live at the root of things,
touch life so nearly. It is something like coming in touch, actual
touch, with the brown earth. Do you see what I am trying to say?"
I looked up at him from my plants, at this tall young man in a
bicycling suit of semi-clerical cut, with his keen face and earnest
eyes, whom we had fallen into the way of treating in almost brotherly
fashion since his Reverence had adopted him as his Young Man as well
as curate. He had broken down in some Midland town from overwork and
come to Fairleigh to recruit and study and fill in a convalescent time.
As a rule we did not like the curates.
"I think you are right," I said, "but somehow I feel I am right too
in a way. One can't be saving souls all the time--one's own or other
people's--and here, as you say, is Adam's work, the brown earth."
He laughed. "And here is Eve naming the flowers! I am sure Eve kept
Adam to the digging while she picked the fruit."
"How men do love that old allegory! Personally I don't think they come
out of it so well that they need quote it so often. However, as it
gives them all the backbone, I feel quite absolved when I ask them to
use it!"
The Young Man rose up. "Ah! if Eve had had the spirit of her daughters!"
"Here is a very large phlox, please dig that hole bigger," I
interrupted, and as we carefully placed it in position, down the path
came his Reverence and the Master.
"Oh!" I shouted, "come and see all my new arrivals; I am going to cut
you out!"
The Master examined our work over his spectacles, and looked up and
down the border critically, ending his survey with an unpromising
"Humph."
Something was very wrong, evidently. My hopeful spirits sank.
"Have we been doing anything very ignorant? Don't you put plants
straight into the earth? Will they all die?"
The Master laughed.
"Let us hope things are not as desperate as all that. I was looking at
your border. Oh, what pauper fare! and what a lot of rubbish in it.
Licence has reigned here for many a long year."
"For over twenty," I exclaimed savagely. "Griggs has been here quite
that time."
"It used to look very well in Mr Wood's time, but that is many years
ago, and he devoted himself chiefly to his roses. It is a pity you did
not do it in the autumn."
"Oh, don't, Master!" I cried dolefully. "Nothing is more trying to my
temper than to be told of all the things that ought to have been done
months and years ago. I can't go back and do them!"
"No more you can. There is a great deal of sound sense in that remark,
only--"
"And don't tell me to wait until the autumn again. I can't always be
waiting for the other end of the year to do the things I want done now."
"Oh! then let us go forward at once," said the Master.
"What shall I do?" asked the Young Man, with as much energy as though
the afternoon were just beginning. "Shall I take out the roots we have
put in to begin with?"
The Master again looked up and down, and I could see he was again
regretting the autumn.
"If you won't wait it must be done," he said at last. "Have this border
thoroughly well turned over, two feet deep at the least, and work in
some of that savoury heap I saw in your little yard. You will find a
good deal of root to cut away from those trees; they take the food from
this border, but that can't be helped now. Then clear out the weeds and
those terrible marigolds I see springing up everywhere, and those poppy
seedlings. I think your new friends will have a better chance when that
is done."
"And the plants that are to stay, may they be touched?"
"You _must_ touch them, but do a piece at a time, and lift them in and
out with a good ball of earth round the roots so as to disturb them as
little as possible. Press them well in afterwards and water."
"Should Griggs put some of the savoury heap just round their roots?"
"No, no, let the whole border have a dressing. Later on any special
plant may be mulched if it is needed."
"Mulched!" said the Young Man, turning to me. "Do you know what that
is?"
I shook an ignorant head.
"Something to do with manure, I believe, but I don't know what."
"Griggs will show you," laughed the Master.
"No, he has his own vocabulary. I try the garden book words on him
occasionally and he looks quite blank."
"It is giving the plants a little extra food from the surface. So
it sinks gradually in or the rain carries it down with it. A gentle
process and the roots are not disturbed. The other process may produce
indigestion, you see."
Adam and Eve carefully replaced the unplanted roots in the hamper and
gave a sigh.
"Oh, dear! All our work. You might as well have gone to see Mrs Gunnet."
"Oh, no," said Adam, "because I have learnt a great deal and can help
you another time."
It was a good thing for me and the border that the Master had looked so
grave over it, for his Reverence was duly impressed with the necessity
of the case, and Griggs and a helpful stranger were hard at work next
day and the next, and by the end of that week the border lay smooth
and brown and neat with hopeful green patches at intervals. Jim and
I and the Young Man had been very busy arranging those patches, and I
hoped the front plants would not grow taller than the back, but a good
deal had been left to luck. The evening primroses and marigolds and
weeds had disappeared, I hoped for good. Time proved that this was too
hopeful a view to take of weeds.
And I will never forget the Master's parting injunction.
"Mind," with raised finger, "you ought never to take a spade near
your herbaceous border, only turn it over with a little fork, for the
well-established roots should not be disturbed. And good soil and
sufficient water ought to be enough as a rule. To-day we have been
dealing with an exceptional case, remember that!"
Oh! Master, yes. Mine is an exceptional case; but I guess there are
many would-be gardeners as ignorant, and, maybe, many gardens as
exceptional.
* * * * *
But to return to my hopefully-growing seeds. I fear they were being
left anyway rather longer than was judicious, for one day about the
beginning of April it struck me my wooden boxes were very full and the
plantlets growing very leggy.
"Why is that?" I asked Griggs. I hated asking Griggs, but there was
no one else to ask. After all it seemed _impossible_ but that Griggs,
during the forty odd years he had pretended to be a gardener, should
not have gathered together some scraps of information concerning plants
and their ways.
"They wants pricking out, that's why they're so spindle-shankey.
'Tain't no good asking me for more boxes, I ain't got no more; and you
can't put 'em out in the open neither--leastways, they'll die if you
do."
"Of course not," I said with all the knowledge I possessed in my tone.
"But we must have boxes. They can be knocked up, can't they?"
"Not without wood, they can't. And just look at all them seeds wot
you've sowed. Why, they wants a sight o' boxes now."
It was a dilemma, but Jim revived my faint spirits.
There were boxes--old winecases--in the cellar, he said. Jim knew
every nook and cranny of the house; he would just ferret them out; no
one would miss them. Jim never asked leave, for experience had taught
him that a demand occasions a curious rise in the value of an article
absolutely unknown to the possessor before it was required by someone
else. And Griggs knocked them together, for Jim explained we had to let
the fellow try his hand occasionally.
We filled the new boxes with a little heavier diet than the baby seeds
had enjoyed, good mould from under some shrubbery, and then carefully
separated each stem; and carrying out Nature's law of the survival of
the fittest, I placed the most promising in the new environment.
I had done one whole box, it looked so neat, the little upright shoots
all about three inches apart, when Jim and the Young Man came round.
He had been away for a few days and was quite anxious to know how my
garden grew.
He had altered the old rhyme with which, of course, his Reverence and
the Others were always pestering me; but I don't think his version was
very original either--
"How does the garden so contrairy
Get on with its new Mistress Mary?"
I was seated on the corner of the one frame and the boxes were
precariously placed on the edge.
The Young Man's face beamed. "I have been learning to prick out; now,
let me see."
And to my horror he began to pull up my neat little plants.
"There, that's wrong, and that and that. No, that stands; but see, all
these are wrong."
I gasped, "What are you doing? Do you call that pricking out? I don't."
"By Jove! you'll catch it now, my dear fellow," said Jim.
"Oh! don't you see it's all right to do that, because it shows you you
have done them all wrong."
"I think you have misunderstood the idea of 'pricking out,'" I said
coldly.
The Young Man was so full of information he paid no attention to my
offended dignity or Jim's mirth.
"I learnt it on purpose to show you. I planted a box full at home and
the gardener came round and did that to my plants. I nearly whacked him
on the head."
"You're a parson," interrupted Jim, "you've got to think of that."
"I know, Jim. I managed to bottle my feelings nearly as well as
Mistress Mary did just now. I know what she is feeling."
But I was still dignified.
"Now will you tell me," I began.
"Oh, it's a first-rate dodge! You see, if they are firmly put in they
will stand that little pull, and if not it shows you ought to have
wedged them in better."
"Why," said Jim, "I bet I could tug out any you could wedge in."
"That's the art; you must wedge right and tug just enough."
"And why," I asked again, "why this tugging and this wedging?"
"Oh, because otherwise they don't catch hold properly and make
themselves at home. I didn't mean to spoil your neat box," he continued
penitently. "May I help you?"
"Why, of course you must," I said, brightening up. "Look at all that
has to be done. Jim, dear, fill those boxes nicely with mould, a
judicious mixture of looseness and compression."
"I've other fish to fry this afternoon. If his Reverence's Young Man
will do some beastly algebra for me I will stay and mess about with
you; if not, he has got to do the messing."
And so Jim deserted us, and we planted and pulled at each other's
boxes, and I certainly tried to get some of his out. And then the fresh
difficulty faced us where to put all these new boxes, for they had to
be protected from the still frosty nights, and also from any too heavy
rains which might, perchance, drown them. I wanted much more room than
the one frame afforded, even could I turn out all the scraggy geraniums.
"They must be protected somehow," I said despondingly, "and we can't
carry them in and out of doors, and oh! how heavy even these little
boxes are. There's the verandah, but the Others will never let me crowd
them out with these boxes. It is just getting sunny out there. What can
we do?"
The Young Man looked round and thought, and thought, and then it came,
an idea worth patenting.
"You don't want heat for them?"
"Oh, no, they ought to be hardened, you see."
"And it's only at night, or against heavy rains, that they want
protecting?"
"That's all."
"Well, then, I have it!" And he had it, the germ of the brilliant idea
that, with Jim's assistance and mine, and Griggs's for actual manual
labour, gradually evolved into an impromptu frame and saved us even
the making of new boxes.
This was the plan of action.
We cleared a space in the little yard where the frame lived, and the
manure heap in one corner, and one sunny border which held lettuce and
I intended should hold my plantlets later on. We made first a bed of
cinders (this for drainage), then a layer of manure (this for heat),
then good mould, and all were enclosed with four strong planks, and in
this protected spot we pricked out our nurslings. At night they were
covered with a plank or two and some sacking, and this also protected
them during any very heavy rains, until they grew strong enough to
weather them. The boxes already pricked out we protected in like
manner, only making no special bed for them.
It became truly a delight to see how day by day those tiny sprigs of
green grew and prospered, and to watch the development of the various
leaves. The pretty crinkly little round leaves of the polyanthus, the
neat spiky twig of the marigold and tagetes, the sturdy, even-growing
antirrhinum with pale green stalks for white, and yellow and rich
brown for the red variety, and the trim, three-cornered leaves of the
nasturtium, each after its kind, very wonderful when we realise all
that potentiality enclosed in a pin's point of a seed, and needing no
difference of treatment to produce either zinnia or lobelia.
I made all the Others, and everyone else too, walk round my nursery and
dilated on the promising appearance of my children.
"Wonderfully neat! but how tiny they all are. Do you mean to say you
expect those little things to flower this year? Why, it is like asking
a baby of six months old to ride a bicycle!" said one of the Others.
"But they are annuals! In comparison they are now twenty years old! Of
course they will flower this year, and be old and done for by October."
"Well, you are _very_ hopeful, but _I_ don't expect much result _this_
year."
"You will see!"
"Well, we have not seen much yet, have we?"
* * * * *
The packets containing my biennial seeds, which, of course, means such
seeds as sown one year furnish plants for the next year's flowering and
then go the way of all "grass," instructed me to sow in the open from
March or April to June.
From what I have so far learned I would certainly advise sowing as
early as possible and not taking June into consideration at all. The
little plants get forward before the really hot weather begins, and
usually the clouds supply sufficient water at that time; but if not, on
no account must they go thirsty. I found watering a great necessity,
for my ground is as porous as a sieve; a substratum of nice cool
tenacious clay must be a great boon to those who happily have it. I
suppose it may have some drawbacks, but my imagination is not lively
enough to suggest any. Being light and poor, I usually doctored the
soil before sowing the seeds. I believe it ought not to be really
necessary; but a little manure mixed with leaf mould and some earth
from a convenient shrubbery or background place, and all dug well in,
was approved of by the plantlets. If by any chance you can lay aside,
from hedgerows, corners of field or other prigable parts, some rolls
of turf and let it stand aside until it rots, it makes most helpful
dressing, particularly for rose roots.
After the ground is ready make little straight trenches about one inch
deep, and thinly, because they are certain anyway to be too close,
scatter in your seeds. There for the present your work ends, and Mother
Earth commences her never-ending miracle of death and resurrection.
"Thou sowest not that body which shall be, but bare grain, it may
chance of wheat or some other grain," and "that which thou sowest is
not quickened except it die," when, "God giveth it a body, to every
seed his own body."
Those little brown pin points, of which you hold hundreds in a pinch on
your palm, each one has its "celestial" body ready to spring into life
through the dark gateway of death. Surely St Paul must have had his
garden as a little boy, and sown his seeds, and marvelled, even as Jim
and I did, with eyes opening to the wonder of it all. A wonder that is
passed over in the matter-of-course way of the daily round, but that
startles one, almost as a revelation, when one's own hand holds the
seed, sows it, and then watches for the result.
To say it is just "life" or the "force of nature" or "the energy
that is behind all things," these are but words, the marvel remains.
Irresistibly the thought arises, "With what body shall _we_ come?" Not
with the old earth body for sure, if my seeds are to teach me anything.
So I sowed first the forget-me-nots, as this year they must come from
seed. Another year I will take the little shoots that are round the old
plant and, separating them, will prick them out in a nursery spot, and
so shall my plants for the following year be more mature, stronger,
and therefore better flowering; a first year's forget-me-nots are apt
to be straggling. Then the sweet-Williams, the wallflowers, red and
gold, Canterbury bells, silene, the little bright pink edging that
with forget-me-nots makes a border so gay in spring time, these were
my first year's venture in biennials; for though some of them may
be considered perennials, the best results may be hoped for from a
continuously fresh store.
The big sunflower seeds I placed just where I wanted them to come up,
sometimes a single one, so that the plant should have all its own way,
and wear as big a head as it knew how, and others in groups of four or
five.
Nasturtiums also I placed as a border to a lonely shrubbery. Some of
the seeds had been got forward in the impromptu frame, but those were
for my tree stumps and for creeping up the verandah. Canariensis the
same; the convolvulus also were planted freely to cover up deficiencies
wherever a creeping thing could grow.
It is wise to sow your perennial seeds early; they get settled in life
before they are called upon to face their first winter. So in another
spot, judiciously cribbed from cabbage-room--crib I had to for my
nursery ground--I sowed in like fashion the perennials, those which
had not already begun their career in wooden boxes and frame. There
were the big Oriental poppies, red and orange, for my impatience had so
far succumbed to the gardening spirit that I could bear to contemplate
sowing seeds with the hope of no immediate return, Brompton stocks,
penstemons, foxgloves and gaillardias; campanulas, too, short and tall,
white and blue; and those already started in boxes, the polyanthus
and columbines, nice sturdy little plants by now, were moved to this
division a little later, when frosty nights were a thing of the past.
These for my first batch of perennials; others would surely follow with
succeeding years. The thought of their permanence delighted me. Dear,
nice things! they would not need sowing year by year, but would yearly
grow more and more "in favour with God and man." So I hoped, even as a
mother hopes it for her children.
That long herbaceous border should one day be full of good stuff, one
day blooming with a succession of flowers; but face the fact, one day
is not to-morrow. The plants must grow; so, patience, patience, though
mine was threadbare.
* * * * *
My other nursery of annuals sown in early March were growing apace and
the sweet peas needed sticking. It certainly spoils their appearance
for a time but is very necessary. I noticed all my seedlings growing in
bits of kitchen garden filched from his Reverence's province grew with
greater vigour than those down my own borders.
I suspected that amongst much neglect the vegetable ground had suffered
least, and so, in spite of his Reverence's outcry that I was robbing
him of at least a sack of potatoes, I continued to make little inroads
on his property. And thus I was brought in contact with the fruit-trees
bordering the pathways. They had been renewed, many of them, when first
his Reverence came to Fairleigh. They looked healthy enough, but very
few blossoms and no fruit ever accounted for their existence. I pointed
this out to his Reverence, and, full of newly-acquired knowledge, asked
him if he had heard of tap-roots. "Griggs planted them, so you may
depend that is what is the matter with them, and in the autumn we will
have them up."
"You are poaching," said his Reverence.
"You ought to be full of gratitude, but I can't take them in hand
myself, I only give you some of my overflowing knowledge. And we should
all like to eat our own apples and pears!"