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