We often say to one another that it is impossible that we can have been
only two years and a half in possession here, so greatly has the scene
changed in that time. Those two and a half years have done the work of
many, or so it appears to us in our innocent vanity. Where I am now
sitting three years ago stacks of raw planking rose out of the trampled
briers and bluebells. The house stood roofed, but the inside was
horrible. The reign of the Hammerer had spread to every creature with
ears. Even in my own little nursery-garden--chosen in the first instance
as the most remote spot--the sound of it went far to extinguish the
nightingales. Now quietude and a sense of comparative settlement has
stolen over the scene. Indoors, when the windows are open, the birds
have it all their own way. Outdoors there is still much to be done, much
to be harmonised and regulated, but the first sense of newness and
desecration has, I think, wholly passed away. This then seems to be an
appropriate moment for inaugurating a sort of running commentary upon
the garden and its surroundings; setting forth what the spade has
already done, and what the spade has still to do; what we possess in the
way of plants, and what we still visibly lack; laying bare above all our
failures and blunderings in the clearest of colours, with an eye, it is
to be hoped, to their rectification. Such a record, honestly kept, must
be a highly improving one to look back upon. A man’s proper
shortcomings, writ out fair in black and white, should contain very
edifying reading for that man himself, whatever it might be for anyone
else. The worst is that, like other amended sinners, we may come to burn
in time with the zeal of the missionary. Not content with our own
private flagellations and exhortations, we may sigh to exhort and to
flagellate others. Hence doubtless, that vast and increasing host of
garden books, which so greatly decorate our bookshelves.
Yet after all a garden is a world in miniature, and, like the world, has
a claim to be represented by many minds, surveying it from many sides.
If it takes all sorts to make a world, it must take a good many
varieties of gardeners to exhaust the subject of gardening. Assuming the
said gardener to be of the right sort, naturally we accept his
exhortations thankfully. Assuming him even not to be quite of the right
sort--a mere harmless fumbler and bungler--still ’twere rash to assume
that he can teach us nothing. Just as every garden--every real garden,
owned by its owner--provides lessons for other garden owners, so even
the written equivalent of such gardens, as long as they are genuine
ones, not bits of confectionery tossed up to look pretty on tables, may
claim the same praise. So frequently has this of late been brought home
to me by experience that, give me only a writer who has faithfully
toiled with his own spade, her own trowel, and I am ready to accept a
new book at his or her hands every week in the year!