Our indefatigable old Cuttle has just come to tell me that the new
water-lily pond leaks, and that I must send for the bricklayer, in order
to upbraid him. I am sometimes asked whether Cuttle is our gardener, and
am always rather at a loss what to answer. Hardly, I suppose, seeing
that he declines to take much notice of any of our flowers, with the
exception of the roses, for which he has a passion. When he came to us
three years ago it was merely “on job” from the builders. Our grounds,
as grounds, had not then begun to exist. Cuttle stuck the first spade
into them then and there, and from that minute their existence began.
Since then he has grown to be more and more intimately identified with
them, and that to such an extent that I find it difficult now to
disentangle the one from the other. Followed by his obedient satellite
and shadow, he ranges at large over all that lies between their
holly-guarded boundaries. His spade, pick, axe, billhook are masters of
all that come within their reach. Walks, and shrubberies, lawn, and
flower-beds began within a short time of his appearance to emerge as if
by magic out of their primal chaos. Order grew out of disorder; symmetry
to be evolved, and light to break in upon the very duskiest of our
entanglements. We have a habit of telling our friends that we ourselves
“made” these grounds, but our part in the process has in reality been
chiefly to sit still, and point our wands. It is Cuttle, Cuttle alone,
who has been their real creator.
For sheer, beaver-like, apparently instinctive industry I have never in
my life known his equal. For rooted self-opinionatedness not, I must
add, very often. How he contrives to get through the amount of work he
achieves in the course of every day, still more how he induces his
subordinates to do the same, remains a perennial marvel to me.
Possibly--seeing that my gardening experiences have hitherto lain a long
way to the west of Surrey--my standard as regards manual labour is not
of the highest. That our Cuttle is a typical Surrey labourer I decline
however to believe, though theoretically that, and nothing loftier, is
his status. Early in our acquaintance he discovered my ingenuous
surprise over his prowess. Far from this suggesting to him that less
activity would serve the turn, it seems to have only spurred him on to
fresh and ever fresh assaults upon my astonishment. That there have now
and then been inconveniences in this excess of energy I am free to
confess, but that is hardly Cuttle’s fault. If, for instance, I remark
that such or such new work had better be begun next week, my remark is
usually received by him in apparently unheeding silence. Next day
however, when I return to the charge, I am told with a smile of pity
that the work in question is already done. As I have just hinted this
sometimes places me in a position of some little embarrassment.
Naturally the work produced at such high pressure rather represents
Cuttle’s ideal of what it ought to be than mine. To show anything but
delighted surprise would be to prove oneself utterly unworthy of such
devoted service, and it is only therefore by degrees, and in the most
circuitous and disingenuous fashion, that I am able little by little to
reinstate my own ideas upon the more or less mutilated ruins of his.
In these early days of September, we stand once more at a new parting of
the ways. Within the next six weeks all the essential part of what we
hope to see accomplished by next summer must be at all events prepared,
or it will be too late. Three chief undertakings at present engage our
energies. First there is the new little water-lily pond, and its outer
environment of bog. Secondly there is the “glade,” which, beginning at
the upper portion of the copse near the house, runs somewhat steeply
downhill to its lower end. Thirdly there is the “long” grass walk, which
passing first along the last named, is eventually to traverse the whole
of the lower portion of the copse, a distance of some six hundred yards,
crossing as it does so the region of the tallest bracken, emerging for a
while upon a gravel walk, which skirts the fence of our nursery-garden,
thence, through another stretch of copse, and between two tall heather
banks, into a fresh tract of birches and sweet chestnuts, till it
finally attains the gate opening out upon the little common at the top.
One somewhat serious problem underlies these, as indeed all similar
little enterprises. How far, one asks oneself, may the natural
conformation of any given piece of ground be legitimately modified?--the
most difficult, in my opinion, of the many small problems which confront
the gardener. The lamentable declivities, the yet more terrible
acclivities, which abound in a certain type of garden we all know;
objects calculated to bring the blush of embarrassment to all but a
hardened visitor’s cheek. Like other adornments it is less their
artificiality than their deplorable lack of Art that so distresses us.
These indeed are sad warnings, and, remembering them, it is well to
misdoubt our own judgment, and to ask ourselves whether it were not
better to abstain altogether from any attempts at modification, which
might lead to results so humiliating and so disastrous?
There are however more encouraging omens. Anyone who has observed how
casual, how purely accidental are many of the natural variations of
surface which nevertheless give us pleasure, has a right to ask himself
whether the spade may not be allowed to produce in a few days what sun,
wind, rain, and similar agents can achieve in a few years. I am inclined
to think that it may, only it must be a spade with eyes, and if possible
with a brain behind it, and both are unusual with spades. In any case
wisdom exhorts us to proceed very cautiously and modestly with all such
changes. To be sure that in the first place they are called for, and in
the second that they will suit with the features of our ground, and the
scene in which it is set. Else, if we neglect these precautions, we too
may come to swell the ranks of those who have made the very words
“landscape gardening” and “landscape gardener” sounds of terror to all
discriminating and nature-loving ears.
One of the least unsatisfactory ways of modifying one’s ground, and
relieving its monotony, is, it seems to me, the “glade.” Glades may of
course be of many forms, and may suggest many ideas. They may pierce
through the dusky heart of a wood, or they may lie nakedly and stonily
open to the sky. They may be furnished with trees, with bushes, with
heather, with grass, or with alpine plants. On the whole the easiest
glade to create, and certainly one of the pleasantest when made, is the
grassy one. Even a perfectly level bit of ground can be induced with
care to pass by gradations into a grassy glade, though where there is
some natural slope the matter is of course very much easier. In that
case all that is necessary is to add a sufficiency of earth on either
side of the upper part of our incline, leaving the lower to merge by
insensible degrees to the natural level. The essential point is not to
miss the right moment for the sowing of the grass seed. This month of
September is in this soil unquestionably the best month in the year for
that purpose. August is apt to be too hot, October may be frosty, while
spring sowings are in my experience exceedingly delusive. If the summer
that follows them is wet, all goes well. Seeing however that each summer
since we came here has been more thirsty than its predecessor, it were
hardly the part of prudence to rely upon that.
It has been a satisfaction to us to find that a moderate upturning of
the soil does not apparently disturb those inmates of it that we wish to
retain. Bluebells and bracken both have their roots at a depth to which
the spade in these operations need not penetrate, while to superimposed
earth they appear to be quite indifferent. The spring that followed our
first operations of this kind bluebells flowered better than usual, as
if glad to be freed from some of their troublesome neighbours,
especially probably that pest of copses, dog mercury. The introduced
bulbs, which now share the ground with them, are mostly of the taller
kinds, daffodils predominating, and for these the fact of the soil being
all newly upturned is an advantage. Our present plan is that the sides
of the glade shall remain permanently uncut, or cut at most once or
twice a year, the central, or walking space, being kept regularly mown.
The bulbs, being at the sides, will thus not suffer. Moreover the
considerable difference of height between mown and unmown grass is bound
to give height and emphasis to our little glade. As in the similar case
of planting rock gardens, such considerations may seem to some poor
devices. Yet upon the successful carrying out of them depends the whole
of that “general effect” which is all that such critics probably heed.
We are not, after all, Nature’s mandatories, and our little slopes are
not Alps, or even alpine meadows. If we can attain to so much as a
suggestion of the sort of thing we dream of we may rest content.