However it may be in other gardens, seed-sowing, I find, to be the very
centre and kernel of this one. The sowing of seeds is apt to be
accounted merely a matter of the raising of a due supply of annuals,
salpiglossis, nicotiana, lobelia, nemophila, clarkia, bartonia, godetia,
“and a long etcetera.” With us it is the permanent, the perennial
occupants of our flower-beds which must either be grown from seed, or
else not grown at all. This fact was early impressed upon our minds, and
in a very summary and effectual fashion, such as Nature’s fashion of
instilling indispensable truths for the most part is.
It was three years ago, and we were a pair of destitute garden-owners.
We had however good friends, with large gardens. The connection was
perfectly self-evident. Without a moment’s hesitation the basket went
round. The response was noble. Plants came to us from North, South,
East, and West, especially West. Alas for those plants!
They were just what we wanted; they were moved at the right time; they
were packed with care; they were not unreasonably long on the road; they
arrived to all appearance in excellent health; they were received with
all the respect they deserved, and their wants provided for as far as
our poor knowledge of those wants enabled us to cater for them. Never
were elaborate arrangements less handsomely rewarded. Seasons returned,
but never have to us returned those plants so generously bestowed, so
hopefully planted. In my private garden-book a list of them still
exists, and a very black list it is to refer to. There they stand, as
they were written down in all the pride of proprietorship. Unhappily a
later entry shows a large round _O_ standing out prominently against
nearly every one of them. Now a round _O_ in that book signifies Death.
From this disaster we arose chastened gardeners. It was determined that
no more guileless plants should be brought to such a fate; no more
kindly owners exploited for so inadequate a result. Remembering the
good, dark, comfortable earth from which most of those plants came;
sadly surveying the very different earth to which they had been
consigned, the cause of their doom could hardly be called mysterious.
Friendly gardens, unless labouring under our own disabilities, being
thus excluded, the question remained how were the flower-beds to get
themselves filled? Only one answer to that question has ever presented
itself to the professional gardening mind, and that is “Send to the
nurseryman.”
Now that nurseryman may or may not be an excellent one. Ours, as it
happens, may fairly I think be called so. Good or bad he is never a
functionary to be approached without deference, at least by those in
whose eyes Thrift stands for something in the battle of life. “But
common plants are _so_ cheap” one is often told. Very likely, they may
be; indeed, judging by their catalogues, nurserymen stand habitually
astonished before the spectacle of their own moderation. An average
herbaceous plant--a lupin, or a larkspur, let us say--costs as a rule
about ninepence. It may sink as low as sixpence, or it may rise as high
as a shilling. Anybody, it will be argued, can afford sixpence; some
people have been known to spend a whole shilling without wincing. A very
short walk along any ordinary garden border, calculating as one goes the
number of sixpennyworths it would take to fill it, will be found an
excellent corrective for such lightheartedness. I made such a
calculation myself only the other day, and the result was an eminently
sobering one.
Seeds on the other hand are honestly cheap. There are expensive
seedsmen, but generally speaking, threepence is the price of a
fair-sized packet of the commoner perennials, and sixpence for one of
the scarcer kinds. This initial difference is, however, an infinitesimal
part of the real one. It is the magnificent possibilities, the vast
fecundity of those sixpences, as compared with the others, which is the
real point. Not one plant, but dozens of plants, often hundreds of
plants, may be the result of a single successful sowing, nor is the time
lost by such sowings nearly as great as people seem to imagine.
But the number of plants to be had in the course of a year by this means
is only part of the advantage to be gained by it. The great advantage is
that by so doing one’s plants become acquainted betimes with the
qualities of the soil in which they find themselves, and, so getting
acquainted, they reconcile themselves to it, as we most of us do
reconcile ourselves to any environment, however little naturally to our
taste, which has compassed us round from babyhood. To come to details.
Alpine plants, though small to look at, are for the most part tolerably
dear to buy. If a man, “whatever his sex!” loves his alpines, is
determined to have them, has a fairly big alpine garden or border to
fill, but will not be at the trouble of rearing them from seed, then I
shall be rather sorry for that man’s pocket. A few of them--notably the
Androsaces--are not amiable in the matter of germination, and these
therefore require a mother-plant or two to begin upon. Others, of which
the gentians may be taken as a type, are unendurably slow in appearing,
though, if a safe place can be found for their seed-box, and it is then
forgotten, the time passes! The great majority of alpines, fortunately,
will grow perfectly well from seed, even ultra-fastidious ones, such as
Silene acaulis, or Ramondia pyrenaica, which for that reason rank high
in nurserymen’s catalogues, doing perfectly well with care, and, of
course, at a fiftieth part of the cost.
Details like these have a sordid ring, and I have to remind myself that
it is upon the successful wrestling with them that one’s ultimate
failure or triumph wholly hinges. Thrift, moreover, is the badge of
every proper-minded husbandman, and it is according to the thriftiness
of his husbandry that Nature rewards his labours. “But Nature,” I hear
some caviller exclaim, “Nature is herself the most reckless of
spend-thrifts. She is the very mother, grandmother, and
great-grandmother of extravagance. She squanders her treasures as the
rain-clouds squander their raindrops, and tosses her wealth abroad like
dust upon the desert air”! True, she does do all this, but I am not
aware that she ever specially desired that her children should follow
her example. “What are your poor little savings? your petty
extravagancies?” we might imagine her saying, “that they should be
likened to mine?” Further, by an odd paradox, it is upon her
wastefulness that our thrift rests most securely. We possess say one
solitary plant of some given kind, and we find that with that single
plant her lavishness has freely provided us with the material of a
hundred, possibly many hundred others. There is scarcely a plant we can
name that by some means or another--by division, by layers, by seeds, by
cuttings, or by some other equally simple variation of the garden
craft--may not be multiplied almost without limit. Truly there is
something staggering about such fecundity, and the brain of even the
strongest gardener might be expected to whirl as he contemplates it.
Following in imagination the history of almost any flowering
plant--yonder pimpernel astray on the gravel will do--giving it only
time enough, a fair field, and not too many rivals, and we shall find
that it has gone far towards peopling every waste place within reach;
nay, if the process could be continued long enough, by the mere law of
its organic existence its descendants are capable of reddening their
entire native countryside for a dozen miles around.