The gardener seems to pass amongst his kinsfolk and acquaintance for a
rather feeble, but more or less meditative sort of man. His trade is
held, I perceive, to be productive of some of the milder forms of
philosophy. Like the angler he enjoys a rather supercilious
consideration on that account from his more violently active brethren.
“You are such a patient fellow,” they say. “You don’t care how long you
stay pottering over one small spot. Such quiet ways of going on would
never do for _us_!”
This may be the case, but I cannot say that I have personally observed,
either in myself, or other gardeners, any tendency to exhibit more
placidity over the cares and crosses of a garden, than over any of the
other cares and crosses of existence. As for philosophy, a certain sort
of cheap moralising a garden is certainly rather productive of. It
sprouts unheeded along the walks, and may be extracted with greater
facility than most of the weeds. That “life is short”; that “flesh is
grass”; that man groweth up in the spring time, and is cut down in the
autumn--such innocent and obvious sprouts of morality as these may
certainly be gathered in a good many of its neglected corners. With
regard to all the larger and more vital growths of philosophy, I am
afraid that they require to be successfully sought for upon wider and
more strenuous battlefields.
Lessons of course may be gathered in a garden, as in most other places.
For the owner, the most wholesome of these is perhaps that he never
really is its owner at all. His garden possesses him--many of us know
only too well what it is to be possessed by a garden--but he never, in
any true sense of the word, possesses it. He remains one of its
appanages, like its rakes or its watering-pots; a trifle more permanent,
perhaps, than an annual, but with no claim assuredly to call himself a
perennial.
In no garden is this fact more startlingly the case than in those that
we have, as we fatuously call it, “made” ourselves. For the owners of
such a garden, the precariousness of their tenure is the first thing, I
think, that is forced upon their attention. And the reason is simple. In
older ones, the reign of the primitive has, to a greater or less extent,
ceased, and the reign of the artificial has become the rule. The Wild
still flourishes in them, but it has become a mere pariah, a vegetable
outcast. Chickweed on the walks, nettles in the shrubbery, daisies in
the lawn. “What does this mean? Who gave you leave to be here? Away with
you at once, intruders that you are!” that is the habitual standpoint.
Now in a new garden, especially a garden that has been won out of the
adjacent woodlands, the sense of intrusion is felt--ought to be felt--to
be all the other way. It is the so-called owners who are here the
trespassers; the unwarrantable intruders; the squatters of a few
months’, at most of a few years’, standing. The bracken, the
honeysuckles, the briers, the birds--these are the established
proprietors; it is they that can show all the documents of original
possession. We may have to eject them, but at least it should be done
respectfully; with such compensation for disturbance as would be
adjudged in any properly constituted agrarian court in the Universe.
Only yesterday these reflections were forced upon my mind as I found
myself, for the third time engaged in a life and death struggle with the
bracken, which has once more invaded our newly made flower borders, and
threatens to gather their whole contents bodily into its capacious
grasp. This is, and always must be, a peculiarly humiliating sort of
struggle to be engaged in, and not the less so if one remains
temporarily the victor. In the first place, one is deeply conscious of
the vandalism of trying to get rid of an object immeasurably more
beautiful than any of the plants one thrusts it aside for. In the second
place, there is a sense of absurdity and futility, which is strongly
upon one all the time. Mrs. Partington, in her efforts at sweeping back
the Atlantic Ocean with her broom, was hardly a more conspicuous
instance of misplaced energy than such attempts to suppress and control
the exuberant green waves, the abounding vitality, of our own
magnificent, indomitable bracken.
Even where humiliating struggles like these have ceased to be necessary,
how slight an excrescence this whole business that we call ownership
really is; how strong, how deeply rooted the state of things which it
has momentarily superseded. Let the so-called owner relax his
self-assertiveness for ever so short a period; let him and his myrmidons
depart for a while upon their travels, and how swiftly the whole fabric
rushes remorselessly back to its original condition. And why not? What
can be more absolutely to be expected? Nor need we even stop at the
garden, the farm, the house, or any similar chattel. Even ourselves,
sophisticated little creatures though we be, in how many ways we remain
the accessories, rather than the masters, of our environment? For a
time, especially in towns, we manage to conceal this truth from
ourselves. We pretend that we have remodelled matters to our liking;
that Nature has become our follower; that our law, not hers, runs
through the planet; that we set the tune, and that she merely plays it.
Oh rash, and hurrying ignorance! Put the holder of so untenable a
doctrine alone, for ever so short a time, especially in the winter, in
the solitary depths of the country, and how soon a perception of his or
her own utter transitoriness will begin to break through the thinly
formed crust of the new, and the superimposed. Let him lift his garden
latch, and step out beyond it into the open country. Let him saunter
alone in the woods after dusk. Let him walk across the solitary,
blackened heather. Let him look down upon the floods, lace-making over
the lowlands. Let him--without taking so much trouble as this--merely
lean out of his window after dusk, amid the thickening shadows, and he
must be of a remarkably unimpressionable turn of mind if the sense of
his own shadowiness, his own inherent transitoriness, is not the
clearest, strongest, and most convincing of all his sensations.
Thus vanity provides its own solution, and the little inflated soul is
driven into puncturing its own proudly swelling balloon. We
discover--sometimes with no little dismay--that it is not alone in our
flower-beds that the wild and the tame, the temporary and the permanent,
the real and the artificial, meet, jostle, and rub shoulders together.
Sir Primitive is a remarkably difficult person to escape from. His blood
still courses unheeded through our own veins, and he is as much a part
of ourselves as he is a part of the most sophisticated of our plants or
our animals. We may imagine that we have left him behind us, and
outgrown his teachings, and the very next day something will occur to
show us that he is at our elbows all the time, as strong, as fresh, and
as absolutely unaffected by any little modern innovations as he ever
was.