Yet, although undoubtedly our ancestor, Sir Primitive stands a good way
back on the family tree, and other influences have grown up since his
time to disturb his teachings. The fear of becoming too tidy, for
instance, does not at first sight seem to be a very reasonable fear. It
has not been imputed to many people as a failing, especially to those
who happen to have been born to the westward of St. George’s Channel!
Nevertheless there are moments when a wild passion for tidiness, a
perfect thirst and craving for order, seems to sweep across the soul
like a wave; when everything else that one habitually cares for is flung
back, and overwhelmed before it, even as the hosts of Pharaoh were flung
back, and overwhelmed before the cold, subduing waters of the Red Sea.
We are all the children of our age; there is no getting over that fact;
heirs of a hardly won civilisation, let us call ourselves Wild
Wilfulness, or any other law-defying name, as much as we please.
Yearning to show that our spirits are above all trammels, that we are as
free as the birds in the air, we nevertheless all sit in identical
armchairs, eat the food the cooks provide us, and in most other respects
exhibit about as much originality as so many stair-rods.
It is only necessary to consider what happens every day of the week in
the garden to perceive that this is the case. We have adopted the most
independent line possible; we have vowed that _our_ gardens shall be
natural ones, or nothing. We adore flowery wildernesses, we declare. We
want our plants to grow as Nature intended them to do, and not as the
hireling gardener does. We intend to put a limit to the eternal
bolstering up of our soil with all sorts of extraneous elements; above
all we will have nothing to say to the clipping of our shrubs into
unreal shapes, nor yet to the planting of our bulbs, and other flowering
plants into lines, squares, and parallelograms, but all shall be a
melting and a blending of one harmonious form into another; every
detail, as far as the eye can reach, being subordinated to the larger
and more important spirit of the landscape as a whole.
So we say! And yet, after the flag of freedom has been thus
ostentatiously raised, what happens? As often as not we find ourselves,
by the logic of facts, and by the realities of the situation, forced
slowly to retreat, as other and equally eminent strategists have been
forced before us. A flowery wilderness is delightful, but unless its
owner is content with the flowers that grow in it by nature, or a few,
very cautious additions, his flowery wilderness is apt after a time to
become a wilderness, minus the flowers. Then perhaps a reaction sets in.
A sense of failure gradually overtakes the too ardent amateur. The reins
of authority drop more and more listlessly from his hands; until at last
he lets them fall altogether, and, with a smile of kindly pity, the
momentarily dispossessed professional once more resumes full, and
henceforth undivided sway.
From so humiliating a finale may all the kindly divinities that watch
over gardens deliver ourselves! Nevertheless there have been moments
when such a fate has seemed to draw near, and even to look one in the
eyes. Only three days ago I was engaged in that breathless struggle with
the bracken. For the last two, aided by Cuttle and his assistant, I have
been fighting ankle-deep against a perfect forest of couch-grass, which
had practically overwhelmed the whole of our nursery-garden, helped
rather than hindered by the fence, with which we had innocently hoped to
keep back, not alone rabbits, but every other trespasser.
Worse than the conduct of the couch-grass, because of a certain personal
element in it, has been the conduct of the rose-campion. Now I have been
exceedingly kind to that rose-campion. Again and again I have intervened
to rescue it, when it was on the point of being rooted out, and
consigned to the dust-heap. Only last spring I carried its roots by
hundreds with my own hands, and re-established them in a special
reservation ground, where they might spread unmolested over a good
half-acre or so of copse. What has been the result? They have indeed
clothed their allotted space, but, not content with this, they have
burst like a horde of Ojibeway Indians, or some such aborigines, out of
their reservation, across the frontiers of civilisation, sending out
myriads of seedlings ahead of them, like a flight of skirmishers, and
are now nearly as numerous collectively, and far more luxuriant
individually, in the nursery, than they are in the copse itself!
Incidents like these wound one, and are more trying for that reason to
the amateur gardener than to the professional one, who probably regards
them as only to be expected. I am far from saying that they constitute a
sufficient reason for surrender, but they certainly seem to need the aid
of a higher quality than mere secular doggedness, to enable one to
grapple with them as one ought. It is moreover such occurrences as
these that produce that extraordinary thirst for order, that very
unlooked-for passion for tidiness, which I just now noted. After a day
or two passed in such struggles as these one begins to understand the
pride of the colonist in pure, speckless Ugliness; in beautifully clean,
naked earth, varied by straight lines of split-wood fences, or the like.
I have not as yet reached that point myself, and am glad to feel that I
can still tolerate Nature. All the same a sort of nurseryman’s attitude
towards everything tainted with wildness is fast gaining upon me, and
unless I can check both it, and this overweening love of tidiness while
there is time, I plainly foresee that there will shortly be nothing else
left!