Two kindly days in a desperately grim winter have had the effect of
reawakening in one’s mind half-forgotten thrillings; thrillings after
long grass, and green shadows; after a thousand eye-caressing tints;
after the pure, delicious life and companionship of flowers. There are
times when all this seems rather to pain than to please. When the
persistency of such perishable things appears but an added wrong, but an
additional unkindness. Why should these last, and other, and higher
ones, _not_ last? we demand; one of those questions which, seeing that
they can never be answered, it were as well, perhaps, that they should
remain permanently unasked.
Walking briskly along the lanes this morning, with a determination to
think only of what lay immediately below my eyes, I have been struck
afresh, as often before, by the capabilities of beauty possessed even by
the poorest plots of ground; plots which, far from having been
intentionally beautified, have been stripped, on the contrary, for
utilitarian reasons of such beauty as Nature had originally endowed them
with. Yet, under the influence of a little kindly sunshine, how they
still gleam, those poor plots; how the few green things left in them
manage to prink themselves out, and to respond genially to that genial
greeting! “And is it not slightly discreditable,” I reflected, “that we,
who call ourselves gardeners, and have deliberately taken in hand
similar, often much better plots, specially with an eye to beautifying
them, should again and again completely fail in doing so; should again
and again spend thought, time, money, and the sweat of the brow--chiefly
of other people’s brows--and all that they should, as often as not, be
rather worse at the end than at the beginning?”
The truth is that this business of “beautifying,” into which many of us
have recklessly plunged, is a very much more difficult and a very much
more delicate operation than we are prepared to admit. To the truly
discerning, the truly nature-loving eye, the smallest scrap of
plant-producing ground, the homeliest corner of earth--“long heath,
brown furze, anything"--has potentialities of beauty and interest which
even the best gardener rarely develops as they might, and ought to be
developed. It is not merely that individually our powers are weak, our
taste poor, our ignorance great, our imagination defective, but that
over and above all this we have in most cases not the faintest idea of
what we are aiming at. With no clear vision of what we propose
ultimately to produce, how in the name of reason can we hope to produce
it, or anything else worth having?
The cause of the mischance in nine cases out of ten lies in the fact
that we attempt too much. Our original combination may have been good,
but we want to make it still better. Our gold gets overgilt; our lilies
are painted till they almost cease to be lilies at all, and the result
is failure all along the line. This sounds the reverse of encouraging,
but I am not sure but what it is in some respects better that it should
be so. I suspect that all gardeners--professionals and amateurs, experts
and gropers,--are just now rather in a state of flux and indecision. Two
chief schools hold the field, and are in some respects mutually
destructive of one another. There is the school which avows itself the
faithful, not to say the servile, follower and imitator of Nature, and
there is the school that proposes to itself to improve upon her. The
tendency of the first is to develop a good deal of picturesque disorder,
a pleasant, rather easy-going sense of repose, and possibly some want of
definite form and colour. The tendency of the second, or rather of its
members, is to regard the garden as a battle-ground; colour, size,
brilliancy, height, as so many tests of their own personal victory, and
every plant, species and hybrid alike, as objects for them to shape and
manipulate at their own good pleasure.
Will these two divergent schools ultimately combine into one harmonious
whole? Will the over-strenuous science of the second strengthen and
reform the airy, somewhat weed-encouraging grace of the first? Will the
aspiration after beauty of the one, in time relax the utilitarian
tension of the other? These are questions which must be left to be
resolved in the still unplumbed future. Possibly the gardener of the
twenty-first or twenty-second century may be able to reply to them!
Pending that desirable, but still rather remote, contingency, I have
left the lanes, and returned homeward, and am now looking down at our
own somewhat chaotic little garden, with its small brown beds, each
edged with a neat white frost-frill. Poor little garden! I have felt so
oblivious of it of late that a certain compunction comes over me as I
look at it. After all, gratitude for such good things as have come in
one’s way is an undoubted part of decent living, and the most practical
way of showing that gratitude is to make the best of them. Well, the
year is still young; there will be time enough for fulfilling that, and
every other small social obligation in the course of it. Eleven and a
half months! What unknown things have you got hidden away? What secrets,
as yet unguessed at by any of us, do you keep concealed behind those
picturesque, and friendly-sounding names of yours?