In the well-ordered garden of every well-ordered house—that is, every house that numbers children in its treasury—there lies, screened perhaps by some inconvenient shrubbery but none the less patent to the stars and the winds and the polite visitor, a tormented patch of earth where sway in dubious security of tenure a number of sickly plants.  For days they have lain parched and neglected in the summer sun; for days they have been beaten down into a morass by torrents poured from an excited watering-pot; their roots have regarded heaven for no less a period than their heads; and in the face of such unnatural conditions Ceres, one fancies, must have fallen back in confusion and left them to struggle on as best they can unaided.  It is only the most hardy p. 168of plants that may survive the attentions of a youthful gardener, and it is a tribute to Nature’s obstinacy that any survive at all.  I have in my mind a garden of this kind, and thereby hangs one of those rather tragic stories which grown-up people are apt to consider funny.  The garden lay below an old brick wall, which must, I think, have faced south, for, as I remember it, it was always lit by the sun.  It was the property of three children, and their separate estates were carefully marked off by decorative walls of shells and freakish pebbles.  Here, early and late, two of the children waged a gallant war against Nature, thwarting and checking her with a hundred delicate attentions; but on the third had fallen that pleasant mood when it is nicer to lie in the shade and to dream of wine than to labour in the vineyard.  His garden was a tangle of weeds and of healthy, neglected plants, and when the inevitable awakening came he saw that it would require days of unprofitable work to turn the wilderness into a proper garden.  Yet to hear the uninformed comparisons of visitors was a shameful ordeal not to be p. 169borne.  He solved the problem, I still think, in a very spirited manner.  He cleared the garden by the simple process of removing plants and weeds alike, and sowed the ground with seeds, purchased alas! with a shilling extracted quite illegally from his money-box.  But the secrecy of these movements had not escaped the notice of the Olympians, and later there fell on his horrified ears an entirely new and obviously truthful theory of botany; it seemed that the word “thief” could be plainly deciphered on the flowers of dishonest gardeners.  There were no blossoms in that little boy’s garden that year.  Like the monk in Browning’s poem, he pinched off all the buds before the sun was up.

They were simple flowers we sought to cultivate in those days, simple flowers with beautiful names.  Violets and snowdrops, the reticent but cheerful pansy, otherwise known as “three faces under a hood,” love-lies-bleeding, wallflowers, stocks, and London pride, or “none so pretty”; of these and their unaffected comrades we made our gardens.  Spades and pickaxes were denied us, but the p. 170simple gardening tools were ours, and he has lived in darkness who has not experienced the keen joy of smacking the earth with the convex side of a trowel.  My hands tingle when I remember how sore weeding made the finger-tips, and there is something in the last ecstatic chuckle of a watering-pot as it run............