A Garden Diary, September 1899—September 1900

A GARDEN DIARY
SEPTEMBER 1899—SEPTEMBER 1900 BY EMILY LAWLESS METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON 1901
To the Garden’s chief Owner, And the Gardener’s Friend
A few leaves from this Diary (or something very similar), have already appeared in The Garden and The Pilot .

September 1, 1899
“A WANDERER is man from his birth,” and some of us who have done comparatively little wandering in our own persons, have done our full share of those less palpable divagations which may be performed within a very small compass of the earth’s surface, nay even within the radius of a single garden chair.
The gipsy dies hard in many people, and the dreams which have fluttered round our youthful fancy flutter round it still, though youth may have become a memory, and the chances of any serious explorations be reduced to a scarce perceptible minimum. To be a traveller in the real and heroic sense is a very great and a very stirring ambition. To have the hope of wandering far and fruitfully; of bringing home the results of those wanderings; such a hope and such an aspiration is one of the biggest things that can be set before a youthful ambition. With a disregard of probabilities, which, looking back, I can only characterise as magnificent, such an ambition had I, in early days, set before myself. To be a traveller on the great scale; a visitor of remote solitudes, and practically untrodden shores; a discoverer of undescribed forms; a rifler of Nature’s still unrifled treasure-houses—such was the hope, and such the happy dream. The words “Unknown to science” floated in those days before my youthful fancy, and were to it a shibboleth, as other and more obviously stimulating words have been to other youthful brains. Fate has not willed that any such resounding lot should be mine, nor was it, to tell the truth, particularly likely that it should so will it. To few of our race has it been given to add, by even a little, to the knowledge of that race, and I am not aware that any portion of my own equipment had particularly marked me out for this rôle that I had so confidently assigned to myself.