The Keeper's Garden
The gamekeeper, like many a countryman, would be at a loss without his garden. His little plot of land means much to him: green food for his table, tonic foods for his pheasants, and a place where, by digging, he may bury some of his cares. He knows no such exercise as digging for keeping away ill-humours. He believes that the more a man sows the more he will reap—it is a lesson daily brought home to him. So he puts his best work into his garden, which is often the model plot of a rural community. In March he divides his time between spade work and his never-ending war on vermin. If he has a pen of stock pheasants he spends a good many minutes a day in admiration of the birds, besides tending to their wants; and he will defy you to prove that you ever saw a finer lot of birds. "Look at that old cock up agen yon corner—ain't 'e got some 'orns? Bless ye, them birds is worth a pound apiece."
So many a March afternoon finds the keeper hard at work at home with spade, fork, trowel or dibbler. His great object is to finish the more laborious work before the time of pheasants' eggs. A feature of the garden is the neat and spacious onion-bed, smoothed with the polished back of a favourite spade, which has dug out countless rabbits. There must be plenty of onions for the young pheasants to come. In time of need a keeper may sacrifice the whole of his onion-bed to his birds, gladly buying such onions as his wife demands for the table. Then there are two or three long rows of peas. Before sowing, the seed is sprinkled with red lead against the ravages of long-tailed field-mice, and after sowing strands of black thread are carried up and down the surface against the attacks of sparrows, while above, as a terrible warning, swings the body of a sparrow-hawk. The site of an old pheasant pen is devoted to Brussels sprouts. A dilapidated dog-kennel will serve to coax rhubarb to be ready for Easter Sunday's dinner.
Flower seeds are not forgotten: in shallow cartridge-boxes, protected by a small home-made frame, seeds are sown for making the little patch of flower-garden gay with stocks and asters, sweet peas, sun-flowers, tobacco-plants, and zinnias. The keeper puzzles over zinnia seed, which is like the fragment of a dead leaf, yet will come up and grow with the speed of mustard and cress, producing a wealth of bloom.
But the planting of the potato patch is the chief work. The neat little furrows which mark each row of potatoes, allowing the hoe to be plied fearlessly before the potatoes show above ground, give a neatness to the cottage garden all the time while the soil is brown and bare.
Gamekeepers, though their work for wages is never done, yet have a few legitimate ways of adding to their incomes. Of course they have the opportunity of making a good deal of money if they trespass on their employers' time; but your keeper is an honest man, and his work is the object of his life. Most keepers are skilled vegetable gardeners, and may make a few shillings from peas and beans. Often enough they have a cunning way with flowers, though envious amateurs are free with their hints about the advantages to be gained from burying foxes to enrich the soil. We know one who will put in a fair day's work with spade and wheelbarrow before even the waggoners have stirred to give their horses breakfast. Going his rounds, the keeper marks good briers for budding; if he does not sell them, he will beg choice buds from rose-growers, and a year or two later the passer-by may be tempted to offer half-a-crown for the fine roses of his little plot. Possibly by this time his roses mean so much to him that he will make some such excuse as, "The missus, she thinks a mortal sight of they."
