At the first hint of broken soil a robin, pert and ready, took up a position on a bare limb of Penzance Briar, and began to eye us merrily just as if he, I and the garden were all out for a day’s worm hunting.
Said I, “Dick, we are out to make a garden path, incidentally to make history.” For I had my idea of the “History of Paths” well at the back of my mind.
The robin replied (or as good as replied), “If it’s history you’re after, it’s insects I’m here for, so we’ll come at a bargain.”
Meanwhile the gardener turned another clod.
Said the robin, “I never saw any one so slow.”
Slow as we might have been we were quick enough in imagination. For one thing there was the question of edging. Tiles, bricks, box, stones, which was it to be?
Half-way down the trench we had made, just at the acute point of the greater curve, the gardener propounded the question of the edging. He leaned on his spade, and turning to me asked if I had thought to something to edge the path with. Now my thoughts were far away from that idea and were hovering like butterflies over a vision of the Path Complete. I saw, for Springtime, a row of Daffodils nodding and yellow in the breeze. For Summer I saw Carnations gleaming richly, and the Roses all blooming. Overhead the driven sky hung out blue banners of distress as if signalling for fine weather. Plumb to earth my thoughts came.
“About something to edge with?”
Almost before I had time to speak, he continued. I had begun with the word, “Box.”
Every one knows what it is to come on the rocks in the soil of a gardener’s mind. It is, as a rule, some old idea taken deep root which forms a rock of resistance. Sometimes it is a rock idea about taking Geranium cuttings, sometimes an idea about the time for pruning fruit trees or the method of pruning them, sometimes it concerns certain plants which he refuses to allow will live in the garden and so lets them die. One is never quite certain when or how the objection will arise. I had sent out a feeler for Box and I struck a rock.