It was a fanciful child, perhaps, but children are full of quaint ideas, who caught the moon in a bright tin spoon, and put it in a bottle, and drew the cork at night to let the moon out to sail in the sky. The child found the tin spoon, dropped by a passing tinware pedlar, in the road, waited till night came, with his head full of a fairy story he had heard, and when it was dark, except for the moon, he stepped into the garden, held the bowl of the spoon to catch the moon’s reflection, and when she showed her yellow face distorted in the bright spoon, he poured the reflection, very solemnly, into a bottle and corked it fast and tight. Then, with a whispered fairy spell, some nurse’s gibberish, he took the precious bottle and hid it in a cupboard along with other mysterious tokens. That’s a symbol of all our lives, bottling up moons and letting them out at nights. Isn’t a garden just such a dream-treat to some of us? There are golden Marigolds for the sun we live by, and silver Daisies for the stars, and blue Forget-me-nots for summer skies. Heaven at our feet, and angels singing from birds’ throats among the trees.
Sometimes we see one cottage garden, next to a Paradise of colour, flaunting Geraniums, and all the summer garland, and in it a poor tree or so, a few ill-kept weedy flowers, overgrown Stocks, a patch of drunken-looking Poppies, a grass-grown waste of choked Pinks: the whole place with a sullen air. What is the matter with the people living there? A decent word will beg a plant or two, seeds and cuttings can be had for the asking. Is it a poor or a proud spirit who refuses to join the other displays of colour? Knock at the door, and your answer comes quick-footed; it is the poor spirit answers you. Of course, there are men who can coax blood out of a stone, and find big strawberries in the bottom of the basket; and others who cannot grow anything, try as they may. It is common enough to hear this or that will not grow for so-and-so, or that man makes such a plant flourish where mine all die. There’s something between man and his flowers, some sympathy, that makes a Rose bloom its best for one, and Carnations wither under his touch, or Asters show their magic purples for one, and give a weak display for another. No one knows what speaks in the man to the Roses that bloom for him, or what distaste Carnations feel for all his ministrations, but the fact remains—any gardener will tell you that. So with your man of greenhouses, so with your humble cottage gardener, and, looking along a village street, the first glance will show you not who loves the flowers but whom flowers love.
This, of course, is not the reason of the weedy garden of the poor spirit, the reason for that is obvious: the poor spirit never rejoices, and to grow and care for flowers is a great way of rejoicing. There’s many a man sows poems in the spring who never wrote a line of verse: his flowers are his contribution to the world’s voice; united in expressions of joy, the writer, the painter, the singer, the flower-grower are all part of one great poem.
The average person who passes a cottage garden is more moved by the senses than the imagination; he or she drinks deep draughts of perfume, takes long comfort to the eyes from the fragrant and coloured rood of land. They do not cast this way and that for curious imaginings; it might add to their pleasure if they did so. There are men who find the whole of Heaven in a grain of mustard seed; and there are those who, in all the pomp and circumstance of a hedge of Roses, find but a passing pleasure to the eye.
We, who take our pleasure in the Garden of England, who feast our eyes on such rich schemes of colours she affords, have reason to be more than grateful to those who encourage the cottage gardener in his work. It is from the vicarage, rectory, or parsonage gardens that most encouragement springs; it is the country clergyman and his wife who, in a large measure, are responsible for the good cottage gardening we see nearly everywhere. These, and the numberless societies, combine to keep up the interest in gardening and bee-keeping, to which we owe one of our chiefest English pleasures. The good garden is the purple and fine linen of the poor man’s life; poets, philosophers, and kings have praised and sung the simple flowers that he grows. Wordsworth for instance, sings of a flower one finds in nearly every cottage garden:
LOVE-LIES-BLEEDING.
You call it “Love-lies-Bleeding”—so you may,
Though the red Flower, not prostrate, only droops
As we have seen it here from day to day,
From month to month, life passing not away: