Then Mrs. Bent’s little boy arrived and she told me how he had given cocoanut chips to the saxifrage; and he didn’t like me, unfortunately, and wouldn’t go into the garden with me. And then Mr. Bent returned accoutred in all the trappings of the professional gardener. He wore a blue apron and leather gloves and a clump of bast sticking out of his pocket; and his trousers and sleeves turned up and everything complete.
“I must be busy,” he said, “but my collection is completely labeled, and you will have no difficulty in following the general scheme of the garden.”
This was true, because of the great simplicity of the scheme. The garden, in fact, ran down quite straight between two other gardens, and finished at a brick wall.
“A howling wilderness you see on each side,” explained Mr. Bent, waving his trowel to the right and left. By this he meant, of course, that the other gardens only had roses and wallflowers and carnations and larkspurs and lilac, and the common or garden flowers familiar to the common or garden gardener. But it was no “side” on Mr. Bent’s part to talk in this scornful way, because to him, from his eagle heights of horticulture, so to speak, his neighbours’ gardens were barren wastes, with nothing in them to detain the expert for a moment.
His garden was literally stuffed with rare and curious things. He admitted that some of them were not beautiful; but they were rare and in some cases he doubted if anybody else in Kent had them. It never occurred to him that nobody else in Kent might want them. Everything was beautifully labelled with metal labels, and many of the rarer and more precious alpine plants had zinc guards put round them to keep away garden pests, such as slugs and snails.
I couldn’t believe that a snail would have dared to show his face in that garden; but Mr. Bent said he always had to be fighting them, and that sometimes they conquered and managed to scale a zinc guard and devour a small choice alpine in a single night!
He had most beautiful flowers to show me; or rather he let me walk up and down among them while he gardened. It was very interesting to see the sure professional touch of Mr. Bent. He never hesitated or doubted what to do. He knew exactly what to cut off a plant, or how much water to give it, or how to tie up a trailer. He planted out a few seedling zinnias to show me. Then he watered them in and removed the seed boxes, and all was neat and tidy in a moment.
He handled long and difficult Latin names with the consummate ease of a native, and he showed me piles of gardeners’ catalogues. Once he had raised a begonia from seed, which they accepted at Kew Gardens, and the Director of Kew gave him something in exchange for his hothouse.
“It died,” said Mr. Bent, “and that through no fault of mine; but the distinction and the compliment have not died and never will.”
He was a member of the R.H.S., or Royal Horticultural Society, and he had shown a plant now and again at their meetings, but without any honour falling to it.