"Lord!" he finally remarked; "you've got it!"
"Got what?" I said, though I knew.
"The garden germ."
Yes. There was no denying it. I had it. I have it still, and there is very little chance of my shaking it off. It is a disease that grows with what it feeds on. Now and then, indeed, I make a feeble fight against its inroads: I will not have another flower-bed, I will not have any more annuals, I will have only things that live on from year to year and take care of themselves. But—
"Alas, alas, repentance oft before
I swore—but was I sober when I swore?
And then—and then—came spring—"
and the florist's catalogues! And is any one who has once given way to them proof against the seductions of those catalogues? Those asters! Those larkspurs! Those foxgloves and poppies and Canterbury bells! All that ravishing company, mine at the price of a few cents and a little grubbing. Mine! There is the secret of it. Out in the great and wonderful world beyond my garden, nature works her miracles constantly. She lays her riches at my feet; they are mine for the gathering. But to work these miracles myself,—to have my own little hoard that looks to me for tending, for very life,—that is a joy by itself. My little garden bed gives me something that all the luxuriance of woods and fields can never give—not better, not so good, perhaps, but different. Once having known the thrill of watching the first tiny shoot from a seed that I have planted myself, once having followed it to leaf and flower and seed again, I can never give it up.
My garden is not very big nor very beautiful. Perhaps the stretch of rocks and grass and weeds beside the house—an expanse which not even the wildest flight of the imagination could call a lawn—perhaps this might be more pleasing if the garden were not there, but it is there, and there it will stay. It means much grubbing. Just putting in seeds and then weeding is, I find, no mere affair of rhetoric. Moreover, I am introduced through my garden to an entirely new set of troubles: beetles and cutworms and moles and hens and a host of marauding creatures above ground and below, whose number and energy amaze me. And each summer seems to add to their variety and resourcefulness. Clearly, the pleasures of a garden are not commensurate with its pains. And yet—
But there is one kind of joy which it gives me at which even the Scoffer—to wit, Jonathan—does not scoff. It began with Aunt Deborah's phlox. Then came Christabel's larkspur. The next summer Mrs. Stone sent me over some of her hardy little fall asters—"artemishy," she called them. And Anne Stafford sent on some hollyhock seeds culled from Emerson's garden. And Great-Aunt Sarah was dividing her peony roots, and said I might take one. And Cousin Patty asked me if I wouldn't like some of her mother's old-fashioned pinks. And so it goes.
And so it will go, I hope, to the end of the long day. Each year my garden has in it more of my friends, and as I look at it I can adopt poor Ophelia's pretty speech in a new meaning, and say, "Larkspur—that's for remembrance; hollyhocks—that's for thoughts." Remembrance of all those dear other gardens which I have come to know, and in whose beauties I am coming to have a share; thoughts of all those dear other gardeners upon whom, as upon me, the miracle of the seed has laid a spell from which they can never escape.