The cause of the mischance in nine cases out of ten lies in the fact that we attempt too much. Our original combination may have been good, but we want to make it still better. Our gold gets overgilt; our lilies are painted till they almost cease to be lilies at all, and the result is failure all along the line. This sounds the reverse of encouraging, but I am not sure but what it is in some respects better that it should be so. I suspect that all gardeners—professionals and amateurs, experts and gropers,—are just now rather in a state of flux and indecision. Two chief schools hold the field, and are in some respects mutually destructive of one another. There is the school which avows itself the faithful, not to say the servile, follower and imitator of Nature, and there is the school that proposes to itself to improve upon her. The tendency of the first is to develop a good deal of picturesque disorder, a pleasant, rather easy-going sense of repose, and possibly some want of definite form and colour. The tendency of the second, or rather of its members, is to regard the garden as a battle-ground; colour, size, brilliancy, height, as so many tests of their own personal victory, and every plant, species and hybrid alike, as objects for them to shape and manipulate at their own good pleasure.
Will these two divergent schools ultimately combine into one harmonious whole? Will the over-strenuous science of the second strengthen and reform the airy, somewhat weed-encouraging grace of the first? Will the aspiration after beauty of the one, in time relax the utilitarian tension of the other? These are questions which must be left to be resolved in the still unplumbed future. Possibly the gardener of the twenty-first or twenty-second century may be able to reply to them!
Pending that desirable, but still rather remote, contingency, I have left the lanes, and returned homeward, and am now looking down at our own somewhat chaotic little garden, with its small brown beds, each edged with a neat white frost-frill. Poor little garden! I have felt so oblivious of it of late that a certain compunction comes over me as I look at it. After all, gratitude for such good things as have come in one’s way is an undoubted part of decent living, and the most practical way of showing that gratitude is to make the best of them. Well, the year is still young; there will be time enough for fulfilling that, and every other small social obligation in the course of it. Eleven and a half months! What unknown things have you got hidden away? What secrets, as yet unguessed at by any of us, do you keep concealed behind those picturesque, and friendly-sounding names of yours?
January 20, 1900
THE wind this morning was excruciatingly cold, with a hungry whistle, that belied the pale sunrays, which were doing their best to redeem the situation. On such a morning the good gardener’s thoughts, even before going out, fly to the younger and weaklier amongst his plants, and his imagination towards devising new shelters, and, if possible, more efficient ones. Creepers are, as a rule, easily protected; either there is a wall, against which mats can be laid, or, at worst, some post that they can be fastened to. It is shrubs in the open that present the greatest difficulty; nightcaps of sacking, or tents of matting not adding to the picturesqueness even of a winter garden.
Our more recently planted rhododendrons look anything but happy, and I have just been begging Cuttle to bestow a good shovelful of nourishment about the roots of each of them. It is not protection that they need, for they are hardy enough, but they sicken in this thin, dry soil, which seems to reach them through their two-foot blanket of peat.
Even when well grown and long established, rhododendrons hardly seem to me to be quite the ideal thing for these rustling oak copses of ours. We plant them, partly for the sake of their colour in its season, partly because we need evergreens, and the common ponticum is one of the best of evergreens, but they seem to me to remain exotics, and not altogether happy ones. There are two distinct varieties of scenery with both of which rhododendrons consort magnificently. One is heavy, boggy ground, deep, dark, and oozy, under large trees, into the recesses of which they can settle, spreading out in all directions, re-rooting themselves as they choose in the black earth; their flowers catching the divided sunrays, and turning every hollow place into a pool of colour. Another, and a yet more ideal place is a steep hillside, provided that it is furnished with boulders, and provided that the said boulders are not of limestone. There is one such hillside above the Bay of Dublin which I find it difficult to believe might not be able to hold its own, even though confronted with any similar extent of ground amongst the Himalayas themselves. It begins as a ravine, rising out of a rather thin wood. As one mounts the ravine opens, and the trees fall back. The boulders, with which the slopes are covered, rise higher and higher, and larger and larger, till they tower into the air over one’s head, perfect monoliths. In and out, above, behind, and between them grow the rhododendrons, in their flowering season an absolute feast of colour, the sort of thing that in a cultivated age pilgrimages will be formed to venerate. To see them in such a place is to get a new impression of the possibilities of heroic gardening. One’s eyes are caught, one’s whole mind and spirit is swept away upon a tide of colour; the grey micaceous granite of the ravine, the heather looking down over its top, the long blue river of sky, even the sea and its ships, seeming to be merely so many adjuncts and accessories of the central picture.
Such conditions are not to be found every day in the week, or in everybody’s back garden. We have to work out our own redemption, each of us as we best can, with such materials as the Fates have lent us. Happily, as regards natural conditions, here in West Surrey, the garden-lover, whatever other difficulties he may have to contend with, has much to be grateful for. Thanks to its blessed unproductiveness, the harrow has literally in many cases never passed over its soil; its very weeds being mostly those of Nature’s own introduction, not imported ones. Her handiwork is still plainly visible on every side. She looks up at him out of the bracken with an aspect not very different from what she wore at the Prime, and if he wishes to spoil her—well, he has to do it for himself! This to many excellent gardeners would seem a poor compensation for a sadly unproductive soil, and a deplorable lack of summer moisture. There are others, however, to whom a certain sense of indwelling peace, a certain feeling of underlying harmony, are the first of all requirements. Now both of these are more easily found than made.
February 5, 1900
NOT to devote an indefinite number of hours to the reading of war news; to eschew the luxury of idle hands, less on account of Dr. Watts’ reasons against it, as on account of more personal ones, which have taught me to reprobate the practice. Here are a couple of respectable resolutions for a bitterly cold February morning. “Books, and work, and healthful play”! Could a more commendable little programme be invented? or one that might be followed with greater advantage by many of us who only exhibit our superiority by laughing at it?