That he or she ought to have been made so is quite true, but as a matter of fact, have they? We are moulded out of exceedingly stubborn stuff, and are not often ennobled, I suspect, by the landscapes that surround us, any more than we are by the pursuits we follow, or the names that we carry about with us. Furthermore the essentials of all landscape show a considerable similarity. Much the same sort of clouds and sunshine, much the same sort of nights and days, much the same sort of summers and winters, visit alike the tamest and the wildest of them. Even the more dramatic and exciting fluctuations—snow, and hail, storm, and lightning—exhibit a greater impartiality than might have been expected. The gale that has just unroofed your lordly tower, has equally swept the tiles off our humble porch; in the same way that moralists are fond of assuring us that sickness and sorrow, loss and pain, old age and death, fall equally upon the homes of beggars and of kings.
Never having belonged to the last of these classes, I cannot take it upon me to answer for the discomforts that pertain to it. With regard to the other, though I have often seen myself figuring, or upon the point of figuring, amongst its sad and tattered ranks, the impression has never been a particularly agreeable one, and I prefer, therefore, not to dwell upon it. It was moreover the subject of landscapes, I think, not of either kings or beggars, that was under discussion? But that is the sort of thing that is always happening! Of all the unsatisfactory stock to keep, ideas are in my experience the most unsatisfactory; equally whether they are winged, or entirely wingless ones. As for a diary—which, to be of the slightest use, ought to act as a kind of crow-boy, or goose-girl, to them, and keep them in order—on the contrary it seems merely to follow their waddlings and gyrations with the most foolish, and unnecessary submissiveness. The result is that one starts intending to fill a page with one subject, and before one has got very far one discovers that in reality one is filling it up with quite another!
September 6, 1899.
WE often say to one another that it is impossible that we can have been only two years and a half in possession here, so greatly has the scene changed in that time. Those two and a half years have done the work of many, or so it appears to us in our innocent vanity. Where I am now sitting three years ago stacks of raw planking rose out of the trampled briers and bluebells. The house stood roofed, but the inside was horrible. The reign of the Hammerer had spread to every creature with ears. Even in my own little nursery-garden—chosen in the first instance as the most remote spot—the sound of it went far to extinguish the nightingales. Now quietude and a sense of comparative settlement has stolen over the scene. Indoors, when the windows are open, the birds have it all their own way. Outdoors there is still much to be done, much to be harmonised and regulated, but the first sense of newness and desecration has, I think, wholly passed away. This then seems to be an appropriate moment for inaugurating a sort of running commentary upon the garden and its surroundings; setting forth what the spade has already done, and what the spade has still to do; what we possess in the way of plants, and what we still visibly lack; laying bare above all our failures and blunderings in the clearest of colours, with an eye, it is to be hoped, to their rectification. Such a record, honestly kept, must be a highly improving one to look back upon. A man’s proper shortcomings, writ out fair in black and white, should contain very edifying reading for that man himself, whatever it might be for anyone else. The worst is that, like other amended sinners, we may come to burn in time with the zeal of the missionary. Not content with our own private flagellations and exhortations, we may sigh to exhort and to flagellate others. Hence doubtless, that vast and increasing host of garden books, which so greatly decorate our bookshelves.
Yet after all a garden is a world in miniature, and, like the world, has a claim to be represented by many minds, surveying it from many sides. If it takes all sorts to make a world, it must take a good many varieties of gardeners to exhaust the subject of gardening. Assuming the said gardener to be of the right sort, naturally we accept his exhortations thankfully. Assuming him even not to be quite of the right sort—a mere harmless fumbler and bungler—still ’twere rash to assume that he can teach us nothing. Just as every garden—every real garden, owned by its owner—provides lessons for other garden owners, so even the written equivalent of such gardens, as long as they are genuine ones, not bits of confectionery tossed up to look pretty on tables, may claim the same praise. So frequently has this of late been brought home to me by experience that, give me only a writer who has faithfully toiled with his own spade, her own trowel, and I am ready to accept a new book at his or her hands every week in the year!
September 8, 1899
OUR indefatigable old Cuttle has just come to tell me that the new water-lily pond leaks, and that I must send for the bricklayer, in order to upbraid him. I am sometimes asked whether Cuttle is our gardener, and am always rather at a loss what to answer. Hardly, I suppose, seeing that he declines to take much notice of any of our flowers, with the exception of the roses, for which he has a passion. When he came to us three years ago it was merely “on job” from the builders. Our grounds, as grounds, had not then begun to exist. Cuttle stuck the first spade into them then and there, and from that minute their existence began. Since then he has grown to be more and more intimately identified with them, and that to such an extent that I find it difficult now to disentangle the one from the other. Followed by his obedient satellite and shadow, he ranges at large over all that lies between their holly-guarded boundaries. His spade, pick, axe, billhook are masters of all that come within their reach. Walks, and shrubberies, lawn, and flower-beds began within a short time of his appearance to emerge as if by magic out of their primal chaos. Order grew out of disorder; symmetry to be evolved, and light to break in upon the very duskiest of our entanglements. We have a habit of telling our friends that we ourselves “made” these grounds, but our part in the process has in reality been chiefly to sit still, and point our wands. It is Cuttle, Cuttle alone, who has been their real creator.
For sheer, beaver-like, apparently instinctive industry I have never in my life known his equal. For rooted self-opinionatedness not, I must add, very often. How he contrives to get through the amount of work he achieves in the course of every day, still more how he induces his subordinates to do the same, remains a perennial marvel to me. Possibly—seeing that my gardening experiences have hitherto lain a long way to the west of Surrey—my standard as regards manual labour is not of the highest. That our Cuttle is a typical Surrey labourer I decline however to believe, though theoretically that, and nothing loftier, is his status. Early in our acquaintance he discovered my ingenuous surprise over his prowess. Far from this suggesting to him that less activity would serve the turn, it seems to have only spurred him on to fresh and ever fresh assaults upon my astonishment. That there have now and then been inconveniences in this excess of energy I am free to confess, but that is hardly Cuttle’s fault. If, for instance, I remark that such or such new work had better be begun next week, my remark is usually received by him in apparently unheeding silence. Next day however, when I return to the charge, I am told with a smile of pity that the work in question is already done. As I have just hinted this sometimes places me in a position of some little embarrassment. Naturally the work produced at such high pressure rather represents Cuttle’s ideal of what it ought to be than mine. To show anything but delighted surprise would be to prove oneself utterly unworthy of such devoted service, and it is only therefore by degrees, and in the most circuitous and disingenuous fashion, that I am able little by little to reinstate my own ideas upon the more or less mutilated ruins of his.
In these early days of September, we stand once more at a new parting of the ways. Within the next six weeks all the essential part of what we hope to see accomplished by next summer must be at all events prepared, or it will be too late. Three chief undertakings at present engage our energies. First there is the new little water-lily pond, and its outer environment of bog. Secondly there is the “glade,” which, beginning at the upper portion of the copse near the house, runs somewhat steeply downhill to its lower end. Thirdly there is the “long” grass walk, which passing first along the last named, is eventually to traverse the whole of the lower portion of the copse, a distance of some six hundred yards, crossing as it does so the region of the tallest bracken, emerging for a while upon a gravel walk, which skirts the fence of our nursery-garden, thence, through another stretch of copse, and between two tall heather banks, into a fresh tract of birches and sweet chestnuts, till it finally attains the gate opening out upon the little common at the top.
One somewhat serious problem underlies these, as indeed all similar little enterprises. How far, one asks oneself, may the natural conformation of any given piece of ground be legitimately modified?—the most difficult, in my opinion, of the many small problems which confront the gardener. The lamentable declivities, the yet more terrible acclivities, which abound in a certain type of garden we all know; objects calculated to bring the blush of embarrassment to all but a hardened visitor’s cheek. Like other adornments it is less their artificiality than their deplorable lack of Art that so distresses us. These indeed are sad warnings, and, remembering them, it is well to misdoubt our own judgment, and to ask ourselves whether it were not better to abstain altogether from any attempts at modification, which might lead to results so humiliating and so disastrous?