There are however more encouraging omens. Anyone who has observed how casual, how purely accidental are many of the natural variations of surface which nevertheless give us pleasure, has a right to ask himself whether the spade may not be allowed to produce in a few days what sun, wind, rain, and similar agents can achieve in a few years. I am inclined to think that it may, only it must be a spade with eyes, and if possible with a brain behind it, and both are unusual with spades. In any case wisdom exhorts us to proceed very cautiously and modestly with all such changes. To be sure that in the first place they are called for, and in the second that they will suit with the features of our ground, and the scene in which it is set. Else, if we neglect these precautions, we too may come to swell the ranks of those who have made the very words “landscape gardening” and “landscape gardener” sounds of terror to all discriminating and nature-loving ears.
One of the least unsatisfactory ways of modifying one’s ground, and relieving its monotony, is, it seems to me, the “glade.” Glades may of course be of many forms, and may suggest many ideas. They may pierce through the dusky heart of a wood, or they may lie nakedly and stonily open to the sky. They may be furnished with trees, with bushes, with heather, with grass, or with alpine plants. On the whole the easiest glade to create, and certainly one of the pleasantest when made, is the grassy one. Even a perfectly level bit of ground can be induced with care to pass by gradations into a grassy glade, though where there is some natural slope the matter is of course very much easier. In that case all that is necessary is to add a sufficiency of earth on either side of the upper part of our incline, leaving the lower to merge by insensible degrees to the natural level. The essential point is not to miss the right moment for the sowing of the grass seed. This month of September is in this soil unquestionably the best month in the year for that purpose. August is apt to be too hot, October may be frosty, while spring sowings are in my experience exceedingly delusive. If the summer that follows them is wet, all goes well. Seeing however that each summer since we came here has been more thirsty than its predecessor, it were hardly the part of prudence to rely upon that.
It has been a satisfaction to us to find that a moderate upturning of the soil does not apparently disturb those inmates of it that we wish to retain. Bluebells and bracken both have their roots at a depth to which the spade in these operations need not penetrate, while to superimposed earth they appear to be quite indifferent. The spring that followed our first operations of this kind bluebells flowered better than usual, as if glad to be freed from some of their troublesome neighbours, especially probably that pest of copses, dog mercury. The introduced bulbs, which now share the ground with them, are mostly of the taller kinds, daffodils predominating, and for these the fact of the soil being all newly upturned is an advantage. Our present plan is that the sides of the glade shall remain permanently uncut, or cut at most once or twice a year, the central, or walking space, being kept regularly mown. The bulbs, being at the sides, will thus not suffer. Moreover the considerable difference of height between mown and unmown grass is bound to give height and emphasis to our little glade. As in the similar case of planting rock gardens, such considerations may seem to some poor devices. Yet upon the successful carrying out of them depends the whole of that “general effect” which is all that such critics probably heed. We are not, after all, Nature’s mandatories, and our little slopes are not Alps, or even alpine meadows. If we can attain to so much as a suggestion of the sort of thing we dream of we may rest content.
September 11, 1899
HERE on the bench beside me is a basketful of plants, not garden ones by any means, but weeds, mere ugly weeds, detested, and detestable, which, having pulled up, I was about to throw away. And, sitting down for a moment before doing so, I chanced to turn over two or three of them in idle mood, and in so doing have been captured unawares, as I have often been before, by the wonder, the mystery, of those ordinary processes of nature, which we all of us know so remarkably well, and which we certainly as a rule take such uncommonly little heed of.
Matthew Arnold has somewhere counselled us to let our minds dwell upon that great and inexhaustible word “Life,” till we learn to enter into its meaning. It was a critic’s and a poet’s counsel, but it might still more appropriately have been a naturalist’s or a botanist’s. Life is indeed one of the unescapable mysteries, a mystery that expands and grows as we consider it, even as the hosts of heaven seem to grow and multiply as they recede before our straining gaze. For, if we even put aside the more active animal world, and look merely at the comparatively placid vegetable one, is it possible to think of it for a moment without being overwhelmed, as it were stunned, by the vastness of its effects; by the complexity of its untiring energy? To take only one of the results of that energy. It is the plants of the world, especially those which we are in the habit of calling its weeds, which constitute its great restraining forces. The operations of inorganic nature tend for the most part towards obliteration; towards the rubbing down of landmarks, towards the effacing of all individuality in the landscape. Water, tumbling as snow, hardens into ice, and rasps away continually at the surfaces of the mountains. Rivers scrape off, and carry away with them, every particle of earth that they meet with on their journey to the sea. As for the sea, we know that its one object ever since it came into existence has been, day by day, and at each returning tide, to encroach upon, and devour more and more of the heritage of its brother the earth. Seeing that the land we live on occupies only about a third part of the superficies of the globe, it follows that the whole of what is now dry land could easily be disposed of below the water; indeed it has been ascertained that were it thus neatly tucked and tidied away, the level of the ocean would be only altered by less than a hundred feet. It is due mainly to the untiring vigour, to the extraordinary binding power of plants, that this consummation has been averted. Their office has been to hinder a tendency which, even if it had not ended in the submergence of the whole earth, would at least have washed and pared away its irregularities to one deadly monotonous level. Trees and bushes do much in this direction, but it is the little clinging weeds, which as gardeners we detest, and would so gladly annihilate: these crowfoots—why not, by the way, crowfeet?—with their crowding roots; these knotgrasses, these clinging bind-weeds,—it is such as they, backed by sea-spurreys, and bents, and by reeds and rushes innumerable, that do more to keep the waters of the globe in order, and to maintain dry land, than man, with all his dykes, dams, embankments, and such like accumulations, since first he began to strut or to caper over its surface.
But the journey which lies before one’s thoughts when once they embark upon this river we call “Life,” is indeed too big for them even imaginatively to attempt. Our boats are so small, and the river so wide, that one soon loses sight of shore. Even if, abandoning these perplexing living things, one falls back upon the mere inorganic forces of the world, what a prodigious amount of energy here too comes into play! Nature everywhere eternally building up, and with apparently no blind hand, but with a most clear, definite, and shaping policy. It is good for us to escape now and then out of our own hot and fussy little rooms, into these larger, cooler spaces; yet, if a wholesome, it cannot be said to be entirely a gratifying experience. For how soon, even in the simplest of such matters, does one arrive, like the people in the Pilgrim’s Progress at a place called “Stop”? How soon does thought practically cease, and one remains dumb and gasping, like some poor dull beast, in a mere, vacant-eyed daze of wonder? “The mind of man"—it was one who knew what he was talking about that said it—“is an indifferent sort of musical instrument, with a certain range of notes, beyond which, upon both sides, there is an infinitude of silence.”
September 12, 1899
THE Epic of Weeding has still to be written! It should be undertaken in no light or frolic vein, but with all the gravity that the subject demands. What I should wish to see would be either a careful scientific treatise by a competent authority, or, what would perhaps be still better, a great poem, which, like all the highest poetry, would go straight to the very soul of the subject, and leave the votary of it satisfied for ever. To the earnest-minded Weeder, most other occupations seem comparatively subordinate. Blank is that day some portion of which has not been devoted to faithful weeding. Blank is that night in which, as he lays his head upon the pillow, he cannot say to himself that such, or such a piece of ground has been thoroughly cleared, and will not require to be done again—for quite a fortnight!
One disadvantage it certainly has, but then it is one that it shares with all the other higher, and more absorbing pursuits. If inordinately pursued, it tends to grow upon its votary, until everything else becomes subsidiary. What was originally a virtue, may thus in time come near to growing into a vice. Of this danger I am myself a proof. There have been moments—not many, nevertheless some—when I have found myself sighing for more weeds to conquer. Worse, I have had the greatest difficulty on more than one occasion to keep myself from pouncing upon my neighbour’s perfectly private chickweeds and groundsels, which I have happened to catch sight of across a fence!