They were just what we wanted; they were moved at the right time; they were packed with care; they were not unreasonably long on the road; they arrived to all appearance in excellent health; they were received with all the respect they deserved, and their wants provided for as far as our poor knowledge of those wants enabled us to cater for them. Never were elaborate arrangements less handsomely rewarded. Seasons returned, but never have to us returned those plants so generously bestowed, so hopefully planted. In my private garden-book a list of them still exists, and a very black list it is to refer to. There they stand, as they were written down in all the pride of proprietorship. Unhappily a later entry shows a large round O standing out prominently against nearly every one of them. Now a round O in that book signifies Death.
From this disaster we arose chastened gardeners. It was determined that no more guileless plants should be brought to such a fate; no more kindly owners exploited for so inadequate a result. Remembering the good, dark, comfortable earth from which most of those plants came; sadly surveying the very different earth to which they had been consigned, the cause of their doom could hardly be called mysterious.
Friendly gardens, unless labouring under our own disabilities, being thus excluded, the question remained how were the flower-beds to get themselves filled? Only one answer to that question has ever presented itself to the professional gardening mind, and that is “Send to the nurseryman.”
Now that nurseryman may or may not be an excellent one. Ours, as it happens, may fairly I think be called so. Good or bad he is never a functionary to be approached without deference, at least by those in whose eyes Thrift stands for something in the battle of life. “But common plants are so cheap” one is often told. Very likely, they may be; indeed, judging by their catalogues, nurserymen stand habitually astonished before the spectacle of their own moderation. An average herbaceous plant—a lupin, or a larkspur, let us say—costs as a rule about ninepence. It may sink as low as sixpence, or it may rise as high as a shilling. Anybody, it will be argued, can afford sixpence; some people have been known to spend a whole shilling without wincing. A very short walk along any ordinary garden border, calculating as one goes the number of sixpennyworths it would take to fill it, will be found an excellent corrective for such lightheartedness. I made such a calculation myself only the other day, and the result was an eminently sobering one.
Seeds on the other hand are honestly cheap. There are expensive seedsmen, but generally speaking, threepence is the price of a fair-sized packet of the commoner perennials, and sixpence for one of the scarcer kinds. This initial difference is, however, an infinitesimal part of the real one. It is the magnificent possibilities, the vast fecundity of those sixpences, as compared with the others, which is the real point. Not one plant, but dozens of plants, often hundreds of plants, may be the result of a single successful sowing, nor is the time lost by such sowings nearly as great as people seem to imagine.
But the number of plants to be had in the course of a year by this means is only part of the advantage to be gained by it. The great advantage is that by so doing one’s plants become acquainted betimes with the qualities of the soil in which they find themselves, and, so getting acquainted, they reconcile themselves to it, as we most of us do reconcile ourselves to any environment, however little naturally to our taste, which has compassed us round from babyhood. To come to details. Alpine plants, though small to look at, are for the most part tolerably dear to buy. If a man, “whatever his sex!” loves his alpines, is determined to have them, has a fairly big alpine garden or border to fill, but will not be at the trouble of rearing them from seed, then I shall be rather sorry for that man’s pocket. A few of them—notably the Androsaces—are not amiable in the matter of germination, and these therefore require a mother-plant or two to begin upon. Others, of which the gentians may be taken as a type, are unendurably slow in appearing, though, if a safe place can be found for their seed-box, and it is then forgotten, the time passes! The great majority of alpines, fortunately, will grow perfectly well from seed, even ultra-fastidious ones, such as Silene acaulis, or Ramondia pyrenaica, which for that reason rank high in nurserymen’s catalogues, doing perfectly well with care, and, of course, at a fiftieth part of the cost.
Details like these have a sordid ring, and I have to remind myself that it is upon the successful wrestling with them that one’s ultimate failure or triumph wholly hinges. Thrift, moreover, is the badge of every proper-minded husbandman, and it is according to the thriftiness of his husbandry that Nature rewards his labours. “But Nature,” I hear some caviller exclaim, “Nature is herself the most reckless of spend-thrifts. She is the very mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother of extravagance. She squanders her treasures as the rain-clouds squander their raindrops, and tosses her wealth abroad like dust upon the desert air”! True, she does do all this, but I am not aware that she ever specially desired that her children should follow her example. “What are your poor little savings? your petty extravagancies?” we might imagine her saying, “that they should be likened to mine?” Further, by an odd paradox, it is upon her wastefulness that our thrift rests most securely. We possess say one solitary plant of some given kind, and we find that with that single plant her lavishness has freely provided us with the material of a hundred, possibly many hundred others. There is scarcely a plant we can name that by some means or another—by division, by layers, by seeds, by cuttings, or by some other equally simple variation of the garden craft—may not be multiplied almost without limit. Truly there is something staggering about such fecundity, and the brain of even the strongest gardener might be expected to whirl as he contemplates it. Following in imagination the history of almost any flowering plant—yonder pimpernel astray on the gravel will do—giving it only time enough, a fair field, and not too many rivals, and we shall find that it has gone far towards peopling every waste place within reach; nay, if the process could be continued long enough, by the mere law of its organic existence its descendants are capable of reddening their entire native countryside for a dozen miles around.
September 16, 1899
FEW forms of frailty are more lamentable than vanity, and few variations of vanity have for some time back seemed to me more stamped with puerility than garden vanity. Can anything be imagined more childish, or less worthy of a reasonable human being, than for A or Z to pride themselves on the fact that whereas Horificus globuratus fl. pl. flourishes like a weed in their gardens, it entirely refuses to grow in those of B or X, despite the fact that B and X have remade the greater part of their borders, in a spirit of slavish emulation? The same argument applies, even more forcibly, to other details, such as the making of cuttings, or layers, the carrying of tender plants through the winter, the satisfactory growing of vegetables, and so forth; operations which ought to be approached in the largest and most enlightened spirit, and never for a moment made the subject of mere petty self-satisfaction, or of a narrow and arrogant self-laudation.
This point being thoroughly settled, I now proceed to draw out a list of plants grown successfully from seed by ourselves during the last three years; premising that this is only our first list, chiefly of rock-plant seedlings, and that I shall have another, much longer, and much more important one to draw up when the right time comes!