From this list I have carefully omitted all our defeats. Victors I observe, invariably do so!
September 25, 1899
THE gardener seems to pass amongst his kinsfolk and acquaintance for a rather feeble, but more or less meditative sort of man. His trade is held, I perceive, to be productive of some of the milder forms of philosophy. Like the angler he enjoys a rather supercilious consideration on that account from his more violently active brethren.
“You are such a patient fellow,” they say. “You don’t care how long you stay pottering over one small spot. Such quiet ways of going on would never do for us!”
This may be the case, but I cannot say that I have personally observed, either in myself, or other gardeners, any tendency to exhibit more placidity over the cares and crosses of a garden, than over any of the other cares and crosses of existence. As for philosophy, a certain sort of cheap moralising a garden is certainly rather productive of. It sprouts unheeded along the walks, and may be extracted with greater facility than most of the weeds. That “life is short”; that “flesh is grass”; that man groweth up in the spring time, and is cut down in the autumn—such innocent and obvious sprouts of morality as these may certainly be gathered in a good many of its neglected corners. With regard to all the larger and more vital growths of philosophy, I am afraid that they require to be successfully sought for upon wider and more strenuous battlefields.
Lessons of course may be gathered in a garden, as in most other places. For the owner, the most wholesome of these is perhaps that he never really is its owner at all. His garden possesses him—many of us know only too well what it is to be possessed by a garden—but he never, in any true sense of the word, possesses it. He remains one of its appanages, like its rakes or its watering-pots; a trifle more permanent, perhaps, than an annual, but with no claim assuredly to call himself a perennial.
In no garden is this fact more startlingly the case than in those that we have, as we fatuously call it, “made” ourselves. For the owners of such a garden, the precariousness of their tenure is the first thing, I think, that is forced upon their attention. And the reason is simple. In older ones, the reign of the primitive has, to a greater or less extent, ceased, and the reign of the artificial has become the rule. The Wild still flourishes in them, but it has become a mere pariah, a vegetable outcast. Chickweed on the walks, nettles in the shrubbery, daisies in the lawn. “What does this mean? Who gave you leave to be here? Away with you at once, intruders that you are!” that is the habitual standpoint. Now in a new garden, especially a garden that has been won out of the adjacent woodlands, the sense of intrusion is felt—ought to be felt—to be all the other way. It is the so-called owners who are here the trespassers; the unwarrantable intruders; the squatters of a few months’, at most of a few years’, standing. The bracken, the honeysuckles, the briers, the birds—these are the established proprietors; it is they that can show all the documents of original possession. We may have to eject them, but at least it should be done respectfully; with such compensation for disturbance as would be adjudged in any properly constituted agrarian court in the Universe.
Only yesterday these reflections were forced upon my mind as I found myself, for the third time engaged in a life and death struggle with the bracken, which has once more invaded our newly made flower borders, and threatens to gather their whole contents bodily into its capacious grasp. This is, and always must be, a peculiarly humiliating sort of struggle to be engaged in, and not the less so if one remains temporarily the victor. In the first place, one is deeply conscious of the vandalism of trying to get rid of an object immeasurably more beautiful than any of the plants one thrusts it aside for. In the second place, there is a sense of absurdity and futility, which is strongly upon one all the time. Mrs. Partington, in her efforts at sweeping back the Atlantic Ocean with her broom, was hardly a more conspicuous instance of misplaced energy than such attempts to suppress and control the exuberant green waves, the abounding vitality, of our own magnificent, indomitable bracken.
Even where humiliating struggles like these have ceased to be necessary, how slight an excrescence this whole business that we call ownership really is; how strong, how deeply rooted the state of things which it has momentarily superseded. Let the so-called owner relax his self-assertiveness for ever so short a period; let him and his myrmidons depart for a while upon their travels, and how swiftly the whole fabric rushes remorselessly back to its original condition. And why not? What can be more absolutely to be expected? Nor need we even stop at the garden, the farm, the house, or any similar chattel. Even ourselves, sophisticated little creatures though we be, in how many ways we remain the accessories, rather than the masters, of our environment? For a time, especially in towns, we manage to conceal this truth from ourselves. We pretend that we have remodelled matters to our liking; that Nature has become our follower; that our law, not hers, runs through the planet; that we set the tune, and that she merely plays it.