Oh rash, and hurrying ignorance! Put the holder of so untenable a doctrine alone, for ever so short a time, especially in the winter, in the solitary depths of the country, and how soon a perception of his or her own utter transitoriness will begin to break through the thinly formed crust of the new, and the superimposed. Let him lift his garden latch, and step out beyond it into the open country. Let him saunter alone in the woods after dusk. Let him walk across the solitary, blackened heather. Let him look down upon the floods, lace-making over the lowlands. Let him—without taking so much trouble as this—merely lean out of his window after dusk, amid the thickening shadows, and he must be of a remarkably unimpressionable turn of mind if the sense of his own shadowiness, his own inherent transitoriness, is not the clearest, strongest, and most convincing of all his sensations.
Thus vanity provides its own solution, and the little inflated soul is driven into puncturing its own proudly swelling balloon. We discover—sometimes with no little dismay—that it is not alone in our flower-beds that the wild and the tame, the temporary and the permanent, the real and the artificial, meet, jostle, and rub shoulders together. Sir Primitive is a remarkably difficult person to escape from. His blood still courses unheeded through our own veins, and he is as much a part of ourselves as he is a part of the most sophisticated of our plants or our animals. We may imagine that we have left him behind us, and outgrown his teachings, and the very next day something will occur to show us that he is at our elbows all the time, as strong, as fresh, and as absolutely unaffected by any little modern innovations as he ever was.
September 26, 1899
YET, although undoubtedly our ancestor, Sir Primitive stands a good way back on the family tree, and other influences have grown up since his time to disturb his teachings. The fear of becoming too tidy, for instance, does not at first sight seem to be a very reasonable fear. It has not been imputed to many people as a failing, especially to those who happen to have been born to the westward of St. George’s Channel! Nevertheless there are moments when a wild passion for tidiness, a perfect thirst and craving for order, seems to sweep across the soul like a wave; when everything else that one habitually cares for is flung back, and overwhelmed before it, even as the hosts of Pharaoh were flung back, and overwhelmed before the cold, subduing waters of the Red Sea.
We are all the children of our age; there is no getting over that fact; heirs of a hardly won civilisation, let us call ourselves Wild Wilfulness, or any other law-defying name, as much as we please. Yearning to show that our spirits are above all trammels, that we are as free as the birds in the air, we nevertheless all sit in identical armchairs, eat the food the cooks provide us, and in most other respects exhibit about as much originality as so many stair-rods.
It is only necessary to consider what happens every day of the week in the garden to perceive that this is the case. We have adopted the most independent line possible; we have vowed that our gardens shall be natural ones, or nothing. We adore flowery wildernesses, we declare. We want our plants to grow as Nature intended them to do, and not as the hireling gardener does. We intend to put a limit to the eternal bolstering up of our soil with all sorts of extraneous elements; above all we will have nothing to say to the clipping of our shrubs into unreal shapes, nor yet to the planting of our bulbs, and other flowering plants into lines, squares, and parallelograms, but all shall be a melting and a blending of one harmonious form into another; every detail, as far as the eye can reach, being subordinated to the larger and more important spirit of the landscape as a whole.
So we say! And yet, after the flag of freedom has been thus ostentatiously raised, what happens? As often as not we find ourselves, by the logic of facts, and by the realities of the situation, forced slowly to retreat, as other and equally eminent strategists have been forced before us. A flowery wilderness is delightful, but unless its owner is content with the flowers that grow in it by nature, or a few, very cautious additions, his flowery wilderness is apt after a time to become a wilderness, minus the flowers. Then perhaps a reaction sets in. A sense of failure gradually overtakes the too ardent amateur. The reins of authority drop more and more listlessly from his hands; until at last he lets them fall altogether, and, with a smile of kindly pity, the momentarily dispossessed professional once more resumes full, and henceforth undivided sway.
From so humiliating a finale may all the kindly divinities that watch over gardens deliver ourselves! Nevertheless there have been moments when such a fate has seemed to draw near, and even to look one in the eyes. Only three days ago I was engaged in that breathless struggle with the bracken. For the last two, aided by Cuttle and his assistant, I have been fighting ankle-deep against a perfect forest of couch-grass, which had practically overwhelmed the whole of our nursery-garden, helped rather than hindered by the fence, with which we had innocently hoped to keep back, not alone rabbits, but every other trespasser.
Worse than the conduct of the couch-grass, because of a certain personal element in it, has been the conduct of the rose-campion. Now I have been exceedingly kind to that rose-campion. Again and again I have intervened to rescue it, when it was on the point of being rooted out, and consigned to the dust-heap. Only last spring I carried its roots by hundreds with my own hands, and re-established them in a special reservation ground, where they might spread unmolested over a good half-acre or so of copse. What has been the result? They have indeed clothed their allotted space, but, not content with this, they have burst like a horde of Ojibeway Indians, or some such aborigines, out of their reservation, across the frontiers of civilisation, sending out myriads of seedlings ahead of them, like a flight of skirmishers, and are now nearly as numerous collectively, and far more luxuriant individually, in the nursery, than they are in the copse itself!
Incidents like these wound one, and are more trying for that reason to the amateur gardener than to the professional one, who probably regards them as only to be expected. I am far from saying that they constitute a sufficient reason for surrender, but they certainly seem to need the aid of a higher quality than mere secular doggedness, to enable one to grapple with them as one ought. It is moreover such occurrences as these that produce that extraordinary thirst for order, that very unlooked-for passion for tidiness, which I just now noted. After a day or two passed in such struggles as these one begins to understand the pride of the colonist in pure, speckless Ugliness; in beautifully clean, naked earth, varied by straight lines of split-wood fences, or the like. I have not as yet reached that point myself, and am glad to feel that I can still tolerate Nature. All the same a sort of nurseryman’s attitude towards everything tainted with wildness is fast gaining upon me, and unless I can check both it, and this overweening love of tidiness while there is time, I plainly foresee that there will shortly be nothing else left!