One thing I have never yet managed to do is to keep cool and collected, my misfortune being that I boil up so soon. My hat gets out of angle, my hair flattens out where it ought to be wavy, and waves around where it ought to lie flat; and—worst of all—it ceases to worry me that these things are so.
And then I open a periodical wherein some unknown celebrity has been photographed “at home”; and she is sure to be shown “in the garden,” where, behold! you see her in the airiest of fashionable nothings in the way of a white frock, accompanied by a ten-guinea hat, a twenty-guinea dog, and a sixpence-halfpenny trowel—all worn with consummate photographic grace, as she artlessly sets to work to transplant a hoary wistaria that has smothered the (photographer’s) verandah for fifty years, explaining to the interviewer, meanwhile, how she simply adores gardening, how she gets all her ideas for the dresses she wears in the third act from her pet bed of marigolds, and how she never dreams of taking part in a first night performance without having previously run the lawn-mower twice round the gravel paths.
Clever creature; you don’t wonder she is labelled a celebrity; any woman who can keep that hat on while using that trowel, has accomplished something!
I didn’t feel like hoeing just then, no matter what the cost of my gardening outfit. The moment seemed to call for non-strenuous occupation that would admit of leisurely movement and unlimited pauses with nothing doing—which is what I find a mind like mine requires.
Of course there was plenty of hoeing waiting to be done, there always is; I never knew a soil so chock-full of weed-seeds as ours seems to be, and I never knew a place where folks are so little worried by them. Where things grow as easily as they do about our hills and valleys (and where the angle of the garden is just what ours is), you will find that the native reduces land-labour to the minimum, and nothing is disturbed unless absolutely necessary. Reasonably, if you have left the hoe at the top of the garden, and the top is a hundred feet above the bottom of the garden where you are standing, you think twice before you climb up and fetch it.
As one result of this universal conservation of energy, our local nettle crop is one of the finest in the kingdom, I verily believe.
“Why are those things left standing in every field corner?” I asked a farmer on one occasion, pointing to the usual grey-green waving jungle of weeds.
“They nettles?” he questioned, in surprise; “well, what’s the good of wasting attention on ’em? They don’t hurt no one!”
Incidentally I may say it is always well to criticize the methods employed on other people’s land rather than those practised on your own, since most right-minded employés resent any implication, no matter how politely you wrap it up, that improvement is possible; and if you question the why and wherefore of anything, it may be mistaken for fault-finding in this imaginative age. Hence, unless the handy man chances to be one of exceptional make up, I go farther afield when gleaning information.