But though one part of the garden is set apart for herbs and another for vegetables, you must not imagine that they are only to be found there. Fine clumps of parsley have planted themselves in among the annual larkspurs; mint persists in running riot among the pink and white mallows (but the mint family never remains quietly at home); a sturdy scarlet runner comes up, year after year, beside a great bush of gum cistus, which makes me think it might be treated as a perennial; it seems impossible to get the artichokes to part company with the Michaelmas daisies, while raspberry canes shoot up among the old-fashioned red fuchsia bushes; radishes are flourishing like the green bay-tree underneath the sweetbriar; a regiment of pickling onions is living on most neighbourly terms with a row of cup-and-saucer Canterbury bells; and as for rhubarb—well, what can you expect when one man, whom I employed for a brief spell, remarked:
“You’ll see where I’ve put in that thur special rubbub, miss, because I’ve planted a traveller’s joy a-top of he to mark the spot.”
Cupid’s Border is another section of this garden that may interest you. Here you naturally find Love-in-a-mist and Love-lies-bleeding. The flowers which the country folks call Love-lockets dangle pink and white from their graceful curving stems; (alas, in catalogues and places where they know, this plant is merely regarded as dielytra). In this border you of course find forget-me-nots “that grow for happy lovers”; bachelor’s buttons, too, hold up their heads in a very sprightly manner, and please notice that they are getting nearer and nearer to the clump of Sweet Betsy. But the bachelor’s buttons have a rival, for the other side of Sweet Betsy stands lad’s love—and though not so showy as the bachelor’s buttons, lad’s love claims to be of more solid worth. I leave them to settle the matter between themselves, however; I’m not one to interfere in such affairs.
At the other side of the border stands a maiden’s blush rose, and gallantly waving beside it is a clump of Prince’s Feather (sometimes referred to in common parlance as “they laylock bushes”). At the edge of the border you naturally find heartsease, not the stiff, over-developed article of modern flower-shows, but the old-fashioned sort, all streaks and splashes of rich purple and yellow.
There is no time now to go round the vegetable garden—not that this can be regarded as an entirely separate part of the estate, for the vegetables have got mixed up in a terribly haphazard way with the rest of things, as I hinted just now. The potato-plot, for instance, has a border of golden wallflowers all round and double daisies at the edge, with a row of giant sunflowers, hollyhocks, and clumps of honesty at the back.
This mixture is partly in the nature of a compromise. The gentleman who wields the spade has to be taken into account. No matter who he is, no matter how often he discharges me and I have to beg yet someone else to “oblige” me, it is always the same, the tiller of the soil regards space given over to flowers as a grievous waste, not to say an indication of feeble-mindedness! Therefore he inserts a row of vegetables or seeds whenever I happen to have cleared out some flowering plants and left a morsel of space pro tem. It seems a prevailing idea among the non-qualified working classes, in rural districts, that the cultivation of flowers ranks about on a level with doing the washing—work derogatory to a man and only fit for women!
To the credit of the handy man I must say that on one occasion he did kindly present me with a load of pig manure. He put it on the flower garden the day before we arrived, as a pleasant surprise, which it certainly was! Next day we all had relatives with broken legs, who needed our immediate return to town.
Nevertheless the vegetables play their part, and assume no small importance, in due course; for it is another unwritten law of this cottage that visitors shall go out and select the day’s vegetables, and cut them with the dew on; of course, if they are superlatively lazy, they can meanly get some early riser to do it for them; also they can confer together, or each can gather her own choice.