But it is in these wide gardens that the earliest strawberries are grown, and to them the reporter of the local newspaper goes in search of the gigantic gooseberry or the potato weighing four pounds and three ounces; and that is what the good ladies with the abhorred shears and the baskets—the Atropussiies, in whose hands lie the fates of the fruits as well as of the flowers—consider the sum of high gardening: the growth of the abnormal is their aim and they are as proud of their achievement as the townsman who took to poultry was of his when he exhibited a bantam weighing six pounds.
Now I hold that gardens are like nurseries—nurseries of children, I mean—and that all make an appeal to one's better nature, that none can be visited without a sense of pleasure even though it may be no more than is due to the anticipation of getting away from them; therefore, I would not say a word against the types which I venture to describe; as I have found them. The worst that I can say of them is that they are easily described, and the garden or the girl that can be described will never be near my heart. Those gardens are not the sort that I should think of marrying, though I can live on the friendliest of terms with them, particularly in the strawberry season. They do not appeal to the imagination as do the small and irregular ones at the rear of the grocer's, the stationer's, the fishmonger's, the bootmaker's, or the chymist's—in this connection I must spell the name of the shop with a y: the man who sits in such a garden is a chymist, not a chemist. I could not imagine a mere chemist sniffing the rosemary and the tansy and the rue au naturel: the mere chemist puts his hand into a drawer and weighs you out an ounce of the desiccated herbs.
In one of Mr. Thomas Hardy's earlier novels—I think it is The Mayor of Casterbridge—he describes a town, which is very nearly as delightfully drowsy as our Yardley Parva, as one through which the bees pass in summer from the gardens at one side to those at the other. In our town I feel sure that the bees that enter among the small gardens of sweet scents and savours at one end of the High Street, never reach the gardens of the gigantic gooseberry at the other; unless they make a bee-line for them at the moment of entering; for they must find their time fully occupied among the snapdragons of the old walls, the flowers of the veronica bushes, and the buttons of the tall hollyhocks growing where they please.
When I made, some years ago, a tour of Wessex, I went to Casterbridge on a July day, and the first person I met in the street was an immense bee, and I watched him hum away into the distance just as Mr. Hardy had described him. He seemed to be boasting that he was Mr. Hardy's bee, just as a Presbyterian Minister, who had paid a visit to the Holy Land to verify his quotations, boasted of the reference made to himself in another Book.
“My dear friends,” said he, “I read in the Sacred Book the prophecy that the land should be in heaps; I looked up from the page, and there, before my very eyes, lay the heaps. I read that the bittern should cry there; I looked up, and lo! close at hand stood the bittern. I read that the Minister of the Lord should mourn there: I was that Minister.”
But there are two or three gardens—now that I come to think of it there are not so many as three—governed by the houses of the “better-class people” (so they were described to me when I first came to Yardley Parva), which are everything that a garden should he. Their trees have not been cut down as they used to be forty years ago, to allow the flowers to have undisputed possession. In each there are groups of sycamore, elm, and silver birch, and their position makes one feel that one is on the border of a woodland through which one might wander for hours. There are tulip-trees, and a fine arbutus on an irregular, slightly-sloping lawn, and a couple of enormous drooping ashes—twenty people can sit in the green shade of either. In graceful groups there are laburnums and lilacs. Farther down the slope is a well-conceived arrangement of flower-beds cut out of the grass. Nearly everything in the second of these gardens is herbaceous; but its roses are invariably superb, and its lawn with a small lily pond beside it, is ideal. The specimen shrubs on a lower lawn are perfect as regards both form and flower, and while one is aware of the repose that is due to a thoughtful scheme of colour, one is conscious only of the effect, never being compelled to make use of the word artistic. As soon as people begin to talk of a garden being artistic you know that it has failed in its purpose, just as a portrait-painter has failed if you are impressed with the artistic side of what he has done. The garden is not to illustrate the gardener's art any more than the portrait is to make manifest the painter's. The garden should be full of art, but so artfully introduced that you do not know that it is there. I have heard a man say as if he had just made a unique discovery,—
“How extraordinary it is that the arrangements of colour in Nature are always harmonious!”