From Dublin to Chicago: Some Notes on a Tour in America

by George A. Birmingham

With the alertness and hopefulness there goes, inevitably, a certain restlessness. "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't" is a proverb which appeals to the English man. It could never be popular in America. The American, if he made up his mind to go in for the acquaintance of devils at all, would be inclined to try the newer kinds, not merely because he would be hopeful about them, but because he would feel sure that the old ones would bore him. He would never settle down to a monotonous cat and dog life with a thoroughly familiar devil. The Englishman prefers to remain where he is unless the odds are in favor of a change being a change for the better. The American will make a change unless he thinks it likely to be a change for the worse.

We were greatly struck while we were in America by the fact that there were very few gardens there. The season of the year, late autumn, was not, indeed, favorable to gardens. Still I think we should have recognized flower beds and the remains of flowers if we had seen them. At first we were inclined to think that Americans do not care for flowers; but we were constantly assured, on unimpeachable authority, that they do. And we were not dependent on mere assertion. We saw that Americans adorn their rooms with cut flowers, sometimes at huge expense. They must therefore like flowers. They also, we were told, like growing them; but as a matter of fact they do not grow them to anything like the same extent that flowers are grown in England or Ireland. We used to ask why people who like flowers and would like to grow them have so few gardens. We got several answers. The climate, of course, was one. But it is not fair to make the climate responsible for too many things. Besides the climate, as I have said before, is not the same all over America. It is difficult to believe that it is everywhere fatal to gardening.

Another answer—a much more satisfactory one—was that it takes time to create a garden, and Americans do not usually stay long enough in one house to make it worth while to start gardening. It is plainly an unsatisfactory thing to inaugurate a herbaceous border in 1914 if you are likely to leave it early in 1915. As for yew hedges and delights of that kind, no one plants them unless he has a good hope that his son will be there to enjoy them after he has gone. The American, so we were told, and so of course believed, is always looking forward to moving into a new house. This is because he is alert, sanguine and a lover of change. The Englishman is inclined to settle down in one house, and it is very difficult to root him out of it. Therefore gardens are commonly possible in England and rarely so in America.

We did indeed see some gardens in America, and they were tended with all the care which flower lovers display everywhere. We saw in them plants brought from very different places, round which there doubtless gathered all sorts of associations, whose blossoms were redolent with the perfume of happy memories as well as their own natural scents. But these gardens belonged to men who either through the necessity of their particular occupation or through some eccentricity of character felt that they were likely to remain in one place.

Gardens are generally best loved and most carefully tended by women. I have known men who took a real interest in plants, but for the most part men who spend their leisure hours in gardens occupy themselves in mowing the grass or scuffling the walks. They will trim the edges of flowerbeds with shears, they will sometimes even dig, but their hearts are not with the growing plants. Often they confess as much openly, saying without shame that mowing is capital exercise after office hours, or that the celery bed must be properly trenched if it is to come to perfection. No one who works in this spirit is a gardener, nor is a man who merely desires a tidy trimness. To the real gardener neatness is an unimportant detail. It is better that a flower should grow in a bed with ragged edges than that it should wither slowly in the middle of the trimmest of lawns. It is women, far oftener than men, who possess or are possessed by the instinct for getting things to grow. It is after all a sort of mother instinct, since flowers, like children, only respond to those who love them. Probably every woman who has the mother instinct has the garden instinct too, and most women, we may be thankful for it, are potentially good mothers.

Perhaps it is the fact that he is content to stay still long enough to render gardens possible which makes the Englishman attractive as a husband. It is easy to understand that there is something very fascinating to a garden lover in the prospect of attachment to one particular spot. It is a great thing to feel: "Here I shall live until the end of living comes, and then my sons will live here after me. All the rockeries I build, all the trees I plant, all my pergolas and rose hedges are for delight in coming years, for delight still in the years beyond my span of living." This instinct for a settled home, of which a garden is the symbol, is surely stronger in woman than in any man. Woman is after all the stable part of humanity. Man fights, invents, frets, fusses and passes. Woman is the link between the generations. Man makes life possible and great. It is woman who continues life, hands it on. Her nature requires stability. She feels after settledness in the hope of finding it.

If I were a philosopher I should pursue these speculations and write several pages about men and women which it would be very difficult for any one to understand. But I have no taste for hunting elusive thoughts among the shadows of vague words. I am content to note my little facts; that American men are more restless than Englishmen, that there are fewer gardens in America than in England, that most women like gardens, and that there are more marriages between American women and Englishmen than between English women and American men.

I came across a curious example of American restlessness a little while ago. There was a footman, very expert in his business, who lived and earned good wages in an English house. He was an ambitious footman, and, though his wages were good, he wanted them to be better still. His opportunity came to him. An American wanted a valet and was prepared to pay very large wages indeed. The footman offered his services, and being, as I said, a very good footman, he secured the vacant position, and the wages which were far beyond any he would ever have earned in England. At the end of two years he happened to meet the butler under whom he had served in the English house. The butler congratulated him on his great wealth. The footman, now a valet, replied that there are several things in the world better worth having than money.

"I haven't," he said, "slept a fortnight at a time in the same bed since I left you, and it's killing me."

Now that would not have killed or gone near killing an American born footman, if there is such a thing as an American born footman. He would have enjoyed it, just as his master did; for that American, being very wealthy, could if he liked have slept in the same bed every night for a year, every night for many years, until indeed the bed wore out. He preferred to vary his beds as much as possible. He had, no doubt, many beds which were in a sense his own, beds in town houses, beds in shooting boxes, beds in fishing lodges, beds in Europe, beds which he had bought with money and to which he had an indefeasible title as proprietor. But not one of these was, as an Englishman would understand the words, his own bed. There was not one to which he came back after wandering as to a familiar resting place. They were all just couches to sleep on, to be occupied for a night or two, indistinguishable from those which he hired in hotels.