It is fortunate that we are not all provided with equally favourable sites and soils. How monotonous would gardening become if one knew that he had but to act, deed for deed, as his neighbour in order to attain exactly the same garden result. We should feel disposed to throw down our spades and trowels if the end of our efforts might be foreseen by looking over our neighbour's boundary. If the difficulties to be overcome could be formally catalogued, the whole art of gardening would be reduced to a wooden system in which there would be little room for surprise or pleasure. But Fate has decreed that our gardens shall differ in spite of the apish copying spirit which still fills so many of our breasts. Our sites vary, our soils vary, and our atmospheric conditions vary to such an extent that any gardener, if he is to produce a result of any worth, must perforce use his native intelligence in order to overcome the specific difficulties peculiar to his plot of earth.
POPPY ANEMONES
Gardening readers will remember Dean Hole's story of the enthusiastic flower-loving navvy who, obtaining the post of gatekeeper on the railway, was provided with nothing but a barren gravel pit as apology for a garden. "Twelve months afterwards," says the Dean, "I came near the place again—was it a mirage which I saw on the sandy desert? There were vegetables, fruit-bushes and fruit-trees, all in vigorous health; there were flowers, and the flower-queen in her beauty, 'Why, Will,' I exclaimed, 'what have you done to[13][14] the gravel-bed?' 'Lor' bless yer,' he replied, grinning, 'I hadn't been here a fortnight afore I swopped it for a pond!' He had, as a further explanation informed me, and after an agreement with a neighbouring farmer, removed with pick and barrow his sandy stratum to the depth of three feet, wheeled it to the banks of an old pond, or rather to the margin of a cavity where a pond once was, but which had been gradually filled up with leaves and silt; and this rich productive mould he had brought home a distance of two hundred yards, replacing it with the gravel, and levelling as per contract."
That man's garden was a real living creation: it was indeed a "great work." And it is in everything true that great natural possessions, though they may render life more comfortable and possibly more apparently successful, yet make the battle the tamer and less interesting. Indeed the greater the odds to be overcome, the more magnificent will every victory appear, and the gardener who creates a flowery Eden out of a piece of bare and starving desert has scored a greater success than his who but grows beautiful flowers and delicious fruits where soil and site and surroundings have been entirely on his side.
I am writing in a garden which is as remarkable an example of difficulties overcome as was the garden of Dean Hole's navvy. Those who are familiar with the sand-dunes or towans which form so pronounced a feature of much of the northern coast-line of Cornwall, will realize that these scarcely afford ideal spots for easily made gardens. A thin coating of poor grass, reeds, wild thyme and occasional sea-hollies form the only drapery for the blown sand which makes up the whole body of soil.
Yet it was on such a spot that a friend of mine pitched his camp, or rather built his cottage, and set to work to create a garden. His aim in life being to kill care, he desired nothing more eagerly than to be constantly occupied. For three years he spent fully one half of his days in bringing into his territory leafmould and soil, clay and manure. He soon had a good protective screen of pines, euonymus, privet and hazel, and only then did he seriously begin to plant his garden. He had, during those three years, raised crops of clover, trifolium and the like, digging them again into the newly created soil from whence they came.
He read all the gardening books on which he could lay hands, he saw all the gardens within walking distance, and he studied the wants of every flower before he sowed or planted it, just as though it were an honoured guest whom he were inviting. He had no rule-and-compass scheme before his eyes, and planted his shrubs and flowers in those situations where they might most healthily yield their beauty and their fragrance. Such paths as his garden has are merely gravelled developments of the beaten tracks which usage indicated as necessary or convenient; and I am afraid that they would meet with the disapproval of that great authority, Mr Reginald Bloomfield, who has said that a garden "should be laid out in an equal number of rectangular plots where everything is straightforward and logical."
My friend is nearly twenty years older than when he began to create his garden, and it has already acquired much of the character of an old house to which successive additions have been made. The year through, the earth is draped and decorated with beautiful plants, Aconites, Snowdrops, Crocuses, Primroses, Violets, Fritillaries, Columbines, Pinks, Roses, Lilies, Sunflowers and all the host of old-fashioned flowers.
The great problems of "architectural" gardening, "landscape" gardening, and the rest, did not interest him. So simple and unpretentious was his little house that an attempt at terraces, clipped evergreens, and the like, would have struck a jarring note at once. Therefore, it is quite in keeping that beautiful flowers and beautiful shrubs border one's way right up to the entrance door; nor does Nature end there, for over all the outer walls are trained lovely and fragrant climbers—Clematis, Rose, and Honeysuckle—which give the idea that the cottage does indeed "nestle" in the garden.