Garden-Craft Old and New

by John Dando Sedding

"Simple Nature's breathing life,"

surprising the thorn veiled in blossom, revelling in the wealth of boundless life there, in the variety of plant-form, the palpitating lights, the melody of nesting birds, the common joy and sweet assurance of things.

"Society is all but rude
To this delicious solitude."

Or it may be he is on the breezy waste, lying full length among the heather, watching the rabbits' gambols, or the floating thistle-down with its hint of unseen life in the air, or sauntering by the stream in the lower meadows, learning afresh the glory of weed life in the lush magnificence of the great docks, the red sorrel, the willow-herb, the purple thistles, and the gay battalions of fox-gloves thrown out in skirmishing order, that swarm on each eminence and hedgerow. Or you may meet him hastening home for the evening view from the orchard-terrace, to see the solemn close of day, and the last gleam of sunshine fading over the hill.

It is worth something, I say, to win clear hold of the fact that Nature in a garden and Nature in the wild are at unity; that they have each their place in the economy of human life, and that each should have its share in man's affections. The true gardener is in touch with both. He knows where this excels or falls behind the other, and because he knows the range of each, he fears no comparison between them. He can be eloquent upon the charms of a garden, its stimulus for the tired eye and mind, the harmony that resides in the proportions of its lines and masses, the gladness of its colour, the delight of its frankly decorative arrangement, the sense of rest that comes of its symmetry and repeated patterns. He will tell you that for halcyon days, when life's wheels run smooth, and the sun shines, even for life's average days, there is nothing so cheery, nothing so blithely companionable, nothing that can give such a sense of household warmth to your home as a pleasant garden. And yet none will be more ready to warn you of the limits of a garden's charms, of its sheer impotence to yield satisfaction at either end of the scale of human joy or sorrow.

And so it is. Let but the mist of melancholy descend upon you, let but the pessimistic distress to which we moderns are all prone penetrate your mind, let you be the prey of undermining sorrow, or lie under the shadow of bereavement, and it is not to the garden that you will go for Nature's comfort. The chalices of its flowers store not the dew that shall cool your brow. Nay, at times like these the garden poses as a kind of lovely foe, to mock you with its polite reticence, its look of unwavering complacency, its gentle ecstasy. Then the ear refuses the soft and intimate garden-melodies, and asks instead for the rough unrehearsed music of Nature in the wild, the jar and jangle of winds and tides, the challenge of discords,

"The conflict and the sounds that live in darkness,"

the wild rhetoric of the night upon some "haggard Egdon," or along the steep wild cliffs when the storm is up, and the deeps are troubled, and the earth throbs and throbs again with the violence of the waves that break and bellow in the caves beneath your feet; and then it perhaps shall cross your mind to set this brief moment of your despair against the unavailing passion of tides that for ten thousand years and more have hurled themselves against this heedless shore. Or you shall find some sequestered corner of the land that keeps its scars of old-world turmoil, the symptoms of the hustle of primeval days, the shock of grim shapes, long ago put to sleep beneath a coverlet of sweet-scented turf; and the unspoiled grandeur of the scene will prick and arouse your dulled senses, while its peaceful face will assure you that, as it was with the troubled masonry of the hills in the morning of the world, even so shall it be with you—time shall tranquillise and at length cancel all your woes. Or again,

"Should life be dull, and spirits low
'Twill soothe us in our sorrow
That earth has something yet to show,
The bonny holms of Yarrow."

Better tonic, one thinks, for the over-wrought brain than the soft glamour of the well-swept lawn, the clipt shrubs, the focussed beauty of dotted specimens, the ordered disorder of wriggling paths and sprawling flower-beds of strange device, the ransacked wardrobe of the gardener's stock of gay bedding-plants, or other of the permitted charms of a modern garden; better than these is the stir and enthusiasm of Nature's broad estate, the boulder-tossed moor, where the hare runs races in her mirth, and the lark has a special song for your ear; or the high transport of hours of indolence spent basking in the bed of purple heather, your nostrils filled with gladsome air and the scent of thyme, your eyes following the course of the milk-white clouds that ride with folded sails in the blue heavens overhead and cast flying shadows on the uplands, where nothing breaks the silence of the hills but the song in the air, the tinkle of the sheep-bells, and the murmur of the moorland bee.