I did not feel quite convinced of this axiom; gardening seemed to be a continual assistance or interference with Nature in her most natural moods. So I said dubiously,
"Yellow jasmine should never be cut at all, then?"
"Look you 'ere, miss, at them buds all up the stem. If I cuts the stem wot becomes of them buds, eh?"
Unanswerable old Lovell! But as I looked at the thick matted trailings that covered his porch, it dawned on me that perhaps a judicious pruning out of old wood at the right season would help and not hinder the yellow show.
"Does it bloom on the new wood?" I asked with a thought most laudable in an Ignoramus.
"Blooms! why, it blooms all over. Look at it!" And having sounded the depth of old Lovell's knowledge, I left him with more words of praise.
So that was it! And my yellow jasmine might be blooming like that if left alone, or better, if rightly handled; and doubtless the poverty-stricken appearance of the white jasmine, the small and occasional flowers of the clematis, were due to the same cause. Here was a new and important department of my work suddenly opened up. I determined Nature should have a free hand until I could assist her properly. Until I knew the how, when and why of the clipping process, the edict should go forth to old Griggs, "Don't touch the shears."
On examining my own decapitated climbers I found that Griggs had indeed been hedging and ditching in the brutal way in which the keepers of our country lanes perform their task. It had often grieved my spirit to see the beautiful tangle late autumn produces in the hedges ruthlessly snipped and snapped by the old men, told off by some of the mysterious workings of the many councils under which we now groan, to do their deed of evil. That it ever recovers, that spring again clothes the hedges brilliantly, that the wild rose riots, the wild clematis flings itself, the honeysuckle twines, all again within the space of six or eight months, is an ever-recurring miracle. But my creepers and climbers did not so recover; their hardy brethren in the hedges outstripped them. Griggs impartially clipped the face of the house in the autumn when ivy is trimmed, and, now that I noticed it, the results overpowered me with wrath. How extraordinary that people should let such things go on, should live apathetically one side of the wall when flowers were being massacred on the other; should have streamers of yellow glory within their reach in December and January, and should sit placidly by the fire when the iron jaws were at work and never shout to the destroyer, "Hold!" Well, it was no use carrying every tale of woe to his Reverence or the Others. Jim was fully informed, and being, as I have often noticed, a person of immense resource, he very shortly afterwards whispered to me that the "old guffoon" would have great difficulty in finding his shears again. If I would obtain proper advice on the point it was a department, he thought, peculiarly suited to his abilities. I might grow giddy on a ladder, but as the navy was to be his profession he thought the opportunity one to be taken.
There was nothing to cut of the yellow jasmine; it must grow first, and then the older stems might be judiciously trimmed after its flowering time is over. A year to wait for that, to Jim's disgust, but toward the end of February we cautiously trimmed the Japanese variety of "old man's beard," called by the learned "clematis flamulata." It grew on the verandah, and one of the Others had driven Griggs off when he approached with his shears. She said he looked like murder, and whether it was right or not it should not be done. I had to give her chapter and verse for it that this variety of clematis ought to have a very mild treatment, a sort of disentanglement, and thus help it to long streamers before she would allow Jim and me and a modest pair of scissors to do ever so little work. Jim sighed for the shears, and I had to warn him against the first evidence of the murderous spirit of old Griggs.