I think that border sowed the first seeds of gardening love in my heart.
"But when you came here was it like this?" I asked.
"It was a pretty bad wilderness," he said with a look round.
"Oh! things take such a time," I groaned.
"I have been here twenty-five years. I have planted nearly everything you see, except the big trees."
"Twenty-five years! But I!—I can't begin planting things for twenty-five years hence. It is too bad of one's predecessors to leave one nothing but weeds and stones and Griggs!"
"Yes. Well, you have got to make things better for your successors. Not but what you can get results of some sort under twenty-five years. All this"—and he waved his hand to that wonderful border—"comes, at least comes in part, with but eighteen months' careful tending."
Even eighteen months seemed to my impatient spirit too long; I wished for a fairy wand. But fairy effects have a way of vanishing like the frost pictures on the window pane.
"Well, if ever I try to make our wilderness blossom like the rose I will just grow perennial things and pop them in and have done with it."
At which the Master laughed.