How the Garden Grew

by Maud Maryon

Those little brown pin points, of which you hold hundreds in a pinch on your palm, each one has its "celestial" body ready to spring into life through the dark gateway of death. Surely St Paul must have had his garden as a little boy, and sown his seeds, and marvelled, even as Jim and I did, with eyes opening to the wonder of it all. A wonder that is passed over in the matter-of-course way of the daily round, but that startles one, almost as a revelation, when one's own hand holds the seed, sows it, and then watches for the result.

To say it is just "life" or the "force of nature" or "the energy that is behind all things," these are but words, the marvel remains. Irresistibly the thought arises, "With what body shall we come?" Not with the old earth body for sure, if my seeds are to teach me anything.

So I sowed first the forget-me-nots, as this year they must come from seed. Another year I will take the little shoots that are round the old plant and, separating them, will prick them out in a nursery spot, and so shall my plants for the following year be more mature, stronger, and therefore better flowering; a first year's forget-me-nots are apt to be straggling. Then the sweet-Williams, the wallflowers, red and gold, Canterbury bells, silene, the little bright pink edging that with forget-me-nots makes a border so gay in spring time, these were my first year's venture in biennials; for though some of them may be considered perennials, the best results may be hoped for from a continuously fresh store.

The big sunflower seeds I placed just where I wanted them to come up, sometimes a single one, so that the plant should have all its own way, and wear as big a head as it knew how, and others in groups of four or five.

Nasturtiums also I placed as a border to a lonely shrubbery. Some of the seeds had been got forward in the impromptu frame, but those were for my tree stumps and for creeping up the verandah. Canariensis the same; the convolvulus also were planted freely to cover up deficiencies wherever a creeping thing could grow.

It is wise to sow your perennial seeds early; they get settled in life before they are called upon to face their first winter. So in another spot, judiciously cribbed from cabbage-room—crib I had to for my nursery ground—I sowed in like fashion the perennials, those which had not already begun their career in wooden boxes and frame. There were the big Oriental poppies, red and orange, for my impatience had so far succumbed to the gardening spirit that I could bear to contemplate sowing seeds with the hope of no immediate return, Brompton stocks, penstemons, foxgloves and gaillardias; campanulas, too, short and tall, white and blue; and those already started in boxes, the polyanthus and columbines, nice sturdy little plants by now, were moved to this division a little later, when frosty nights were a thing of the past.

These for my first batch of perennials; others would surely follow with succeeding years. The thought of their permanence delighted me. Dear, nice things! they would not need sowing year by year, but would yearly grow more and more "in favour with God and man." So I hoped, even as a mother hopes it for her children.

That long herbaceous border should one day be full of good stuff, one day blooming with a succession of flowers; but face the fact, one day is not to-morrow. The plants must grow; so, patience, patience, though mine was threadbare.