Top-heavy civilization is always righting itself by a side-reach after the “primitive” and the “elemental.” Weary capitalists and professional men play—expensively—at what when all’s said is but a child’s game of ball enhanced by feats of walking. Science gives us the motor; and slug-a-beds who have hitherto accepted sunrise as an act of faith grow to be connoisseurs in effects of morning haze and chiaroscuro.
Perhaps, then, there are many others who, like myself, have discovered, in this year of the travail of humanity, the sober and healing pleasures of the garden. Of course I had always intended to have a garden sometime, on the same principle by which I hope to see Japan, to read the Old Testament in Hebrew (having first mastered a dozen other languages more immediately relevant to my business), to have my twilight stage of knowledge regarding the material universe dispelled by the blinding light of modern discovery. I had even used the planning of this garden, with its companion brook, grove, and lawn, as a lure for sleep. But that was a paradise for the eye alone; and in my heathen blindness I dreamed that the joy of the garden was in the beholding. Most pityingly I look back upon that time of ignorance. Confess, fellow amateurs, is not the joy in the making? Even harvesting, the end for which the garden was made, yields the gardener himself a crasser pleasure, as compared with the stirring of the earth, laying down seeds in a row like a string of matched stones, and most of all watching the young plants, obedient to his design, prick through the earth and advance from seed-leaf to bushiness or stateliness, from foliage to flower. To gather the fruits of your labor justifies your enterprise, but it is something like receiving royalties for a work of art born in a flash of inspiration. To see the delicate green shoots, perfect in their vague promise, and innocent of the blights, distortions, and frustrations that may overtake them later on, stretching up and unfolding where the other day there was only black earth, is akin to the first vision of some great creative idea, before one meets its penalty in hours of toil and cheated hope. There is even a tinge of guilt in our pleasure; we have digressed, in the name of civic duty, from our lawful callings, considering that we made some sacrifice of time or strength, and our virtue has turned into an indulgence.
One of my first discoveries (after the simplest rudiments of the art I essayed to practise) was that of all topics on the lips of men the garden is the most conversable, the most fraternal. Hitherto, observation had led me to suppose children and rheumatism the most universal of interests. Having neither myself, I have been cut off from that fluent intercourse upon first steps and first words, adenoids, preventive dentistry, potatoes carried in the pocket, baths of hot brine, and the proportion of protein in the diet, which makes strangers or friends akin. There was always the weather; but—unless one has a garden, as sensitive as a poet to every nuance of sun or atmosphere—talk of the weather is a mere subterfuge, a symbol of our inarticulateness and awkward shyness masking our human yearning to know our fellows and to wish them well. The garden, as a subject of discourse, combines all the pretext offered by the weather to hint our good will without violating our shyness; all the diversity and perpetual surprise of a child’s development; all the right to condole with misfortune and to be agreeably officious about remedies enjoyed by those who encounter the rheumatic; all the delight of professional note-comparing known to invalids, cooks, and pedagogues. To appear in my garden, equipped with sun-hat and hoe, was, I found, to be hail-fellowed by every condition of men—pickaninnies, delivery-men, professors, elegants and inelegants, experts and inexperts. My acquaintanceship among my neighbors grew like Jonah’s gourd. “Do you mind my asking what that line of white strips is for?” “To warn the English sparrows off my pea-vines.”—“Would you like some young cabbage-plants?”—“Your corn is lookin’ fine!” Common interests were visible and inexhaustible.
Other sociabilities also I have found in the garden. We prate a good deal of “companionship with nature,” and go out fussily to seek it, with camera, bird-book, field-glasses, and expensive camping gear. In the garden one loses all this self-consciousness. Instead of personifying nature, and offering her the compliment of man’s society, one sinks into one’s place as a piece of nature. The catbird spluttering joyous music at me, almost forgetting to be afraid; the cardinal that looks down where I stand tossing off a magnificent plume of spray from my watering-pot, and whistles, “We-e-ell! Who’d-have-thought-to-see-you-keeping-at-it?” and I myself, turning to my own uses the perpetual need of life to renew itself, to evolve out of seed and bulb new seeds and bulbs, which shall give birth in time to other seeds and bulbs—we are all part of the same process.
With our Little Brother the Robin I am approaching intimacy. It is pleasant to see him assume, with almost human egotism, that the worms I turn up, the strings I plant by, the stakes I drive, are special providences for himself. Yet I have never quite won his confidence. I have often longed to speak to him, explaining that there are worms enough for us both, and how easy I find it to scatter a few extra strings for his nest-building; I have longed to reassure the wild doves who run about on their pretty pink feet in the long grass near the garden, and at my approach fly away with a protesting soft “chitter-chitter-chitter.” I realize afresh, as I have often realized in watching people coax squirrels to eat from their hands, or children lavishing affection on brainless hens and rabbits, that if there had been no Saint Francis, it behooved mankind to invent him. On the other hand, the gardener, a fighter in the struggle for food, finds the impartial views of the dilettante asking for “companionship with nature” quite unthinkable. The wild rabbit, which only last winter I thought an engaging creature, has not changed the sleekness of his brown coat, his funny little white tuft of tail, or his wavelike movements; but he has become repulsive to me.
A whole new set of values, in fact, takes possession of mind and senses. One comes to like the writhings of the angle worms in the muck, knowing that they do the gardener service. Various sights and contacts, once offensive, being now considered not simply in themselves, but in relation to our purposes, become indifferent or actually pleasurable. Even whiffs of fertilizer, if suggestive merely, give an agreeable sense that the work is going forward. And what an infinite gulf between “dirt” and “soil”! There lies between a whole initiation into secrets chemical and biological. Once I passed by garden tracts with undistinguishing eyes. Now to see them stifled with weeds, or to see the earth stiff and lumpy, affects me like walking in New York slums, or like a hideous grouping of colors; to see the earth mellow and finely tilled is satisfying, like a good chord in music, or like a firm strong drawing.
Digging, planting, transplanting, watching the sky, I have come face to face with the meaning of words I have known all my life, in the dim way we know most things outside our own importunate concerns. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.” It is one thing to understand this saying botanically, and another to see it exemplified when you are breathlessly awaiting the result. “An enemy hath done this!” I cried when the wild rabbit stripped my young bean-plants, or when some great dog made his bed in my onion-patch. All sorts of images, from parable, poem, and story, re-awake in my mind with a morning freshness and brightness. And in my turn I have enacted, or experienced, many a little apologue. For example, I discover that plants grown in over-shaded spots fall victim no less surely to what sun they get, on scorching days, than those quite unprotected. Here are the facts; the moralist may make of them what he will.
What would any art be without its disappointments and anxieties, its hours of depression that measure the worth of the goal striven for? The amateur gardener has his share. I pass over in forgiving silence—almost silence—the haughty fashion in which the masters of the craft, professing to offer information, so give as to withhold. Your professional is a thorough classicist; “nothing too much” his motto. Enough, and not too much, whether it be vanilla in the cookies, exercise for the invalid, “corroborative detail” in the narrative, or sunshine, water, fertilizer, depth of earth, mulching for your plants. And this all-important but inscrutable rule is the despair of every amateur. A grievance perhaps more personal to myself has been the unnatural behavior enjoined on me toward seedlings of my own sowing, my own cosseting. In a sense, I had brought them into the world, and now I was told some of them must be done away with, that the rest might thrive! As I edged along the rows, unhappily choosing, among all the pretty youngsters, the victims for the sacrifice, I reminded myself of Catiline (’tis consoling, at last to have a use for one’s education); notat et designat oculis ad caedem unumquemque. Sometimes my human instinct to value every individual and to lavish care on the weak has got the better of me. I do not dwell on the experiments to which I have resorted; but some of them, in spite of the doctrinaires, were triumphs! On the other hand, I have bitterly resented deformities and discolorations in my nursery. For the first time in my life I understand how the Spartans could expose for death infants blemished in mind or body. I understand what fierce parental pride is at the bottom of many a father’s or mother’s blindness to faults and commonplaceness.