CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FOURTH

Whatever my garden may be, I think I can honestly claim for it that it has no educational value. The educational garden is one in which all the different orders and classes and groups and species and genera are displayed in such a way as to make no display, but to enable an ordinary person in the course of ten or twelve years to become a botanist. Botany is the syntax of the garden. A man may know everything about syntax and yet never become a poet; and a garden should be a poem.

I remember how a perfect poem of a garden was translated into the most repulsively correct prose by the exertions of a botanist. It was in a semi-public pleasure ground maintained by subscribers of a guinea each, and of course it was administered by a Committee. After many years of failure, an admirable head-gardener was found—a young and enthusiastic man with eye for design and an appreciation of form as well as colour. Within a short space of time he turned a commonplace pleasure-ground into a thing of beauty; and, not content with making the enormous domed conservatory and the adjoining hothouse a blaze of colour and fragrance, he attacked an old worn-out greenhouse and, without asking for outside assistance, transformed it into a natural sub-tropical landscape—palms and cacti and giant New Zealand ferns, growing amid rocky surroundings, and wonderful lilies filling a large natural basin, below an effective cascade. The place was just what such a place should be, conveying the best idea possible to have of a moist corner of a tropical forest, only without the overwhelming shabbiness which was the most striking note of every tropical forest I have ever seen in a natural condition. In addition to its attractiveness in this respect, it would have become a source of financial profit to the subscribers, for the annual “thinning out” of its superfluous growths would mean the stocking of many private conservatories.

On the Committee of Management, however, there was one gentleman whose aim in life was to be regarded by his fellow-tradesmen as a great botanist: he was, to a great botanist, what the writer of the cracker mottoes is to a great poet, or the compiler of the puzzle-page of a newspaper is to a great mathematician; but he was capable of making a fuss and convincing a bunch of tradesmen that making a fuss is a proof of superiority; and that botany and beauty are never to be found in association. He condemned the tropical garden as an abomination, because it was impossible that a place which could give hospitality to a growth of New Zealand fern, Phormium Hookeri, should harbour a sago palm Metroxylon Elatum, which was not indigenous to New Zealand; and then he went on to talk about the obligations of the place to be educational and not ornamental, showing quite plainly that to be botanical should be the highest aim of any one anxious for the welfare of his country.

The result of his harangue was the summoning of the head-gardener before the Board and his condemnation on the ground that he had put the Beautiful in the place that should be occupied by the Educational. He was ordered to abandon that unauthorised hobby of his for gratifying the senses of foolish people who did not know the difference between Phormium Hookeri and Metroxylon Elatum, and to set to work to lay out an Educational Garden.

He looked at the members of the Board, and, like the poker player who said, “I pass,” when he heard who had dealt the cards, he made no attempt to defend himself. He laid out the Educational Garden that was required of him, and when he had done so and the Board thought that he was resigned to his fate as the interpreter of the rules of prosody as applied to a garden, he handed in his resignation, and informed them that he had accepted a situation as Curator of a park in a rival town, and at a salary—a Curator gets a salary and a gardener only wages—of exactly double the sum granted to him by the employers from whom he was separating himself.

In three years the place he left had become bankrupt and was wound up. It was bought at a scrapping figure by the Municipality, and its swings are now said to be the highest in five counties.

I saw the Educational Garden that he laid out, and knew, and so did he, that he was “laying out”—the undertaker's phrase—the whole concern. When he had completed it, I felt that I could easily resist the temptation to introduce education at the expense of design into any garden of mine.

It is undeniable that a place constructed on such a botanical system may be extremely interesting to a number of students, and especially so to druggists' apprentices; but turning to so-called “educational purposes” a piece of garden that can grow roses, is like using the silk of an embroiderer to darn the corduroys of a railway porter.

But it was a revelation to some people how the growing of war-time vegetables where only flowers had previously been grown, was not out of harmony with the design of a garden. I must confess that it was with some misgiving that I planted rows of runner beans in a long wall border which had formerly been given over to annuals, and globe artichokes where lilies did once inhabit—I even went so far as to sow carrots in lines between the echeverias of the stone-edged beds, and lettuces at the back of my fuchsia bushes. But the result from an æsthetic standpoint was so gratifying that I have not ceased to wonder why such beautiful things should be treated as were the fruit-trees, and looked on as steerage passengers are by the occupants of the fifty-guinea staterooms of a fashionable Cunarder. The artichoke is really a garden inmate; alongside the potatoes in the kitchen garden, it is like the noble Sir Pelleas who was scullery-maid in King Arthur's household. The globe artichoke is like one of those British peers whom we hear of—usually when they have just died—as serving in the forecastle of a collier tramp. It is a lordly thing, and, I have found, it makes many of the most uppish forms in the flower garden hide diminished heads. An edging of dwarf cabbages of some varieties is quite as effective as one of box, and Dell's “black beet” cannot be beaten where a foliage effect is desired. Of course the runner bean must be accepted as a flower. If it has been excluded from its rightful quarters, it is because the idea is prevalent that it cannot be grown unless in the unsightly way that finds favour in the kitchen garden. It would seem as if the controllers of this department aimed at achieving the ugly in this particular. They make a sort of gipsy tripod of boughs, only without removing the twigs, and let the plant work its way up many of these. This is not good enough for a garden where neatness is regarded as a virtue.

I found that these beans can be grown with abundant success in a border, by running a stout wire along brackets, two or three feet out from a wall, and suspending the roughest manila twine at intervals to carnation wires in the soil below. This gives an unobtrusive support to the plants, and in a fortnight the whole, of this flimsy frontage is hidden, and the blossoms are blazing splendidly. I have had rows of over a hundred feet of these beans, but not one support gave way even in the strongest wind, and the household was supplied up to the middle of November.

I am sure that such experiments add greatly to the interest of gardening; and I encourage my Olive branch in her craving after a flower garden that shall be made up wholly of weeds. She has found out, I cannot say how, that the dandelion is a thing of beauty—she discovered one in a garden that she visited, and having never seen one before, inquired what was its name. I told her that the flower was not absolutely new to me, but lest I should lead her astray as to its name, she would do well to put her inquiry to the gardener and ask him for any hints he could give her as to its culture, and above all, how to propagate it freely. If he advised cuttings and a hot bed, perhaps he might be able to tell her the right temperature, and if he thought ordinary bonemeal would do for a fertiliser for it.

Beyond a doubt a bed of dandelions would look very fine, but one cannot have everything in a garden, and I hope I may have the chance, hitherto denied to me, of resigning myself to its absence from mine, even though it be only for a single week.

But there are many worthy weeds to be found when one looks carefully for them, and I should regard with great interest any display of them in a bed ( in a neighbour's garden, providing that that garden was not within a mile of mine).

The transformation just mentioned of a decrepit greenhouse into the sub-tropical pleasure-ground, was not my inspiration for my treatment of a greenhouse which encumbered a part of my ground only a short time ago. It was a necessity for a practice of rigid economy that inspired me when I examined the dilapidations and estimated the cost of “making good” at something little short of fifty pounds. It had been patched often enough before, goodness knows, and its wounds had been poulticed with putty until in some places it seemed to be suffering from an irrepressible attack of mumps.

Now the building had always been an offence to me. It was like an incompetent servant, who, in addition to being incapable of earning his wages, is possessed of an enormous appetite. With an old-fashioned heating apparatus the amount of fuel it consumed year by year was appalling; and withal it had more than once played us false, with the result that several precious lives were lost in a winter when we looked to the greenhouse to give us some colour for indoors. With such a list of convictions against it, I was not disposed to be lenient, and the suggestion of the discipline of a Reformatory was coldly received by me.

The fact was, that in my position as judge, I resembled too closely the one in Gilbert's Trial by Jury to allow of my being trusted implicitly in cases in which personal attractions are to be put in the scales of even-handed Justice; and with all its burden of guilt that greenhouse bore the reputation of unsightliness. If it had had a single redeeming feature, I might have been susceptible to its influence; but it had none. It had been born commonplace, and old age had not improved it.

Leaning against the uttermost boundary wall of the garden, it had been my achievement to hide it by the hedge of briar roses and the colonnade; but it was sometimes only with great difficulty that we could head off visitors from its doors. Heywood heaped on it his concentrated opprobrium by calling it the Crystal Palace; but Dorothy, who had been a student of Jane Eyre, had given it the name of “Rochester's Wife,” and we had behaved toward it pretty much as Jane's lover had behaved in his endeavour to set up a younger and more presentable object in the place of his mature demented partner: we had two other glass-houses that we could enter and see entered without misgiving; so that when we stood beside the offending one with the estimate of the cost of its reformation, I, at any rate, was not disposed to leniency.

“A case for the Reformatory,” said Dorothy, and in a moment the word brought to my mind the advice of the young lord Hamlet, and I called out,—

“Reform it altogether.”

“What do you mean?” she asked; for she sometimes gives me credit for uttering words with a meaning hidden somewhere among the meshes of verbiage.

“I have spoken the decision of the Court,” I replied. “'Reform it altogether.'”

“At a cost—a waste—of sixty odd pounds?”

“I will not try to renew its youth like the eagles,” said I, in the tone of voice of a prophet in the act of seeing a vision. “I shall make a new thing of it, and a thing of beauty into the bargain.”

She laughed pretty much as in patriarchal days Sara, laughed at the forecast of an equally unlikely occurrence.

After an interval she laughed again, but with no note of derision.

“I see it all now-all!” she cried. “You will be the Martin Luther of its Reformation: you will cut the half of it away; but will the Church stand when you have done with it?”

“Stronger than it ever was. I will hear the voice of no protestant against it,” I replied.

My scheme had become apparent to her in almost every particular as it had flashed upon me; and we began operations the very next day.

And this is what the operation amounted to—an Amputation.

When a limb has suffered such an injury as to make its recovery hopeless as well as a danger to the whole body, the saving grace of the surgeon's knife is resorted to, and the result is usually the rescue of the patient. Our resolution was to cut away the rotten parts of the roof of the greenhouse and convert the remainder, which was perfectly sound, into a peach-shelter; and within a couple of weeks the operation had been performed with what appeared to us to be complete success.

We removed the lower panes of glass without difficulty—the difficulty was to induce the others to remain under their bondage of ancient putty: “They don't make putty like that nowadays,” remarked my builder, who is also, in accordance with the dictation of a job like this, a housebreaker, a carpenter, and a glazier—a sort of unity of many tools that comes to our relief (very appropriately) from the United States.

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I replied to him enigmatically that putty was a very good servant, but a very bad master. The dictum had no connection with the matter in hand, but it sounded as if it had, and that it was the crystallisation of wisdom; and the good workman accepted it at its face value. He removed over two hundred panes, each four feet by ten inches, without breaking one, and he removed more than a thousand feet of the two-inch laths from the stages, the heavier ones being of oak; he braced up the seven foot depth of roof which we decreed should shelter our peaches, and “made good” the inequalities of the edges. In short, he made a thoroughly good job of the affair, and when he had finished he left us with a new and very interesting feature of the garden. A lean-to greenhouse is, as a rule, a commonplace incident in a garden landscape, and it is doubtful if it pays for its keep, though admittedly useful as a nursery; but a peach-alley is interesting because unusual. In our place of peace this element is emphasised through our having allowed the elevated, brick-built border that existed before, to remain untouched, and also the framework where the swing-glass ventilators had been hung. When our peach-trees were planted, flanked by plums and faced by apples en espalier, we covered the borders with violas of various colours, and enwreathed the framework with the Cape Plumbago and the Jasmine Solanum. and both responded nobly to our demands.

Nothing remained in order to place the transformation in harmony with its surroundings but to turn the two large brick tanks which had served us well in receiving the water from the old roof, into ornamental lily ponds, and this was accomplished by the aid of some of the stone carvings which I had picked up from time to time, in view of being able to give them a place of honour some day. On the whole, we are quite satisfied with this additional feature. It creates another surprise for the entertainment of a visitor, and when the peaches and plums ripen simultaneously, following the strawberries, we shall have, if we are to believe Friswell, many more friends coming to us.

“If they are truly friends, we shall be glad,” says Dorothy.

“By your fruits ye shall know them,” says he, for like most professors of the creed of the incredulous, he is never so much at his ease as when quoting Scripture.

This morning as I was playing (indifferently) the part of Preceptress Pinkerton, trying to induce on Rosamund, Olive, Francie, Marjorie, and our dear, wise John, a firm grasp of the elements of the nature of the English People as shown by their response to the many crusades in which they have taken part since the first was proclaimed by Peter the Hermit, I came to that part of nay illuminating discourse which referred to the Nation's stolidity even in their hour of supreme triumph.

“This,” said I, “may be regarded by the more emotional peoples of Europe as showing a certain coldness of temperament, in itself suggesting a want of imagination, or perhaps, a cynical indifference—'cynical,' mind you, from kyon, a dog—to incidents that should quicken the beating of every human heart. But I should advise you to think of this trait of our great Nation as indicating a praiseworthy reserve of the deepest feelings. I regard with respect those good people who to-day are going about their business in the streets of our town just in the usual way, although the most important news that has reached the town since the news of the capture of Antioch in 1099, is expected this evening. And you will find that they will appear just as unconcerned if they learn that the terms of the Armistice have been accepted—they will stroll about with their hands in their pockets—not a cheer.... Is that your mother calling you, John?”

“No; I think it's somebody in the street?” said John.

“Oh, I forgot. It's Monday—market day. There's more excitement in Yardley High Street if a cow turns into Waterport Lane than there will be when Peace is proclaimed. But still, I repeat, that this difference... What was that? two cows must have turned into—Why, what's this—what's—sit down, all of you—I tell you it's only—”

“Hurrah—hurrah—hurrah—hurrah—hurrah!” comes from the five young throats of five rosy-cheeked, unchecked children, responding to the five hundred that roar through the streets.

In five minutes the front of our house is ablaze with flags, and five Union Jacks are added to the hundreds that young and old wave over their heads in the street; and amid the tumult the recent admirer of the stolid English People is risking his neck in an endeavour to fix a Crusader's well-worn helmet in an alcove above the carven lions on the perch of his home.

There, high over us, stands the Castle Keep as it stood in the days of the First Crusade.

“And ever above the topmost roof the banner of England blew.”

Going out I saw a cow stray down Waterport Lane; but no one paid any attention to its errantry.

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