Cornell University Library 
 SB 455.A93 
 
 The garden that I love, 
 ■3 1924 003 393 273 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924003393273 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
THE 
 
 GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED AUSTIN 
 
 POET LAUREATE 
 
 Vola con g/i occhi per questo giardino, 
 
 Che 'veder iui /' accendera lo sguardc \ 
 
 P'm a montar per lo raggio dinj'wo, 
 
 Dante, Drnwa Commedia^ Par. C. xxxi. vv. 97-99 
 
 Retired Leisure, 
 That in trim gardens takes his pleasure. 
 
 Milton, // Penseroso 
 
 SIXTH THOUSAND 
 
 ILonton 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. 
 
 NEW YORK : MACMILLAN & CO. 
 1896 
 
 ^11 right! raermd 
 
First Edition, May 1894. Second Edition, Ailgust 1894. 
 
 Third Edition, January 1895. Fourth Edition, January 1896 ; 
 
 reprinted, February i8g6. 
 
TO 
 
 MADELEINE & DOROTHT STANLEY 
 
 Dear Madeleine and Dorothy, 
 
 Do you remember how, when first you saw 
 the Garden that I Love, inexorable clouds, as though of 
 opinion your presence was sunshine enough, came drifting 
 from the south, and fitful showers drenched border and 
 flower-bed ? But young enthusiasm, and in part perhaps 
 inherited amiability, allowed you to see nothing save unquali- 
 fied beauty, and even on that morose forenoon you bestowed on 
 them panegyrics they hardly deserve even in their most un- 
 clouded moments. 
 
 After you were both gone, I said to myself, ' Some day 
 they will have a garden of their own, and they too will Ime 
 it^ But what is Lave ? Love, says Veronica'' s Poet some- 
 where. 
 
 Is observation^ patience, vigi/ance. 
 
 And heartfelt understanding, hove is tvisdom 
 
 In tender operation. 
 
 But it is neither wise, nor tender, nor loving, to remit to 
 others, however expert, the supreme care of one's garden. 
 You will tend yours with your awn hands, and discover its 
 needs with your awn heart ; and if, in doing so, you have 
 to withdraw yourselves sometimes, more than accords with 
 modern wont, into rural seclusion, your social instincts will 
 
vi THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 not thereby be starved^ nor your share in the graces and 
 charities of life thereby be curtailed. You will find much 
 resemblance between flowers and human beings ; for they too 
 grow reserved under coldness or maltreatment^ and respond 
 with almost feminine alacrity to every sympathetic endeavour 
 to apprehend them. But, most of all, the cultivation of a 
 garden tends to foster that sense of kinship with the lowly 
 in which you have been trained ; since there are none who 
 lave their garden so tenderly as the poor. Is it not a con- 
 soling thought that what, after human affection, is, I think, 
 the deepest and most abiding of all pleasures, is well with- 
 in the reach of the humblest cottager ? Only yesterday I 
 saw, in a little village garden, a cluster of Crown Imperials 
 that put to shame the best I can boast ; and I know full 
 well their higher beauty was but the stalk and blossom of 
 deeper devotion. 
 
 Tou therefore, I know, will tend your own flowers, 
 even as already, in some degree, you tend them at your 
 dear Arlington ; bestowing them on your friends, with them 
 decorating the Sanctuary, and ofttimes carrying them — 
 ' lilies, lilies bearing ' — to the window-sills of the suffering 
 and the pallets of the poor. That is why, more even than 
 for the friendship you and yours have shown me, I ask you 
 to accept the dedication of this little volume. 
 
 Believe me always. 
 
 Tours affectionately, 
 
 ALFRED AUSTIN. 
 
 Bw'inford Old Manor, 
 
 May day y 1894. 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 April loth. 
 ' I COULD live in it,' he said. 
 
 It was a little plot of ground, some fifteen feet 
 square, abutting on the high-road, one of a succes- 
 sion of cottage-gardens, all of them of pretty much 
 the same size, but each having a representative 
 character of its own, and better or worse cultivated, 
 more or less affectionately tended, according to the 
 disposition, taste, and energy of the, owner. This 
 one was very formal, — but, indeed, from the 
 
2 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 narrowness of their territory, they necessarily all 
 had that characteristic, — but noticeably neat and 
 lovingly ordered. Its main ornament was a giant 
 Echeveria, which drew my attention, certainly not 
 by reason of its loveliness, but rather by the hearti- 
 ness of its growth, somewhat surprising in a com- 
 paratively tender species exposed to all the chances 
 of the year. Round it, at carefully -calculated 
 distances, were geraniums, calceolarias, ageratums, 
 some ten -week stocks, — everything, in fact, that 
 you have a right to look for in a highly-respectable 
 enclosure. The man I had addressed was a 
 mechanic, employed in some neighbouring railway 
 works, and he evidently treated his spruce little 
 plot like a machine, which ought never to be out 
 of gear. He had cast aside the dress of his daily 
 occupation, smartened himself up, and put on his 
 best attire, as he always did when about to work 
 among his flowers — as though the tidiness he 
 exacted from them reacted on himself, and com- 
 pelled him, in turn, to be spick-and-span when in 
 their superior company. I had stopped to compli- 
 ment him on the assiduity with which he cultivated 
 his bit of ground, and for friendliness' sake observed 
 that he must indeed be fond of it. Then came tSe 
 emphatic answer— 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 3 
 
 ' I could live in it.' 
 
 I suppose I smiled ; for a whole life passed on 
 a piece of earth fifteen feet square, part of which 
 is dedicated to a gravel path, seems a somewhat 
 narrow existence. But, after all, what is narrow ? 
 The Garden that I Love is, I allow, a trifle larger 
 than that ; but to the owner of Wilton or Albury 
 I imagine it would appear pitiably small. Withal, 
 not only could I spend all my days in it, but, as a 
 fact, I do so ; and the only complaint I ever have 
 to make concerning it is when weeds grow apace or 
 shrubberies become unconscionably untidy ; and 
 then I blame myself, and say to Veronica, who has 
 often warned me against what she calls my mania 
 for expansion, that I fear it is too large. Gentle 
 as she always is with me, she cannot resist quoting 
 my tardy testimony to the fulfilment of her own 
 predictions A wise man never says Med culpa to 
 a woman. But then I have no pretensions to be 
 wise, save in love for my garden and for Veronica. 
 
 ' I know you will be pleased Lamia and the Poet 
 can both come ; and it is so nice to think that, this 
 time, we shall have them all to ourselves.' 
 
 She had her hand on the green ivory knob of 
 the old Sheffield silver-plated urn, ready to turn it 
 back as soon as the teapot was duly filled. The 
 
 B 
 
4 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 urn was one of her ' things ' my sister valued most 
 in the world, partly because, as I cannot deny, its 
 form was admirably classical, which is only another 
 word for shapely and harmoniously proportioned, 
 but still more because she had got it a bargain in a 
 country town not yet awake to the money value of 
 what our grandmothers laid aside as done with, or 
 parted with as out of date. I remember when she 
 first brought it home, showing it to me with an air 
 of triumph, and evidently expecting from me that 
 instant and copious sympathy which every good 
 woman demands from male ignorance for her pur- 
 chases, I thought it one of the most worthless pieces 
 of old rubbish I had ever looked on. I did not 
 say so, you may be quite sure ; on the contrary, I 
 was quite magnificently mendacious, employing for 
 the purpose the most colossal adjectives of conven- 
 tional admiration I could summon to my lips. It 
 is only fair to say that when I bring home some 
 new campanula, looking exceedingly scrubby and 
 more like a small wisp of withered grass than a live 
 plant, Veronica behaves with the same sympathetic 
 insincerity, and lavishes on my trumpery trouvaille 
 epithets that would better become a new orchid 
 from the upper reaches of the Amazon or the 
 jungles of Madagascar. 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 5 
 
 ' Guess what I gave for it,' she said. 
 
 To be honest, I would not, in my then state of 
 mind, have given half-a-crown for it. At a shot, 
 I said — 
 
 ' Perhaps eighteen shiUings.' 
 
 ' Fifteen! ' she answered, with a glow of financial 
 triumph. She had it plated again, and, I fancy, it 
 now stands her in about six guineas ; and any guest 
 who fails, before going away, to notice this urn and 
 comment on its matchless beauty, is mentally set 
 down by its owner as a person not only destitute of 
 taste, but as deficient in good breeding, and even 
 lacking in the cardinal virtues. Such an offender 
 is never invited again, except at my special instance ; 
 and, though the slight to the urn is never alluded 
 to, — Veronica is much too feminine a diplomatist 
 for that, — my proposal is invariably received with 
 coldness, and is not conceded until the moral 
 qualities of the person in question have been tacitly 
 depreciated between us. Women rarely, if ever, 
 commit this particular form of offence ; but most 
 men, it must be owned, are so stupid, that they are 
 quite capable of seeing tea made out of an urn big 
 enough and beautiful enough to contain all the 
 ashes of all the Great without making an observa- 
 tion. To the more crass of our male guests I 
 
6 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 generally contrive to give a seasonable hint on the 
 subject ; and if it be a man I like very much and 
 wish to see abiding in Veronica's good graces, I 
 take care, on Monday morning, to whisper to him 
 just before breakfast — 
 
 ' I say, old fellow, don't forget the urn.' 
 One friend of mine — I need scarcely say he was 
 an Irishman — acted so extravagantly on the hint, 
 and expatiated with so much unction on the urn, 
 and more particularly on what he called the 
 ' Hellenic fascination of its form,' though in truth 
 he does not know an oval from a rhomboid, that I 
 have often suspected Veronica, apparently confirmed 
 celibate though she seems, keeps a soft corner in 
 her heart for that arrant impostor. 
 
 The concentration of Veronica's attention on the 
 breakfast-table did not prevent her from extending 
 to me her sisterly cheek. I always salute her thus 
 when we meet in the morning. She always salutes 
 me before we part for the night. I imagine the 
 former is a tribute from me to her evident superiority 
 in being abroad the first, and the latter a tribute 
 from her to me in token of my manly capacity for 
 sitting up to any hour over Gerarde's Herball, of 
 which a copy, of the delightful edition of 1636, 
 has just been given me by a neighbouring vicar 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 7 
 
 and valued friend, who, like Catiline, but in a more 
 honourable sense, is sui -profusus. I am quite of 
 Veronica's opinion that this little domestic cere- 
 mony should never be pretermitted, being a sort 
 of morning and evening prayer that sweetens and 
 sanctifies a household. I am aware the habit is 
 somewhat out of fashion, like good manners 
 generally, in these indifferent what-does-it-matter 
 days. But I am sure, were I to neglect it for a 
 single morning, Veronica would be as much aston- 
 ished as if the room had not been dusted, or if the 
 water refused to boil. 
 
 Whenever we are expecting a male guest in 
 whom Veronica is particularly interested, it is in- 
 variably assumed that he is invited for my gratifica- 
 tion ; and when, on the other hand, we are to be 
 paid an angel's visit by some creature too divinely 
 good for human nature's daily food, then of course 
 it is as Veronica's friend that she is asked. Thus 
 we pay due deference to the proprieties without 
 foregoing our little preferences. Of my admiration 
 of Lamia I make no secret. No man could be 
 hypocrite enough for that, seeing that she is 
 visibly and absolutely admirable. But I cannot get 
 Veronica to allow that she herself has more than 
 a purely literary interest in the Poet. Every well- 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 9 
 
 constituted young lady has in these days her 
 favourite poet ; and the person we call ' the Poet ' 
 is Veronica's. She pretends to think Lamia and 
 the Poet would be very happy together, which 
 is manifestly absurd. But the theory assists her 
 to invite him pretty often, and to maintain on her 
 own part the theory of sympathetic indifference to 
 which I have alluded. 
 
 ' I don't think,' observed Veronica, ' I ever saw 
 the garden looking better at this time of year ; and, 
 by Saturday, it will be brighter and gayer still.' 
 
 What Veronica wants indoors that she has not 
 already got, I cannot yet surmise ; but I know that 
 pretty speeches of this kind addressed to my 
 notoriously tenderest point will have to be paid for 
 sooner or later. I wonder if she has seen another 
 urn at the old curiosity shop in our nearest town. 
 
 But what she says about the garden is perfectly 
 true. To-morrow will be May-day ; and though 
 I read in the newspapers that the loveliness of May 
 is a conventional fiction on the part of hyperborean 
 bards with passages of Theocritus running in their 
 heads, never either in Italy or in Greece did I see 
 such tulips, such turf, such a wealth of bloom in 
 shrubbery and orchard, as at this moment are 
 sunning themselves in the Garden that I Love. It 
 
10 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 is with me a cardinal dogma that a garden, truly 
 to deserve the name, must abound in flowers, and 
 not in one nook or corner, but everywhere, from, 
 at least, the day of All Fools to the day of All 
 Saints. If any one will start a gardening competi- 
 tion on that basis I am prepared to enter for the 
 prize. But why should I try to grow the largest 
 and most shapely rose that ever was seen, for a 
 particular day, to the sacrifice of all the other buds, 
 or degrade a many -branching apple-tree into a 
 dwarf cordon, in order to have one Warner's King 
 or a single Peasgood Nonsuch large enough to 
 make a durnpling for a Cyclops ? No, I say ; 
 let the judges, come round one day In every week, 
 and give marks on each occasion to the various 
 competitors, add them up on the ist of November, 
 and then adjudge the prize. 
 
 Over and over again people have said to me, 
 ' What a trouble your Spring gardening must be to 
 you ! ' Others exclaim, ' And what an expense ! ' 
 It is neither one nor the other. It is the simplest 
 and cheapest thing in the world, when one has once 
 mastered it, and then one feels so ashamed of oneself 
 for not having, mastered it before. I had to endure 
 many gentle doubts from Veronica upon this score 
 during my apprenticeship ; and, indeed; one may 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE ii 
 
 say, to the very end, of gardeners as Napoleon 
 said of generals, that those are the best who make 
 the fewest mistakes. For gardening is a partner- 
 ship in which Nature, the"Senior partner, exercises 
 the principal authority. It is only fair that she 
 " should, for hers is the main portion of the capital, 
 and she admits you into the business only because, 
 while a clerk in her service, you displayed a certain 
 amount of skill and a good deal of assiduity. 
 Senior partners of long standing are said to be 
 rather queer and crusty at times, and by virtue of 
 their longer experience do what seem to the juniors 
 the oddest things ; and I will not deny that 
 Nature is occasionally rather short in her temper, 
 especially in Spring, when her stock-in-trade is 
 subject to daily fluctuations. But if you only have 
 the good sense to humour the uncertainty of Nature, 
 it all comes right, if not to a day, much less to an 
 hour, in the long run. 
 
 The Springtime will not come to date ; 
 
 Cloud, wind, and frost Man's reckoning mar. 
 For bud and bloom you have to wait, 
 
 Despite your ordered Calendar. 
 
 If Nature worked by rule and square, ». 
 
 Than Man what wiser would she be ? , 
 
 What wins us is her careless care, ^ 
 
 And true unpunctuality. ' 
 
12 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 Thus, speaking with a certain generous absence 
 of precision, one may safely affirm that a well-con- 
 ceived Spring garden should be looking its very 
 best some time about the first week in May. This 
 year the calculation will be fulfilled to a nicety. 
 The big dense bushes of the small-leaved berberis, 
 thick as a quickset hedge but not trimmed like it, 
 and neither brushed nor topped, are in the full 
 glory of their golden flower, and spread round 
 about them a rich Persian carpet of superfluous 
 pollen. The industrious bees, clad in work-day 
 velveteen, make profitable music in them all day 
 long. The double gorse, whose fault is to flower 
 itself to death, is a lowlier but withal not an un- 
 worthy rival of the berberis ; and the broom, here 
 yellow, there white, is furnishing itself to its finger- 
 tips. In the mixed beds a,nd borders the fritillaries 
 and Crown Imperials are in their heyday, the 
 jonquils are sweeter than any honey, the grape- 
 hyacinths are as stiff and unconcerned as usual ; and, 
 while the old-fashioned double daffodils have faded 
 from grass and thicket, the later and more elaborate 
 narcissus are still pluming themselves on their 
 cuffs, and collars, and dainty petticoats. The 
 hepaticas, whether blue or scarlet, fagged by the 
 sun, are fast following the vanished crocuses ; but 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 13 
 
 oxslip and polyanthus, where they enjoy a little 
 shelter, still hold bravely out. This morning I 
 saw a Tiarella, or Foam Flower, making a very 
 respectable show, though I can see I have made a 
 mistake in planting it where it stands. It is too 
 much exposed to the mid-day sun, and has hardly 
 sufficient moisture about its roots. Next year it 
 shall be better treated. For there is no gardening 
 without humility, an assiduous willingness to learn, 
 and a cheerful readiness to confess you were mis- 
 taken. Nature is continually sending even its 
 oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some 
 egregious blunder. But, by the due exercise of 
 patience and diligence, they may work their way 
 to the top again. 
 
 But, indeed, were it not for one's mistakes, one's 
 failures, and one's disappointments, the love one 
 bears one's garden would soon perish for lack of 
 sustenance. Just as you may admire but can 
 scarcely feel tenderly towards uniformly successful 
 people, so for a garden that was always and every- 
 where equally gaudy or equally green you might 
 entertain wonder, but you would hardly cherish 
 affection. It is one's failures in life that make one 
 gentle and forgiving with oneself; and I almost 
 think it Is the failures of others that mostly endear 
 
14 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 them to us. The Garden that I Love is very 
 perverse, very incalculable in its ways — falling at 
 times as much below expectation as at others 
 exceeding it. They who have no patience with 
 accident, with waywardness, should not attempt to 
 garden. Every gardener is, like Dogberry, ' a 
 fellow that hath had losses.' There are some 
 gardeners, I am aware, who have nothing but 
 losses, and who resign themselves with provoking 
 equanimity to these, more especially if they be 
 gardening for others, and are paid for doing so. 
 These garden stoics should be pitilessly avoided 
 or dismissed. But a fair percentage of things will 
 ' go home ' ; and the pathetic sum of mortality 
 demands its contribution from tree, shrub, and 
 flower. A gardener of the old-fashioned sort never 
 expresses, nor indeed feels, the faintest surprise 
 when plants fall into consumption and slowly fade 
 away. Do not his own daughters, and the 
 daughters of his neighbours, sometimes do the 
 same? He regards casual losses in border and 
 shrubbery as part of the General Dispensation, 
 which the parson assures him is ' all right.' Still 
 this attitude of passive submission to the inevitable 
 may be carried too far ; and it is well, having found 
 out the conditions of a plant's existence, to try to 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 15 
 
 keep it alive as long as possible. Not but that, 
 occasionally, one may without blame insist on a 
 plant doing less well in a less favourable position. 
 The most beautifiil garden — I do not mean the 
 plot of ground with the most perfectly developed 
 flowers — ^will have the greatest number of losses by 
 reason of certain severe and merciless conditions 
 under which its beauty has to be maintained. An 
 unbeautiful garden is a garden in which man's 
 artificial selection reigns and rules supreme. In a 
 beautiful garden man tempers the hard-and-fast 
 lines of artificial selection by leaving something to 
 natural selection, permitting within due bounds the 
 struggle for existence, and not bewailing overmuch 
 the non-survival of the unfittest. 
 
 There is one season of the year in which, over 
 a considerable area of the garden, chance and 
 vicissitude are excluded, and in which there never 
 are any losses to record. The area is that which 
 I fancy Veronica had in her mind when she was 
 good enough to say this morning she never saw it 
 looking better or brighter. I will not deny that 
 there is a certain formality in Veronica's taste, in 
 some degree, no doubt, the accident of disposition, 
 but in some measure, I sometimes suspect, the 
 result of the scrupulous care with which she orders 
 
1 6 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 and contrives the interior of our home. It is well 
 understood that everything domestic or within- 
 doors she rules without partner or challenge, and 
 that everything forensic, or out-of-doors, falls 
 under my exclusive sway. I daresay I do not 
 always confine myself to my own territory ; 'but 
 if I make a suggestion beyond it, and Veronica 
 does not accept it, cadit qUiSsHo, and I say nothing 
 more. I think women are more aggressive than 
 men, though in a quiet, insidious, and unobtru- 
 sively pertinacious way. Veronica trespasses on my 
 domain much oftener than I trespass on hers. 
 This, however, by the way. She is so masterly in 
 her household, that a man would have to be a pre- 
 sumptuous ignoramus to question her supremacy 
 in that important realm. But the tidiness, the 
 neatness, the shapeliness, she there maintains lead 
 her unconsciously, I think, to look for them out- 
 of-doors also. Accordingly, she never says such 
 agreeable things about the Garden that I Love as 
 she does when the beds are all full of Spring- 
 flowering bulbs, each in its proper place, and each 
 a picture of method, order, and symmetry. 
 For tulips will always wear a certain indoor, 
 drawing-room look, do what you will with them. 
 Each bulb has got to grow one particular flower, 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 17 
 
 in one particular way ; and, in so far as it deviates 
 from the law of the Medes and Persians appertain- 
 ing to tulips, it is a failure. Accordingly, I have 
 never been able to reconcile myself to beds of 
 closely-planted tulips, with nothing to mitigate or 
 relieve their eighteenth-century correctness. In- 
 deed, they are much less formal and more satisfac- 
 tory when cut and taken into the house ; for then, 
 if put into properly-shaped glasses, they assume a 
 languid air, as though their beautiful heads were 
 too heavy for their fragile stems, make graceful 
 curves, and take on a drooping attitude almost 
 pathetic. Unsevered from the hidden bulb they 
 stand bolt upright, and are in masses more like 
 squares of infantry than peaceful tenants of the 
 parterre. But carpet the bed in which you- plant 
 them with Forget-me-not, and the green leaves and 
 delicate cerulean flowers of the myosotis form an 
 atmosphere of casual carelessness that communi- 
 cates itself to the tulip stalks and flower cups soar- 
 ing amongst them. 
 
 I have long since convinced Veronica, who loves 
 to find me out in some supposed act of extravagance 
 out-of-doors, in order, I suppose, to parry or avert 
 what she considers my occasional tendency to 
 reprove her for excessive expenditure within, that 
 
1 8 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 Spring gardening is a very inexpensive diversion. 
 I do not think, were I to show her my gardening 
 bills, — which, however, I take good care never to 
 do, — that she could tax me with an outlay on fresh 
 tulips of more than five pounds during the last five 
 years. The account for lilies, narcissus, Scilla 
 sibirica, Chionodoxa Lucilia, and out-door cycla- 
 mens, would, I allow, tell a different tale, for I 
 lose a good many of these every year. But one's 
 tulips are a possession for ever, if one only goes the 
 right way about preserving them. It is simplicity 
 itself. When about the third week in May they 
 have to be dug up, I lay them in ' by the heels,' 
 as gardeners say, in soil resembling that in which 
 they have been flowering. There they remain till 
 their leaves are fully withered, and then they are 
 taken up and placed in sand in spare wooden boxes. 
 Some time in August I look them over, take off 
 any dead leaves or coating that may yet be clinging 
 to them, and place them on trays in the sun, so as 
 to make quite sure they are dry. But you must 
 not keep them there too long. Then all of them 
 that are not rejected by reason of imperfection or 
 insufficiency of weight are stored in brown-paper 
 bags, and there stay till they are wanted again in 
 November, to be committed afresh to the open 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 19 
 
 beds, with a small handful of sand round them, to 
 preserve them from the peril of excessive moisture. 
 I often think what a comfortable time they have 
 of it during the cold winter days and long winter 
 nights, snugly housed underground, hybernating 
 and fast asleep, yet dreaming all the while of the 
 Spring, of March sunshine, April rain, and May 
 music, and slowly and unseen moving towards 
 their liberation from subterranean slumber. Under 
 the warm blanket of the snow they are breathing 
 the whole time, stirred by that internal motion, 
 which, at the allotted hour, will produce what we 
 call their awakening. 
 
 You may think I am easily pleased ; but, day 
 after day, in March, and indeed several times a 
 day, I pass many happy moments in stooping over 
 the beds, and looking with eager gaze for the first 
 indications of their coming through the ground. 
 Should they be later than usual in pushing their 
 little green cones through the earth, I softly move 
 the covering from some of them, then put it back 
 again carefully when I have satisfied myself that 
 they are there, and only waiting for a little more 
 sunshine to say good-morrow to the Spring. How 
 delicately and with what infinite tact they lend 
 themselves to every mood of that fascinating but 
 
 c 
 
20 
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 fitful season ! Let the sun but shine fully and 
 frankly, and, when once they are well above ground, 
 
 they will open their hearts to it with quick and 
 sensitive response, as though they could neither 
 love nor be loved by it too much. When the 
 heavens wax morose and the sky turns lack-lustre, 
 then slowly, quietly, and showing no ofitnce, but 
 as if conscious that love and open-heartedness are 
 things too good and precious to be wasted, they 
 close their transparent chalices ; sometimes, as they 
 do so, imprisoning some sedulous bee that was too 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 21 
 
 intent on his honeyed labours to notice that the 
 enchanted palace in which he was working was 
 being gradually transformed into a cruel fortress 
 without exit. One by one, when comes the ap- 
 pointed hour, they let fall their still beautifully- 
 tinted petals, and once more withdraw their thoughts 
 underground. I have to confess that hitherto I 
 have neglected to make proper use of the late- 
 flowering, old-fashioned English tulips, to which 
 fine names are now being given whereof we can 
 well afibrd to be ignorant. But I will correct that 
 fault, and must, moreover, give the parrot tulips 
 another chance, planting them nearer to each other 
 and in poorish soil, so to prevent them from 
 growing too tall and compelling one to stake them, 
 to the loss of more than half their beauty. They 
 must be grown in groups ; just as the English 
 tulips, which, though the tallest of all, are strong 
 enough, as everything English should be, to carry 
 their heads without any support, produce the best 
 effect when planted singly. 
 
 The Forget-me-not gives even less trouble than 
 the tulips, which it beautifies. I do not remember 
 where my first stock came from, but you can always 
 raise any quantity you may desire by sowing the 
 seed in the open air in June, pricking off the young 
 
22 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 plants in August, and finally putting them in their 
 allotted beds some time in November. After that, 
 if you lay them in ' by the heels,' when lifted in 
 May, they will ripen their seed there, and scatter 
 it, and you will find in August that your stock of 
 growing plants for the ensuing season is far in 
 excess of your needs. Once learn how Nature 
 gardens for herself, and you will be able to spare 
 yourself a good deal of trouble. 
 
 Veronica remarked to me, a day or two ago, 
 that my favourite phrase is somewhat inappropriate ; 
 and when I asked her why, she quoted from The 
 Gardener s Daughter the lines — 
 
 Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite 
 Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love. 
 
 What an insidious way with it has beautiful 
 verse, creeping without effort, and without observa- 
 tion on one's part, into one's heart, and dwelling 
 in our memory, like some fair, winsome, indispens- 
 able child. Of course I have for years known 
 The Gardener's Daughter, yet I was unaware, till 
 accurate Veronica reminded me, that the phrase 
 'The Garden that I Love' is thus to be found there. 
 
 If, in order to love one's garden, it were neces- 
 sary that it should not be quite beyond the living 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 23 
 
 world, I fear that mine would never have so com- 
 pletely absorbed my affections. Tacitus, in his De 
 Moribus et Populis Germania, observes of our 
 Saxon ancestors, ' Colunt discreti ac digressi, ut 
 fons, ut campus, ut nemus placuit. Vicos locant, 
 non in nostrum morem, connexis et coharentihus 
 tedificiis : suam quisque domum spatio circumdat.' 
 The ' space ' that I described myself as desiring 
 around my ' home,' when I finally decided that 
 with the busy world I had no more business, was 
 declared by Veronica to be greatly in excess of 
 anything I should be able to discover within the 
 limit of my exceedingly moderate income ; and for 
 a time it looked as though she would prove an 
 only too true prophetess. I have had but one 
 experience of the kind, but I should think one 
 meets with more disappointments, vexations, and 
 disillusions in searching for such a home in the 
 country than in any other pursuit in life. It is 
 so easy to beguile people into long journeys by 
 descriptions that have no relation whatever to the 
 thing described. As a rule, the places I was in- 
 duced to look at were pronounced impossible at a 
 glance, either by reason of their inherent ugliness 
 and the vulgarity of their architecture, being 
 grotesque or' meaningless, of the badness of the 
 
24 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 situation, of the unattractive nature of the country 
 in which they stood, or by the too close proximity 
 of other dwellings. I knew exactly what I wanted. 
 I was looking for charm, solitude, and some an- 
 tiquity ; and these in conjunction Veronica said 
 I should never get. 
 
 I had reached a stage of extreme despondency 
 when Veronica said, ' Why not go and see this 
 one ? ' indicating a number and description in the 
 catalogue of a well-known house-agent. 
 
 ' Because,' I answered, ' the description is so 
 uninviting, and, as you surely see, the rent is too 
 low for it to have attractiveness of any kind. 
 However, I will go and see it to-morrow.' 
 
 To-morrow came, and I went, taking a journey 
 of some sixty miles from town. It was a lovely 
 August day ; but I suppose I was out of humour 
 in consequence of a succession of disappointments, 
 and in that state of heart which is produced by 
 hope deferred ; so that when, on reaching the end 
 of my journey, I was unable to obtain a conveyance 
 of any sort, by reason of some high ecclesiastic 
 function which had set the little town agog, I half 
 made up my mind to return to London by the 
 next train, without troubling myself to inspect one 
 fraud more. But, just as I was about to reach this 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 25 
 
 conclusion, a genial though suspiciously rubicund 
 outside porter accosted me. 
 
 ' It is under three miles, sir,' he said, ' and a 
 very pretty walk ; and, if you like, I will show 
 you the way.' 
 
 ' Very well,' I answered. And we started. 
 
 The first mile of the road was blameless, but 
 unremarkable, and I was just beginning to think 
 my guide had as little conscience as a London 
 house-agent, when we passed through an unpre- 
 tentious gate, and were in an old elm avenue, 
 undeniably picturesque, and doubly welcome by 
 reason of its shade, but the growth of whose trees 
 had been stunted by irreparable neglect. Shortly 
 their umbrageous branches came to an end, and we 
 were in a park, indifferently cared for according to 
 modern ideas, but stocked with timber of magnifi- 
 cent growth and of every known native variety. 
 Perhaps the oaks domineered in majesty, but they 
 had worthy companions in both towering and 
 branching elms ; in dense and expansive sycamores, 
 each of which occupied a vast territory to itself ; 
 in tall, soaring ash -trunks, that take such pride 
 in their boles that they never conceal them with 
 leaves ; in horse - chestnuts, covered with their 
 prickly fruit ; and, here and there, in Spanish 
 
26 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 chestnuts, the finest I have ever seen in England, 
 and still more colossal specimens of which were 
 congregated, as I now am better aware, on a wooded 
 eminence my companion told me I must learn, 
 if I ever came to settle in that country, to designate 
 a toll. Here and there a stately walnut spread out 
 its shining leaves, a handful of which I could not 
 resist plucking and bruising, so pleasant to me is 
 their aromatic scent ; and they, too, gave evidence 
 of a copious harvest. If there be a woodreeve of 
 this well-timbered domain, he must be, I thought 
 to myself, a good old Tory indeed^, who does not 
 allow trunk to be axed or bough.^ to be. lopped. 
 Neglect is very picturesque in its effects, whether 
 the thing neglected be a ruined castle, an unkempt 
 peasant, or a secular woodland chase. I felt that, 
 had "Veronica been with me, she would have observed 
 that this park was very ill maintained, and that she 
 would dearly love to have the thinning and regu- 
 lating of its trees. To my less orderly imagination 
 it presented a most agreeable appearance; and 
 what, perhaps, put the finishing touch to my satis- 
 faction was the exceeding number of hawthorns, 
 most of them in the perfect maturity of their 
 growth. Whilst I was being thrown into this 
 sympathetic state of mind, my companion suddenly 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 27 
 
 called my attention to a goodly Jacobean mansion 
 of red brick standing in the lower ground of the 
 park, and looking as though it had been there from 
 all time worth thinking of. Shakeap^re must 
 have been alive when it was built, and Cecil, and 
 Drake, and Sir Walter Raleigh, and many another 
 famous Englishman whose name we love to hear 
 because he glorified and exalted our race by what 
 he said or did. At any rate, I mused to myself, 
 the immediate approach to this so-called manor- 
 house is altogether after my heart. 
 
 I had scarcely made this consoling reflection 
 when we came upon another gate, passed out of the 
 park, and found ourselves in an ordinary meadow, 
 through which, however, the park-road still travelled 
 in a pleasing curve. It looked tame and character- 
 less after the undulating sylvan spaces I had just 
 traversed, and my heart began once again to sink 
 within me, when we came to yet another gate that 
 led into an apple orchard laden with fruit of every 
 sort and colour, the trees being some seventy or 
 eighty years of age. The only thing that invaded 
 the uniformity of their straight and goodly rows 
 was an oak of giant girth and splendidly-spreading 
 branches, so thick with leaves that it was not till 
 we were clear of them that, though it stood not 
 
28 
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 more than fifty yards ahead of me, I perceived the 
 house I had in desperation come to scrutinise. 
 Even at that instant, and before I had looked on 
 more than its gray stone frontage, almost smothered 
 in creepers up to the very top of its three rounded 
 
 gables, I recognised the haven of my hopes, and 
 the fulfilment, despite Veronica's gloomy pre- 
 dictions, of my most fastidious dreams. It was 
 small ; it was secluded ; its position was, according 
 to my taste, perfect ; and it had the blended charm 
 of simple harmonious form and venerable age. 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 29 
 
 Garden, I could see, there was none, save a narrow 
 strip of ground separated from the orchard by a 
 wire fence, half of which was sward, and the other 
 half dedicated to potatoes and gooseberry- bushes. 
 A short, bent, bare-headed old man was mowing 
 the lawn, if lawn I am to call it, with a scythe, and 
 might, with the implement he lifted at my approach, 
 have stood for Old Father Time himself. 
 
 I had quite made up my mind that, let the 
 interior of the house be what it might, there would 
 I live, and there, if allowed, would die. I was 
 prepared, therefore, for mouldy passages, for rooms 
 of impossible shape and dimension, for tumble- 
 down staircases, and for pitiful accommodation 
 everywhere ; and I was already rehearsing the 
 controversy I should have to conduct with Veronica 
 on this thorny question. But, in company with 
 Father Time and his wife, who had now joined us, 
 and who, with the exception of her raiment, 
 seemed the very double of himself, in hue, age, 
 manner, and toothless speech, I found myself, to 
 my astonishment, passing through the various parts 
 of a dwelling in excellent condition, cased in 
 exceptionally stout walls, and showing nowhere 
 sign either of damp or decay. The hall was little 
 more than a passage ; but there was a savour of 
 
30 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 antique taste in its dark-stained oaken staircase and 
 in its three ancient doorways (through one of 
 which there was access to the offices, while the 
 other two opened on dining-room and drawing- 
 room respectively), which gave it an aspect of 
 dignity too often wanting in halls of much larger 
 di>mensions. An old cottage clock ticked slowly 
 and solemnly in the dining-room, its deliberate 
 measurement of time sounding all the louder 
 because it was the only piedfe of furniture in a room 
 whose board's,, too, were bare. Old Mistress Time 
 had one cardinal virtue at least: she loved cleanli- 
 ness, and there was no corner where one could not 
 have sat down to a hearty meal with unconcerned 
 
 .appetite. Over the dining-room and drawing-room 
 were two other rooms, resembling them 'in size and 
 character, and possessing an unusual aspect of 
 cheerfulness, notwithstanding their heavy mullioned 
 windows, by reason of rfie crQss-4ig^t which they 
 enjoyed. I observed witH satisfaction that, the house 
 
 ' looked almost exactly south-east, to my thinking the 
 proper aspect for an English counjry-house. Sudh 
 an aspect ensures morning cheerfulness all the year 
 round, the full advantage of whatever sun there is 
 in wintel" from dawn practically to, sundown, and 
 the exquisite eiFects of the rising of th,e moon. 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 31 
 
 I had mounted the staircase, and passed through 
 a door at the top of it before' going from the hall 
 into the office? on the ground-floor ; and, in doing 
 so, came upon rooms evidently intended for 
 sleeping-chambers, but of much lower pitch than 
 those in the front of the house, and bearing an 
 altogether different character. Still thinkiilg of 
 Veronica and her shapely, exacting' mind, I was a 
 little disconcerted by the narrow space of the rooms 
 in this portion of the tenement. But when I 
 emerged from them into the kitchen-garden of 
 which I spoke, I more than recovered courage, and 
 resolYcd to defend my future home against all the 
 feminine objections in the world. For there before 
 me stood a real old manor-house of the end of the 
 fifteenth centufy, made more watertight since, no 
 doubt, with brick here and tile there, but retaining 
 its pristine character, and looking at you with its 
 strong, unafected Tudor face. Clearly, the build- 
 ing consisted rather of two houses than of one, 
 built ' baik-tp-back,' the gray stone tenement, with 
 its greater; elevation and ampler pretensions, having 
 beenjoined on to its older and humbler companion 
 at a latfer date. Thus what now was back had once 
 been front, and 'what had originally been complete 
 in Itself had not only been added to, but subordin- 
 
32 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ated to its younger companion. I could not then, 
 nor can I now, make up my mind which of the 
 two I prefer to gaze on. I waver in my liking 
 according to my mood, and just as I revert uncon- 
 sciously, I suppose, to the temper of this century 
 or of that. I kept walking round from one to the 
 other, and felt ineffable peace in musing upon both. 
 The quiet August afternoon, with its long motion- 
 less shadows, its slight intimation of silver haze, 
 and its soothing noise of neighbouring rooks ; the 
 music of a mill stream I could just overhear, the 
 melodious monotone of contiguous ringdoves, the 
 colour of the nectarines on the wall, the recollection 
 of the ripe and ruddy orchard ;— all of these seemed 
 to imbue my mind with a sense of autumnal mellow- 
 ness, when everything one longs for awaits the 
 plucking, and there is nothing more to be desired. 
 The outhouses were numerous, and it was evident 
 that the older dwelling had once been a farmstead. 
 But they were in excellent repair, and red-tiled like 
 the house itself; and the tiles were silvered here 
 and there with the growth and stains of unremoved 
 lichen. There was accommodation for more horses 
 and carriages than Veronica and I should ever be 
 likely to want, though the stable and coach-house 
 fittings were a little rude ; and there were sheds 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 33 
 
 and stalls for kine and beasts, and lodges for 
 waggons and carts we should never need. But 
 there was not an eyesore anywhere. The road by 
 which I had come ended at the house ; and at the 
 back of the kitchen-garden there ran a country 
 lane, prodigally overhung with the foliage of trees 
 in the very heyday of their English vigour. On 
 the other side of the lane was another park. How 
 wrong Veronica had been ! and what a triumph I 
 should have over her ! Suam quisque domum spatio 
 circumdat, I reiterated to myself, with a content- 
 ment rivalling that of the cooing wood-pigeons. 
 There was no sound of crowing cock, of barking 
 house-dog, of screaming child. I could see the 
 gray square tower of a village church about a 
 mile and a half away ; but that was the only indi- 
 cation of social life within the range of \jision. 
 Retirement, seclusion, and old-world charm — had 
 I not found them all.'' Through a nail-studded 
 oaken door, black as ebony with the years, I had 
 descended into the cellars, and had satisfied myself 
 that Veronica, who, from taste not from fanaticism, 
 never touches wine, would have water of extra- 
 ordinarily fine quality to drink. Moreover, though 
 clear as crystal, and brisk to the palate, it was as 
 soft to the hands as velvet or oatmeal. 
 
34 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 I do not know how people consent, save under 
 dire compulsion, to build a house for themselves, 
 or to live in one newly built for them by others. 
 For my part, I like to think that a long line of 
 ancestors, either in blood or sentiment, have slept 
 under the same roof, have trodden the same boards, 
 have genially entertained under the same rafters, 
 have passed through the same doors and up the 
 same staircases, drunk out of the same cellars and 
 eaten out of the same larders I now call mine. I 
 like to think that I am not the first to bring life 
 and death, sigh and laughter, merry-making and 
 mourning, into a human habitation. It is necessary 
 for my contentment, indispensable to my sense of 
 kinship with the Past, that I should know that 
 baby-feet have, generation after generation, toddled 
 along the passages, and children's vacant voices 
 gladdened the corridors which I now tread. I 
 have no desire to invent anything, but only to 
 preserve and perpetuate those things which have 
 long been found good. The society of days gone 
 by is the most friendly and congenial of all forms 
 of companionship, for one peoples and composes it 
 according to the humour of one's imagination. I 
 have never been able to understand why, seeing 
 that one's mother is the most sacred of all human 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 35 
 
 figures, people's grandmothers should have become 
 a theme for poor and profane wit. Grandmothers, 
 great -grandmothers, great -great -grandmothers, I 
 know, and delight in knowing, had sat in the 
 ingle-nooks of what I that day resolved should be 
 my home : all comely, all with spotless lace caps 
 and cuffs and 'kerchiefs, all kindly, all deferred to, 
 all the real guardian angels of the place. Beautiful 
 
 young girls must there have loved and longed, 
 kissed and wept, clapped their hands for joy, and 
 performed innumerable offices of domestic helpful- 
 
36 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ness and charity. A new house would be to me 
 as intolerable as a new world. Even in restless 
 and changeful days like these, the most powerful 
 influence in the Present is the influence of the 
 Past ; just as the influence of our thoughts, actions, 
 and decisions will be felt more a hundred years 
 hence than they are to-day. Living under the 
 shade of the Past, we feel peaceful and secure. I 
 wonder how many generations of swallows have 
 built their nests and reared their broods under the 
 broad, deep eaves of the hinder portion of the old 
 manor-house I that day contemplated with such 
 forward-looking aflection. Four hundred genera- 
 tions of swallows and house-martins and starlings 1 
 Think of that ! They were building there when 
 Shakespeare wrote the lines — 
 
 This guest of Summer, 
 The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, 
 By his bold mansionry, that the heaven's breath 
 Smells wooingly here ; no jutty, frieze, buttress. 
 Nor coign of vantage, but this bird hath made 
 His pendent bed and procreant cradle. Where they 
 Most breed and haunt, I have observed, the air 
 Is delicate. 
 
 I had surrendered myself so entirely to the 
 mellow sunshine and afternoon shadows of the 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 37 
 
 place, that I fear I had attended but ill to the 
 kindly, if somewhat inarticulate, observations made 
 by Father Time, as he dutifully accompanied me 
 in my devious saunterings. But at length it did 
 dawn upon me, as something not undeserving of 
 my attention, that he had more than once intimated 
 to me that the house had been vacant for two years, 
 but that yesterday ' another gentleman ' had been 
 to see it and appeared greatly taken by it. But I 
 had so completely appropriated it in my own mind 
 that this last piece of information troubled me but 
 little. To-morrow I must bring Veronica to see 
 it, and then the matter would be as good as 
 settled. 
 
 I consumed the better part of the evening in 
 chanting its praises to Veronica, while cautiously 
 avowing that some of the rooms were rather small 
 and somewhat low. I saw I was not producing all 
 the effect I intended. Veronica has always chosen 
 to consider me subject to dangerous impulses of 
 enthusiasm, and I suppose she deems it to be her 
 duty to put water into my wine. We were off 
 betimes together on the morrow ; and I hardly 
 ever made a more anxious journey. It was im- 
 possible for her not to admire the two-mile drive 
 through the park and its stately mansion ; but I 
 
38 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 had worked myself almost into a fever over the 
 uncertainty of her verdict upon my newly-found 
 treasure. Talk of sudden enthusiasms 1 Veronica 
 fell in love with it full as promptly as I had done, 
 and a load was lifted off my heart. I never knew 
 her so impulsive, so indisposed to criticise, or averse 
 to investigate. 
 
 ' No, no ! ' she replied to anything I wished to 
 show her or consult her about. ' It is just what 
 we want. Let us go and see the agent at once. 
 You hear it was looked at the day before yesterday 
 by some one else.' 
 
 Only too well pleased to find her in this mood, 
 I gladly consented to drive at once to the house of 
 the agent, who lived. Father Time told us, but a 
 mile away. He received us with all the heartiness 
 of a retired captain of horse, but at once told us 
 that the house was — let ! Who had let it ? He 
 himself, the agent for the estate, but two days 
 previously. If we liked to go and see the owner 
 of the property, we were free to do so ; but it was 
 obvious, he said, we should only be wasting our 
 time. 
 
 Nevertheless we went, taking another and a 
 shorter railway journey to a place about fifteen 
 miles off, where he was staying on a visit. I do 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 39 
 
 not like to say overmuch concerning the grace and 
 attractiveness of Veronica ; but I could see plainly 
 enough they were thoroughly well appreciated on 
 this occasion. For our new acquaintance at once 
 said he should vastly like to have us for tenants. 
 But what could he do.'' We had received a most 
 kindly welcome, but no practical consolation. 
 
 Still I was not cast down ; for, though it seemed 
 absurd to Veronica, I felt an unshakable conviction 
 that I should live for the rest of my days under 
 the shadow and protection of that venerable oak. 
 I wrote to the country agent, enclosing two 
 cheques, each for the same round sum, and 
 authorising him to offer one, and then, if necessary, 
 both, to the tenant who had anticipated me, to be 
 off his bargain. He wrote back saying that what 
 I suggested was not possible, and returning my 
 drafts. Two more days — days of unutterable dis- 
 appointment and depression — passed away ; and 
 then there came a note from my future landlord, 
 to the effect that he had ' put his foot down,' and 
 that he had written to say, as was perfectly true, 
 that he had two agents, one in the country and one 
 in town, that some confusion and rivalry of claims 
 had arisen in consequence, and that, in order to 
 determine the matter in one way or another, he 
 
40 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 had decided in my favour. ' Of course,' he added, 
 ' you will pay him any sum in reason for his dis- 
 appointment.' 
 
 But this had been my very own proposition. A 
 few days later he enclosed me a note from the 
 disappointed house-hunter, saying that he had been 
 put to a good deal of trouble and expense, and he 
 could not ask, by way of compensation, for less 
 than — ten pounds ! 
 
 Veronica says this is my favourite story, and 
 that I have told it too often. But I never get tired 
 of telling it ; and I tell it again to myself whenever 
 any piece of small ill-fortune happens to me, and 
 I want still to think myself a favourite of the gods 
 and to have a hearty laugh over that ten pounds. 
 
 Spring is tidy, of herself. She has the natural 
 finish and clean -looking bloom of youth. She 
 sheds no dead leaves for you to sweep up, flings 
 about no rotten branches for you to carry away. 
 She is spick-and-span in her new raiment. She 
 has none of the redundant growth of Summer, and 
 the blossoms she sends floating on the breeze make 
 less litter even than Autumn gossamer. Thus I 
 was unusually untroubled concerning the reputa- 
 tion of the Garden that I Love and Veronica's mild 
 reprehensions, and had just settled down in a bend 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 41 
 
 of the South Enclosure to a perusal of M. Martha's 
 Les Moralistes de r Empire Romain, when I heard 
 her calling, ' Here they are ! ' 
 
 I never know what aspect Lamia will be pleased 
 to present when she brings her radiant presence to 
 our roof ; she has so many and such various moods, 
 and all of them equally welcome. It is a matter 
 of uncertainty whether she will charm our listening 
 ears with the Music of the Future on the piano I 
 bought expressly for her consummate touch, will 
 sing Tuscan Stornelli by the score, or will play 
 havoc with Veronica's guitar as she invents some 
 madcap accompaniment to the latest production of 
 the Shaftesbury Avenue. Nor is it within the 
 bounds of prediction to say whether she will lead 
 me into labyrinthine dialogues concerning the riddle 
 of the universe, or turn all one's most settled con- 
 victions topsy-turvy with perfectly sincere para- 
 doxes. Sometimes she will dote on my flowers, 
 and make herself the very Flora of the garden ; 
 sometimes she seems hardly to know that it is 
 there, and rambles discursively, yet always with 
 suggestive point, through the various picture- 
 galleries of Europe. She has no opinions, or, at 
 any rate, they are held provisionally, and until 
 further notice. But, indeed, it is too much to say 
 
42 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 that they are ' held ' — except in solution, for she 
 does not seem anxious to solve anything. Her 
 mind points to the four quarters of the wind, and, 
 like it, veers unaccountably. Nor was I quite 
 accurate when I said she has every mood, for she 
 is always exhilaratingly cheerful — delivering herself 
 sometimes of the most gloomy prophecies concern- 
 ing the future of mankind in the highest spirits. 
 
 I cannot quite make out what she thinks of the 
 Poet ; but I suspect she somewhat resents his un- 
 compromising good sense, and Veronica's occasion- 
 ally unfortunate championship of him. I have 
 never been able to understand why such a fuss 
 should be made about what is called Fame, and how 
 any rational human being can desire to obtain it. 
 In the porch of the little church of Kermaria, near 
 Perros-Guirec, in Brittany, I once read the words 
 inscribed on a tablet to a deceased priest, Amavit 
 nesciri et -pro nihilo reputari. That seems to me 
 the utterance of a sage as well as a saint. But our 
 Men of the Time appear to think differently. I 
 must confess, in justice to Veronica's Poet, that I 
 see no indication of his troubling himself concern- 
 ing his position in this world. Perhaps that only 
 causes her to be more solicitous on the subject, and, 
 I suppose, she shares the general desire of her sex 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 43 
 
 to see some solid and practical evidence of success. 
 She reverted to her favourite theme last night, 
 when, as the twilight was deepening, she sat with 
 me and Lamia on the fixed rude seat that girds the 
 bole of my primeval oak, for Lamia inadvertently 
 let fall the observation that the Poet's writings 
 seem to be comparatively little known. He is the 
 least solitary and most companionable of men ; but 
 it happened that at that moment he was not of 
 our company. 
 
 ' If his works are comparatively little known as 
 yet,' said Veronica, ' and every day they are 
 acquiring a wider circle of readers ' — what a 
 characteristic touch was that ! — ' it is because he 
 owes nothing of what reputation he has acquired 
 to factitious circumstance. Born neither in a lofty 
 nor in a humble position of life, he does not 
 interest the world by the lustre of his descent or 
 by the romance of his self-achieved elevation. 
 There is nothing peculiar either in his antecedents 
 or in his career. He has written nothing sensa- 
 tional, and done nothing sensational. He does 
 not excite wonder by being rich or compassion by 
 being poor. He has no patrons and no clients. 
 In all the external conditions of his life he is a very 
 ordinary person. His hair is no longer than that 
 
44 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 of his neighbours, he is scrupulously well dressed, 
 he lives with his mother, whom he adores, earns 
 his bread by inspecting elementary schools, and 
 pays his debts with prosaic punctuality.' 
 
 ' It does not sound poetical,' observed Lamia. 
 
 ' Precisely. Your view is the view of the 
 public at large. I know, dear Lamia, what you 
 would like him to be and do. You would like 
 him to have been born either in a palace or in 
 a garret, to dress in picturesque velveteen rather 
 faded, to have an eye in a fine frenzy rolling, to 
 look on evening dress as the mark of a Philistine, 
 to run away with his neighbour's wife, and to be 
 perpetually calling attention to himself by some 
 obtrusive impertinence.' 
 
 ' But, I think,' urged Lamia, ' I could name 
 poets that have achieved considerable celebrity in 
 their lifetime, yet who were, on the whole, per- 
 fectly respectable members of society.' 
 
 Happily the conversation at this point was 
 arrested by the subject of it joining us. But 
 Lamia was not disposed to allow it to be diverted 
 altogether into another channel. 
 
 ' We were saying that poets have fewer readers 
 now than formerly.' 
 
 ' / did not say so,' observed Veronica. 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 45 
 
 ' Yet, if you did,' replied the Poet, ' I almost 
 thiiak you would have been right. Poetry is the 
 delight, as it is the expression, either of very simple 
 or of very elevated natures. The present age has 
 several marks of distinction ; but it is not simple, 
 and it is not lofty. It is practical and pedestrian, 
 caring for astronomy only as an auxiliary to 
 navigation, and for chemistry only as it promotes 
 light, heat, or locomotion. It has no disinterested 
 interest in anything. It is exceedingly inquiring, 
 but it asks for demonstration, and poetry demon- 
 strates nothing. Neither has it any literary interest 
 in literature ; and books, no matter of what 
 calibre, and literature are to it one and the same 
 thing. But why should it be otherwise ? And has 
 it often been otherwise ? Fit audience, though few, 
 was good enough for Milton ; and the poet who 
 wants more is surely very presumptuous and very 
 unreasonable. Indeed, why should he have an 
 audience at all now that he no longer wanders from 
 manor-house to manor-house reciting his verses.'' 
 Surely, reading verse to oneself soon palls.' 
 
 ' Don't talk nonsense,' said Veronica. 
 
 ' Don't talk sense, I was going to say,' added 
 Lamia. 
 
 ' Suppose you do neither,' I ventured to observe, 
 
46 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ' but recite, instead, some of your own verses to 
 this particular audience at this particular manor- 
 house.' 
 
 ' O yes, do ! ' said Lamia. Veronica said 
 nothinlg, but the silence that followed seemed filled 
 with an unspoken request. Hitherto the nightin- 
 gales had been competing with each other in the 
 contiguous brakes. Now, as though they knew 
 our desire, they desisted for awhile, and in the 
 gathering darkness, rendered deeper by the droop- 
 ing branches of the wide-spreading oak,, we listened 
 to lines none of us had heard before. 
 
 If Love could last, if Love could last, 
 The Future be as wras the Past, 
 Nor faith and fondness ever knovy 
 The chill of dwindling afterglow, 
 O ! then we should not have to long 
 For cuckoo's call and throstle's song, 
 But every season then would ring 
 With rapturous voices of the Spring. 
 In budding brake and grassy glade 
 The primrose then would never fade. 
 The windflower flag, the bluebell haze 
 Faint from the winding woodland ways. 
 But vernal hopes chase wintry fears. 
 And happy smiles and happier tears 
 Be like the sun and clouds at play, — 
 If Love could last ! 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 47 
 
 If Love could last, the rose would then 
 Not bloom but once, to fade again. 
 June to the lily would not give 
 A life less fair than fugitive, 
 But flower and leaf and lavyn renevir 
 Their freshness nightly with the dew. 
 In forest dingles, dim and deep. 
 Where curtained noonday lies asleep. 
 The faithful ringdove ne'er would cease 
 Its anthem of abiding peace. 
 All the year round we then should stray 
 Through fragrance of the new-mown hay, 
 Or sit and ponder old-world rhymes 
 Under the leaves of scented limes. 
 Careless of Time, we should not fear 
 The footsteps of the fleeting Year, 
 Or, did the long warm days depart, 
 'Twould still be Summer in our heart, — 
 Did Love but last ! 
 
 Did Love but last, no shade of grief 
 For fading flower, for falling leat, 
 For stubbles whence the piled-up wain 
 Hath borne away the golden grain, 
 Leaving a load of loss behind. 
 Would shock the heart and haunt the mind. 
 With mellow gaze we then should see 
 The ripe fruit shaken from the tree. 
 The swallows troop, the acorns fall. 
 The last peach redden on the wall. 
 The oasthouse smoke, the hop-bine burn, 
 
4-8 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 Knowing that all good things return 
 To Love that lasts ! 
 
 If Love could last, who then would mind 
 The freezing rack, the unfeeling wind. 
 The curdling pool, the shivering sedge. 
 The empty nest in leafless hedge, 
 Brown dripping bents and furrows bare. 
 The wild-geese clamouring through the air, 
 The huddling kine, the sodden leaves. 
 Lack-lustre dawns and clammy eves r 
 For then through twilight days morose 
 We should within keep warm and close. 
 And by the friendly fireside blaze 
 Talk of the ever-sacred days 
 When first we met, and felt how drear 
 Were life without the other near ; 
 Or, too at peace with bliss to speak. 
 Sit hand-in-hand, and cheek-to-cheek, — 
 If Love could last ! 
 
 Was it fancy that made me think I caught the 
 sound of a sigh, almost of a sob ? But no un- 
 timely word of thanks or praise marred the con- 
 sentaneous silence. Moon there was none ; only 
 here and there a dimly-discerned outrider of the 
 Night. Then the nightingales resumed their un- 
 obtrusive nocturn, and the odour of unseen flowers 
 came floating on the dewy air from the Garden 
 that I Love. 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 May 2,0th. 
 
 If it were Spring perpetually, who would trouble 
 himself to have a garden? When I say this, 
 Veronica smiles incredulously, for she believes that 
 if the whole world were a garden I should still 
 want to have a particular and exclusive plot of my 
 own. It is one of Veronica's superstitions that 
 she knows every winding and recess of my mind. 
 Perhaps it is one of mine that she does not. But, 
 
50 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 in truth, 1 am much more inert than she imagines, 
 and would much rather have my gardening done 
 for me, provided that the result were in accordance 
 with that qualche idea che ho in mente, which 
 Raphael said, in answer to an inquiry as to where 
 he had found the type of his Madonnas, was their 
 true origin. Veronica, who is perhaps no more 
 energetic by temperament than I am, but who is 
 more conscientious, likes to see work being done, — 
 partly, no doubt, out of curiosity as to the method 
 of it, but still more in order that she may assure 
 herself it is being done properly. I like to come 
 upon the ground and find the work out of hand 
 and complete. Rather, however, than it should 
 be done wrongly, I will impose on myself any 
 amount of trouble. 
 
 Spring is the most skilful of all gardeners, 
 covering the whole ground with flowers, and 
 shading off^ the crudest contrasts into perfect 
 harmony ; and were it April, May, and June all 
 the year round, I, for one, would never again put 
 spade or seed into the ground. I should select for 
 the site of my home the heart of an English forest, 
 and my cottage should stand half-way up an 
 umbrageous slope that overlooked a wooded vale, 
 from which majestic trees and coverts again rose 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 5/ 
 
 gradually up to the horizon. One would make 
 just clearance enough to satisfy one's desire for 
 self-assertion against Nature, and then she should 
 be allowed to do the rest. What are all the tulips 
 of the Low Countries in point of beauty compared 
 with the covering and carpeting of the wild-wood 
 celandine? Your cultivated Globe -Flower and 
 Shepherd's-Bane are well enough ; but they have 
 a poverty-stricken look when paragoned with the 
 opulent splendour of the marsh - marigold, that 
 would then grow along the moist banks of the 
 low-lying runnels of my natural garden. 
 
 Perhaps I should be accused of exaggeration 
 were I to describe the effect produced on my, no 
 doubt, not impartial gaze by the Anemone apennina 
 and the Anemone fulgens now in full bloom in the 
 Garden that I Love. Professional gardeners will 
 tell you, in their oiFhand way, that these will 
 grow anywhere. They will not — being, notwith- 
 standing their hardiness in places that are suitable, 
 singularly fastidious as to soil and situation, and 
 even sometimes unaccountably whimsical in our 
 uncertain climate. The Anemone fulgens, or Shin- 
 ing IVindflower, is common enough, no doubt, 
 where it chooses to thrive, and you may see It in 
 bloom in open and favourable Springs as early as 
 
52 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 the month of February, while, with proper arrange- 
 ment of aspect, you can prolong its dazzling beauty 
 well into May. But the Anemone apennina, which 
 I have known some people call The Stork' s-Bill 
 Windflower, is, as far as my experience goes, rarely 
 seen in English gardens. It used, an indefinite 
 number of years ago, to be sold in big basketsful 
 by dark-eyed, dark-haired, dark-skinned flower- 
 girls in the Via Condotti in Rome, in the months 
 of February and March, and I recollect a good 
 Samaritan putting the finishing touch to my con- 
 valescence, after a visitation of Roman fever, by 
 bringing to my room a large posy of this exquisite 
 flower, varying in colour from sky-blue to pure 
 white, and springing out of the daintiest, most 
 feathery foliage imaginable. Perhaps, therefore, 
 it is in some degree the spell of association which 
 makes me feel tenderly enthusiastic concerning the 
 Apennine Windflower. I do not say it prospers 
 in our latitudes as it does in the sunshine-shadow 
 of the Appian Way. But, in most years, it main- 
 tains itself against rude winds, unkindly leaden 
 clouds, 
 
 And Amazonian March with breast half bare, 
 And sleety arrows whistling through the air. 
 
 It asks for some but not too much shelter, and 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 53 
 
 I have had to lighten the natural heaviness of my 
 ground, in order to humour it, with well-pulverised 
 soil and a judicious contribution of sand. 
 
 But, with all my partiality for these domestic- 
 ated windflowers, I will not pretend that they can 
 hold a feather to undulating stretches of sylvan 
 anemones ; and in April these would be as numer- 
 ous as the pink-and-white shells of the sea-shore, 
 which in colour they curiously resemble, around 
 my forest abode. Blending with them in the most 
 affable manner would be the wild or dog-violets, 
 destitute of scent, but making amends by their 
 sweet simplicity for the ostensible absence of 
 fragrance. Where they rule the woodland territory 
 the earth is bluer than the sky. Persons of limited 
 experience concerning Nature's elastic methods 
 have sometimes asked me if Veronica's Poet is not 
 inaccurate in giving the wild windflowers precedence 
 of the primroses in one or two passages of his. 
 Were they as familiar with the seasons as he, they 
 would know that it is beyond guessing to say when 
 the primrose will exercise that sovereignty which 
 it never fails to assert over all the wild -flowers 
 at some period or other of the Spring. I have 
 gathered primroses in basketsful on Christmas Day. 
 Sometimes I have had to hunt for them even in 
 
54 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 March. They will at times follow the footsteps 
 of June till its very close ; yet in another year they 
 will vanish before May is out. In some favoured 
 seasons they will come and go, and then come 
 again. There ' is no bounds,' to use a favourite 
 phrase of my gardeners, to their fascinatingly fickle 
 behaviour. It may please them to accompany, 
 and rather take the shine out of, the ladysmocks. 
 A twelvemonth later they will show a decided 
 partiality for the society of the dog-vioiets ; and 
 it may so happen that they will elect to wait and 
 enter into competitidn with the bluebells. Then, 
 indeed, the glory of the heavens is nothing to the 
 glory of the earth. Nature thus rings the changes 
 on her various vernal notes, and does the same 
 thing year after year, but differently. But, in any 
 case, you see, Spring would garden for me, without 
 wage, for fully three months in the year. For 1 
 have not by any means enumerated and exhausted 
 her resources. She could, and should, do for me 
 in my intra-sylvan home far more than I have as 
 yet described. Just as one begins to feel a little 
 sad because the wood -hyacinths pale, the red 
 campion takes a brighter hue and holds up a bolder 
 stalk, determined to see over the heads of the now 
 fast -shooting green crosiers of the bracken ; and 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 55 
 
 before these unfurl themselves and get too high, 
 the sleepy foxgloves suddenly remember that it is 
 June, and dapple the lush dingles with their spires 
 of freckled bells. All flowers seem to contain a 
 secret — I suppose because they are silent. But the 
 foxglove has always seemed to me to possess more 
 of the mystery of things than any of its sylvan 
 compeers. Moreover, notwithstanding its almost 
 gorgeous ..beauty, it calls no attention to itself, but 
 loves solitude, secrecy, and the shade. Of course 
 the primroses and the bluebells would be the reign- 
 ing beauties of the natural garden. I know a wood 
 of pollarded hornbeam — we are going to take Lamia 
 and the Poet there a few weeks hence — of many 
 acres in extent, where the bluebells grow not only as 
 lush and serried as grass, but well on to three feet in 
 height. The wood has been left untouched and un- 
 trodden for years, and the accumulation of rotted 
 leaves, conjoined with something peculiarly favour- 
 able in the soil, has produced this fairy world. But 
 there the bluebells have usurped the ground entirely, 
 and do not permit any other wild-flower, even a 
 primrose, to cross the frontier of their territory. 
 Therefore, it is not to it I would exclaim — 
 
 O ye woods, spread your branches apace ! 
 To your deepest recesses I fly. 
 
56 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 The wood I should want would have to be 
 hospitable, as many a wood in truth is, to every 
 child of Nature that loved its protection. Nor 
 let it be forgotten that this ' desirable site ' would 
 have its natural orchard as well : the wild pear, 
 the wild cherry, and the wild crab lighting up the 
 woodland greenery with their gay and delicate 
 blossoms. Nor would eglantine and honeysuckle 
 be wanting. On one side I think I should have 
 a little pasture open to the sun, and coming up to 
 my windows to salute me with daisies, and butter- 
 cups, and the milk -sweet breath of ruminating 
 kine. 
 
 But Spring has to make way for Summer, 
 Summer for Autumn, and Autumn for Winter, 
 and only one of these knows how to garden, and 
 it has to do so under rather hostile conditions. 
 Summer is absolutely ignorant of the craft, bring- 
 ing everything on with a rush, and then having to 
 content itself with woods and copses of uniform 
 green ; and, though Winter is a great gardener in 
 one sense, since he makes untiring, if generally 
 unnoticed, preparations for future floral display, 
 he has few flowers to show of his own. Autumn, 
 I grant, knows the art of gardening to perfection, 
 possessing the secret of careless grace even beyond 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 57 
 
 the Spring. There is an orderly negligence, a 
 well-thought-out untidiness about autumnal forms 
 and colours no other season can match. Even to 
 the garden proper, the cultivated plots of man. 
 Autumn adds such wonderful touches of happy 
 accident that, when it comes, really comes, a wise 
 man leaves his garden alone and allows it to fade, 
 and wane, and slowly, pathetically, pass away, 
 without any eiFort to hinder or conceal the decay. 
 Indeed, it would be worth while having a cultivated 
 garden if only to see what Autumn does with it. 
 What she does she seems to do unintentionally, 
 and in those almost permanent fits of absence, 
 during which, I suppose, she is thinking of the 
 past. But this meditative touch of hers is more 
 discernible in the cultivated garden than in the 
 woodlands; and she makes the wild -wood too 
 moist and chill with her tears for it to be the 
 fitting accessory of a cheerful home. Spring may 
 be a less mature artist, but Spring's hopeful and 
 sunny open-heartedness more than atones for some 
 little lack of dexterity. 
 
 Again, I say, were it always April, May, and 
 June, one would discharge one's gardeners and 
 throw oneself on the gratuitous bounty of Nature. 
 I have heard people remark that the Italians seem 
 
/ 
 
 i 
 
 58 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE / 
 
 to care little for flowers, and rarely tend their 
 gardens with true northern affection. But then, 
 are not their glowing sunshine and their spacious 
 atmosphere heaven-sent flowers and gardens in 
 themselves ? and they feel for these somewhat as 
 I feel for the natural capacity of the vernal season, 
 would it only last, to wean me from lawn, and 
 border, and flower-bed — yea, even from the Garden 
 that I Love. 
 
 ' Commend me, my dear Sage,' — it is thus 
 Lamia is pleased at times to christen me, — ' com- 
 mend me to the wise for talking folly. Your 
 natural or wild-wood garden would pall before the 
 Spring was out. Even the most indolent of us 
 like to assert ourselves occasionally, and I can see 
 the havoc you would play with the free gifts of 
 April and the generous prodigality of May. Man 
 is an interfering animal, and, if you like, woman 
 still more so. In fact, man improves Nature, and 
 then woman improves man, or at any rate compels 
 him to improve himself, in order to obtain her 
 approbation. There is no such thing as beauty 
 unadorned. Nature, left to herself, is a reactionist, 
 always slipping back from worse to worse. Give 
 me the hanging gardens of Ecbatana, and the 
 flowers that are fostered by a thousand slaves. 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 59 
 
 A garden ! a garden ! O yes, a garden ! But then, 
 it must be a Garden ! The Garden that you Love 
 is well enough ; but I cannot lose myself in it, nor 
 feel that supreme sense of satisfaction which comes 
 of carelessly ruling a splendid kingdom. I want 
 a garden like yours, enlarged and expanded into 
 what Shelley calls a paradise of wildernesses — a 
 garden where the garden is everything and the 
 owner of it nothing.' 
 
 ' There are many such, dear Lamia,' I answered, 
 ' in this fair and varied England ; and I can show 
 you one whenever you wish to see it. But I fear 
 the owner would count for something, and I must 
 ask his permission before I do so.' 
 
 ' Yes, there it is ! The owner always insists 
 on obtruding himself, though he may not be 
 wanted in the very least. Girls marry yachts, 
 town houses, country houses, and shooting-lodges. 
 Why can one not marry a garden .'' ' 
 
 ' So you can,' I observed, ' but on the same 
 terms.' 
 
 ' But I do not want the same terms ; nor are 
 they necessary. The possessors of the things I 
 named set much store by their houses, yachts, 
 four-in-hands, and salmon rivers. But they think 
 nothing of their gardens, and take these as a matter 
 
6o THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 of course, as producing vegetables, flowers, fruit, 
 and opportunities for an occasional saunter. Why 
 cannot I marry the garden — the paradise of wilder- 
 nesses, I mean — and treat all the rest, the owner 
 included, as a matter of course, an accessory and 
 mere occasional appendage ? ' 
 
 ' I will try to arrange it for you,' I said. ' But, 
 meanwhile, be pleased to observe that, as you 
 yourself note, the owners of what you describe care 
 next to nothing for their garden.' 
 
 ' And, if I married one, perhaps I too should 
 not care for it.' 
 
 ' Precisely. The moment I enter a garden I 
 know at once whether it is the owner's garden or 
 the gardeners' garden. Nearly all large and costly 
 gardens are gardeners' gardens, and for my part I 
 would not take them a gift. I don't think I ever 
 remember envying the gardens of the great ; but 
 I continually see cottage gardens, little village or 
 secluded plots, cultivated and made beautiful by 
 the pathetic expedients of the poor, which seem to 
 have a charm mine cannot rival. Almost every 
 garden, and certainly my own, sins against the law 
 of economy. There are too many flowers ; and 
 effect, surprise, and suggestiveness are lost. I have 
 seen one clambering rose, one lingering hollyhock. 
 
THE GARDEN THAT 1 LOVE 6i 
 
 glorify a cottage home, arrest one's step, and pro- 
 long one's meditations, more than all the terraces 
 of Chatsworth. Dear Lamia ! cultivate simplicity 
 and tenderness, and crush out, as deadliest poison, 
 what I call your low tastes — your taste for 
 splendour, profusion, and the pride of life. In 
 your case they are not to be indulged in without 
 what you spoke of as the accessory becoming the 
 principal, and the occasional the perpetual. The 
 owner of a garden may not care for it in the least ; 
 but you cannot very well keep him out of it.' 
 
 Lamia is always so submissive to my sermons 
 that I rarely preach one. She brought this to a 
 close with the observation, ' Of course you are 
 right,' and we passed together into the orchard. 
 
 It must not be supposed that the orchard, as it 
 now is, is the orchard I happed on that day when 
 I discovered my lifelong home. That, with the 
 exception of some five vigorous survivors, has dis- 
 appeared. For one of the burning questions that 
 arose when I took in hand the making of the 
 Garden that I Love and its immediate surroundings, 
 was what to do, and how to deal with, the orchard. 
 The whole world through there is no lovelier sight 
 than a well-planted, well-grown English orchard, 
 whether in its full spring blossom or in the mellow 
 
62 
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 richness of its autumnal crop. In its one aspect 
 it represents, as nothing else in Nature does, the 
 innocence, the irresponsible freshness, the irresistible 
 
 h^ 
 
 "t^i^ 
 
 
 
 gaiety of simple childhood. In the other, it recalls 
 and reflects the grave fruitfulness of mature and 
 resigned wisdom. Wandering in an orchard, 
 either in mid May or in early October, one feels a 
 desultory and indefinite but all-satisfying sense of 
 peace such as I think one feels nowhere else. One 
 never wants to be elsewhere, for one seems to have 
 got to the heart and centre of things. An orchard 
 at once robust and venerable with years has a great 
 advantage over one whose branches have but a 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 63 
 
 decade or two of growth ; and the one I then 
 found had all the majesty of manhood, with none 
 of the decrepitude of age. But, as I pointed out 
 to Veronica, it completely cut off the house, and 
 would cut ofF the garden that was to be, from the 
 park, with all its wealth and world of splendid 
 timber and green interspaces. I never knew her 
 so unyielding in her opinion, and she begged so 
 hard for the old apple-trees, though I pointed out 
 to her I should have ample space in which to plant 
 new ones, that I had to fall back oh a compromise, 
 and clear away only one row, the centre one, leaving 
 two goodly rows on either side. My own private 
 opinion is that, though Veronica expressed for this 
 ancient orchard an amount of reverence I have 
 never before or since known her to extend to any- 
 thing whether old or young, and though she would 
 have had me suppose that on this occasion she was 
 much more sentimental, more romantic, and more 
 conservative than myself, the reason that mainly 
 swayed her was not the one she advanced. Almost 
 immediately after taking possession, I had sold the 
 bulk of the produce of the orchard to an old but still 
 speculative small farmer in the neighbourhood for 
 five pounds ; and I firmly believe that .Veronica 
 could not bear the idea of parting with this sum, 
 
64 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 which she somewhat sanguinely regarded as an 
 annual incoming, and therefore so much deducted 
 from the rent. It seems very absurd ; but then we 
 all are absurd sometimes, Veronica not excepted. 
 Still I ought to add she is absurd less often than 
 most people. We were not so hard put to it that 
 five pounds more or less mattered in the very least; 
 and, in the matter of generosity, Veronica would 
 give you any mortal thing you asked for. Indeed, 
 could she have saved those apples of the future, she 
 would probably have given most of them away, 
 and been no richer for my yielding to her. But 
 it was only when I represented to her that the cut- 
 down trees would be a fortune in firewood — which, 
 in her then ignorance, she accepted from me as a 
 fact — that she seemed to grow reconciled to the 
 disappearance of that one middle row. When it 
 was cleared away, the soundness of my opinion 
 was made so manifest that further resistance would 
 have been rank obstinacy and want of taste. For 
 it so happened that we had thereby acquired a view 
 of one of the loveliest portions of the park, and, 
 indeed, became, so to speak, ourselves a portion of 
 it, seeming to be in it, whether, strictly speaking, 
 we were or not. The augmented air of conse- 
 quence this opening out of the prospect gave 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 65 
 
 to our modest manor-house, together, no doubt, 
 with nocturnal calculations as to the value of so 
 many cords of apple-wood, completed Veronica's 
 conversion. 
 
 But, in carrying out this painful operation, I 
 was as little iconoclastic as possible. One outer 
 row, as not really impeding the view, and as 
 affording protection against north winds for the 
 young orchard I had engaged to plant, was spared 
 entirely ; and, over and above this wise forbearance, 
 I left one magnificent and most shapely tree to 
 stand in the open by itself. It has ever since been 
 one of our chief delights. In springtime I gaze 
 from my study window on its mass of pink-and- 
 white blossoms, on the clumps of daffodils about 
 its roots, on the young lambs frisking and chasing 
 each other round its sturdy bole. In autumn it is 
 laden with small, round, rosy fruit, which is so 
 beautiful an object that I insist, despite repeated 
 insinuations that the apples are all falling to the 
 ground and being spoilt, on leaving it upon the 
 tree to the last possible moment. It is the year's 
 last tribute to our sense of cultivated beauty, and 
 I do not like to ignore the gift. And, after all, 
 what is waste? There comes a time to all of us 
 when we can eat but little fruit but need never 
 
66 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 tire of gazing on it. Thus I enjoy my apples and 
 pears and damsons in that way, rather than in the 
 grosser and cruder fashion of younger years — 
 tasting them with the eye and the palate of the 
 imagination. Not but that Veronica and I do not 
 gather, or pick up, many a juicy Northern Spy, 
 Golden Noble, or Ribston Pippin — for we have a 
 tree of these that bears fairly well — and regale 
 ourselves on them in a perfunctory and sauntering 
 fashion. As for Lamia and the Poet, if they 
 happen to be here in September and October, as 
 they pretty usually are, their childish appetite 
 knows no bounds. I suppose the Poet will repro- 
 duce his ravenous experience in mellow autumn 
 verse ; but all this biting and crunching only 
 makes Lamia look more April-like than ever. 
 
 Both the old orchard and the new have led to 
 more controversy and more incidents than any 
 other portion of my modest holding. I so rarely 
 have the advantage of Veronica, that I cannot 
 resist narrating a signal triumph I once enjoyed 
 over her disposition to play the horticultural 
 Cassandra in connection with one of the reprieved 
 apple-trees. The Garden that I Love slopes gradu- 
 ally from north-east tO" south-west, so that when I 
 wanted to make a tennis-ground at the far end of 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 67 
 
 the garden towards the park, I had to level up, as 
 the phrase is, moving the earth from the end where 
 stands the Wealden oak, to the southern end where 
 begins what we call our South Border. By this, 
 proceeding the new and raised border abutted oi! 
 one of the old apple-trees, from which it was 
 divided by the garden fence. For two or three 
 years after this operation the tree bore no fruit; 
 and, as the young orchard had meanwhile grown 
 up, and was coming into bearing, Veronica de- 
 nounced as barren the tree for whose life, along 
 with that of its peers, she had once so eloquently 
 pleaded. ' It will never bear again,' she said. ' It 
 is only an eyesore, and you had better cut it down.' 
 ' I think you are wrong, my dear,' I replied. 
 ' What has happened is this : its old roots have 
 got into the fresh rich soil of the new border, and 
 it is accordingly making fresh wood. Be patient, 
 and it will get over this stimulating change, and 
 bear fruitfully as of old.' 
 
 Another year passed, and I still remained a false 
 prophet. But the following May the tree was 
 smothered in blossom, and when August came it 
 WIS laden with big, splendidly plumped-out apples. 
 1 led Veronica to the spot, saying that I wanted to 
 point at her the finger of scorn ; and now the fruit 
 
 F 
 
68 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 of this ancient but teeming apple-tree is known in 
 our fruit-loft and larder as The Finger of Scorn. 
 It keeps till apples come again. I have little 
 doubt that my new orchard will never be as valu- 
 able as the old one, for our forerunners had a 
 thrifty disposition, being, moreover, by no means 
 so ignorant as the presumptuous horticulturists and 
 pomol'ogists of to-day like to suppose, and they 
 planted apple-trees that were both copious bearers 
 and tenacious keepers. Fortunately, Veronica was 
 not at this time skilled in the matter, or she would 
 have led me a life had she known I was not strictly 
 following their economic example. The truth is, 
 I planted for beauty fully as much as for use, and 
 made diligent inquiry about blossom as well as 
 about fruit. So now we shall have unfailing and 
 varied loveliness in April and May, and winter 
 shelves sufficiently well stocked. But it is no earthly 
 use for statesmen to tell the anxious husbandman 
 to foil the dire effects of foreign rivalry and unkind 
 seasons by planting orchards, unless they also tell 
 him what sort of apples to plant. Early crops of 
 fruit that will not keep go for a song, and we all 
 know how little that is worth. Yet, if everybody 
 grew none but apples that keep till after Christmas, 
 the glut would come then instead of a few months 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 69 
 
 earlier. Happy, therefore, they who can regard 
 their orchard as remunerative, so only it be a thing 
 of beauty. I have done the best I can by mine, 
 though in no commercial spirit, having drained it 
 attentively, pruning it yearly, so that light and air 
 can get to the inner branches and buds, and ever 
 and anon manuring it lavishly. And regularly as 
 the end of October comes round, I place a broad 
 band of brown paper midway round every trunk, 
 and smear it pretty thickly with cart-grease, com- 
 posed simply of tar and resin, so that no harm can 
 come to them by it. In this sticky barrier the 
 female moths, who are wingless, find themselves 
 arrested on their way from the grass to the boughs, 
 in which they would fain deposit their eggs, and 
 are collected by thousands in the morning by the 
 gardeners, as they go their rounds with their 
 lanterns. So far, this plan has kept my trees fairly 
 free from greedy and devastating grubs. Of course, 
 the young trees still have substantial cradles round 
 them ; but I pine for the day when they will grow 
 out of their swaddling clothes, be able to take care 
 of themselves without protection or disfigurement, 
 and make us forget for good and all the stroke of 
 unavoidable Vandalism that swept away their nobler 
 predecessors. 
 
70 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 But, indeed^ axe, and saw, and pick, and spade 
 had to be employed with remorseless energy almost 
 everywhere when first I set about contriving the 
 Garden that I Love. I had to make a clean sweep 
 of many a misplaced trunk and worn-out shrubbery, 
 and happily I could do so without anxiety, by 
 reason of the ample framework of bole and branch 
 and foliage, that, at a fitting distance, hemmed me 
 round. I have said that we look south-east ; and, 
 to the north, I levelled with the ground a triple 
 row of worthless and sickly fir-trees, putting in 
 their place a border, indeed, almost a plantation, of 
 evergreen and for the most part flowering shrubs 
 of vigorous growth and branching habit. I have 
 often wondered since that they have done so well, 
 for they stand in a somewhat stiff clayey subsoil, 
 and I put them in, because I could not help myself, 
 in November days of heavy and continuous rain. 
 It was a pretty stupid thing to do, but somehow 
 stupidity this time has not had to pay its due 
 forfeit. But I did a stupider thing than that, for 
 I abolished a pond near the north gate leading into 
 the lane that divides me from the other park of 
 which I spoke, regarding it as shockingly unsightly, 
 and replacing it with a mixed copse. How often 
 have I wished that pond back again, that I might 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 71 
 
 grow water-lilies on its surface, irises on its bank, 
 and reeds and aquatic plants all about it ! But we 
 did some wise and far-seeing things also ; and the 
 wisest thing of all was to include in the area of the 
 garden so much of the ground of the old orchard 
 
 as brought into my pleasaunce the immemorial oak 
 under which the Poet last night repeated, ' If love 
 could last,' and whither, I notice, our guests are 
 frequently drawn. It seems to preside over the 
 garden with patriarchal tenderness, conferring on 
 it a dignity and an aspect of ancientness it might 
 
72 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 otherwise Jack. It seems a symboJ, indeed a repre- 
 sentative, of the toleration the old has for the new, 
 the indulgence age extends to youth. Its girth, a 
 yard from the ground, is some forty feet, and you 
 may saunter under its leaves for over one hundred 
 without turning. So numerous are the boughs, 
 and so dense the leafage, that the turf beneath it 
 is dewless on the clearest nights ; and Lamia has 
 threatened more than once to have a mattress 
 carried out, so that she may pass a summer night 
 under its unconventional canopy. I have turned 
 her from her purpose with tales, true enough, of the 
 owls that roost in its murky and perishing hollows, 
 and of the lair of wild kittens that crouch in the dark 
 recesses of its lower bole. I observed, one day last 
 June, that a strange cat had kittened in the long 
 grass that grows on either side of what we call the 
 orchard drive, which is the approach from the park 
 to the house. Going a few days after to see how 
 the little family were faring, I could discern no 
 trace of them, and concluded that hawk and keeper 
 between them had cut them ofF in the morning of 
 their days. A week later I was hunting for a 
 missing lawn-tennis ball, and stooped down to see 
 if perchance it had run up one of the several 
 recesses or creeks made by the radiating and arching 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 73 
 
 surface roots of the oak. Ball there was none, but, 
 instead, a pair of steadily flaming eyes. Irked by 
 the long, wet grass, for there had been several 
 heavy falls of rain, and anxious to make her young 
 ones more dry and comfortable, the parent had 
 carried them one by one in her mouth to where 
 they now lay snugly ensconced. But all attempts 
 to approach her were in vain, and not the freshest 
 of milk, nor the daintiest of fish, availed to lure 
 her from her narrow den so long as any of us 
 remained within sight. Her litter grew up as fierce 
 and unsociable as herself; and, for a time, the 
 novel delight of having what we called wild cats 
 crouching or careering over the garden obtained 
 for them life and liberty. But at length sentence 
 of death had to be pronounced. Lamia thinks 
 that one of the ferocious race may still be lurking 
 in one of the oak caves, while overhead there may 
 be a large slovenly nest of owlets gnawing the tit- 
 bits of captured field-mice. 
 
 It is to me an unexplained mystery how, not- 
 withstanding a couple of perpetually prowling cats, 
 bird life still flourishes in the Garden that I Love. 
 Were it otherwise, no member of the feline tribe 
 should come within scent or sight of it. At this 
 moment, in bushy Portugal laurel, in tapering 
 
74 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 Lawson cypresses, in shapely thujas, and even in 
 the Picea Pinsafo and the Pinus Nordmanniana, 
 are bulbous nests of thrush and blackbird, solidly 
 rather than careflilly put together, as of birds that 
 feel they will probably have to go through the 
 same work again if they have a second brood. 
 The whitethroats prefer smaller and more compact 
 cover, and, trusting to the secrecy afforded by it, 
 have built in aucuba and retinospora, close to the 
 garden paths ; while the linnets are faithful to the 
 thick thriving ivy on the outer wall of the kitchen- 
 garden. I am in hopes that the golden-crested 
 wrens are going to build again in the Maids-of- 
 the-Village — Felicite Perpetuelle, if you prefer a 
 foreign name — ^that clamber from beside the front- 
 door right up to the very topmost curve of the 
 tallest gables ; and if the long-tailed tits are not 
 going to do the same in one of the five old firs 
 my innovating axe has spared, outside the north 
 window of the dining-room, I do not know what 
 they can be about. 
 
 Lamia may say what she will about my ideal 
 woodland garden ; but I intend to tell her I 
 am prepared to go still further, and that I would 
 sacrifice flowers to birds, if I were compelled to 
 choose between the two. And of all song-birds, 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 75 
 
 the thrush is out and away the prince. Rightly 
 has he been christened a March Minstrel. 
 
 Hearing thee flute, who pines or grieves 
 
 For vernal smiles and showers ? 
 Thy voice is greener than the leaves, 
 
 And fresher than the flowers. 
 
 Scorning to wait for tuneful May 
 
 When every throat can sing, . 
 Thou floutest winter with thy lay, 
 
 And art thyself the Spring. 
 
 It is in the branches of my patriarchal oak that 
 every year he commences his carol, which soon 
 becomes continuous from blossoming dawn to 
 fading eve. No other song-bird sings so early 
 and so late in the day, so early and so late in the 
 year. Inspiration never fails him from opening 
 February to mid July ; and all through October 
 and November he has, I cannot call them ' poetic 
 pains,' but rather poetic delights, through the two 
 gloamings, I sometimes think he gets betrothed 
 in those months, and that the engagement lasts 
 through the winter till St. Valentine's Day or 
 thereabouts, when he concludes the contract, and 
 becomes — if so amorous a singer possibly can be- 
 come — a respectable member of society. Perhaps 
 it is the instinctive fidelity of his disposition — 
 
76 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 The bird that sings within the brake, 
 One mate, and one alone, will take ; 
 While man — 
 
 you know the rest — which causes him always to 
 tune up first in the oak that has been there longer 
 than any other tree for miles around, — an inherited 
 and conservative inclination to do honour to the 
 long-established. And then the thrush is so joyous. 
 He is cross sometimes, and scolds abominably, but 
 he is never sad ! He is the most wholesome of all 
 the lyric tribe, and a pessimist could scarcely listen 
 to him long and often, and remain such ; for his 
 notes are a very jubilee, and rebuke the downcast 
 and the despondent. It is only in August and 
 September that he is silent ; and then one feels 
 disposed to ask — 
 
 Why dost thou ever cease to sing ? 
 Singing is such sweet comfort, who. 
 If he could sing the whole year through, 
 
 Would barter it for anything ? 
 
 A prosaic naturalist would account for the fact 
 by saying that the bird was moulting ; but I sus- 
 pect the thrush is of a greedy and self-indulgent 
 disposition, and cannot resist the tempting things 
 spread out before him in such profusion during 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 77 
 
 the two fruitful months I have named ; and he 
 gorges himself so with strawberries, raspberries, 
 red and white currants, and then, if he is let, with 
 honeyed plums and succulent pears, that he grows 
 lazy, comfortable, and unromantic, and is as empty 
 of song as any well-to-do middle-class alderman. 
 When all the fruit has been gathered, and he can 
 no longer go nibbling and making a beast instead 
 of a bird of himself all over the place, he resumes 
 his natural tone, and enlivens the mellow autumn 
 woodlands with his exhilarating song. Fat fare, I 
 fear, clouds the imagination. I must ask the Poet 
 what he thinks of this theory. I believe I have 
 heard him say that his most silent time is the 
 earlier autumn months. Perhaps he too is made 
 taciturn by all the apples he munches with Lamia — 
 suffering in consequence from a sort of dyspeptic 
 silence. How indignant Veronica would be with 
 this prosaic explanation 1 
 
 It is when the March minstrel first perches and 
 pipes amid the gray branches of the oak that the 
 turf beneath it begins to break into flower, as if in 
 response to his vernal announcement. Celandines, 
 buttercups, and daisies, as a matter of course, 
 always congregated near and about its giant sprawl- 
 ing roots, like the Liliputians about the reposing 
 
78 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 Gulliver. But other companions, placed there by 
 one's own hand, then likewise begin to spangle the 
 ground under its comprehensive branches. The 
 winter aconites come first, and, when their bright 
 little golden buttons have fallen off, then peep the 
 snowdrops, to be swiftly followed by the many- 
 coloured, gloriously -caparisoned crocuses. I re- 
 member once inadvertently telling a gardener to 
 dibble some crocuses into the lawn ; and I found 
 to my horror, when they came up, he had sown 
 them in drills, like so many onions. They should 
 be scattered about like the accidental and irregular 
 stars of the Milky Way, which they far outshine, 
 for they are not golden only, but white, blue, puce, 
 and every combination of these. Of course, they 
 should seem to have come there, as the phrase is, 
 of themselves, and then they spread over the grass 
 a mysterious haze. I hope yet to persuade the 
 Scilla sibirica, and even the Chionodoxa Lucilia, 
 to bear them company in the same enchanted plot. 
 As these February and March compeers flag, up 
 come the lusty spears of the daffodils, single and 
 double, Lent lilies, and the unassuming, incense- 
 scented Narcissus poeticus. I am minded to try 
 the more elaborate and delicate daffodils in the 
 grass, but as yet I cannot answer for their flourish- 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 79 
 
 ing there. Why, too, should not the tulip open 
 its light -refracting chalice under the overarching 
 dome of this natural temple ? I will give them a 
 chance. As a matter of course, rook, squirrel, 
 and field-mouse take tribute of these dainty morsels 
 in winter, catching the bulbs when they are asleep. 
 But they are welcome to their share, the squirrel 
 more especially, in return for his delightful antics, 
 which I have watched so often from the writing- 
 table in the front window of the study. 
 
 Is thine alone the seed that strews the plain ? 
 The birds of Heaven shall vindicate their grain, 
 
 as Pope says in his Essay on Man, which I have 
 been recommending Lamia to read, as a corrective 
 to, though of course not a substitute for, the 
 feminine note that predominates in the most 
 popular nineteenth -century verse. She has just 
 asked me, as we returned from the orchard through 
 the copse kitchen -garden, what more I want of 
 woodland flowers than I have got already. For 
 to the south of the new orchard is what Veronica 
 calls, and we all, therefore, have to call, the Poet's 
 Walk — a long, straight, leafy aisle, like one of 
 Keats's 
 
 Long verdurous glooms and mossy winding ways, 
 
8o 
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 except that it does not wind, and is not gloomy ; 
 and its grassy path and mixed underwood on either 
 side are at present diapered with primroses, upon 
 
 whose cloth-of-gold the bluebells are beginning to 
 assert themselves. Now that she confesses it is 
 more beautiful far than the lawn and its flower- 
 beds, I will acknowledge that perhaps she, too, is 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 8i 
 
 right, and that one does well to remain content 
 with this outer fringe of Nature's all but uninter- 
 fered-with territory. The larger celandine there 
 grows to a wondrous size, and the dog's-mercury 
 and lords-and-ladies make themselves very happy. 
 Later on, the white foxgloves will dapple the fresh 
 young greenery; and I have reason to believe, 
 from what I observed last year, that in a few weeks 
 the hardier columbines will show that they love 
 the partial shelter, the broken sunlight and shade, 
 which the narrow strip of not yet full-foliaged 
 copse affords them. 
 
 ' Oh, tea out-of-doors ! ' exclaimed Lamia, clap- 
 ping her hands, as we emerged out of the copse 
 and I perceived the five o'clock meal being pre- 
 pared in the open air. ' Is not Veronica a dear 
 to humour us .'' I know she thinks it far too early 
 in the year for al fresco banquets.' 
 
 ' It is to please the Poet,' I said. ' For him 
 she would sacrifice her strictest notions and most 
 methodical ways. Do not flatter yourself, dear 
 Lamia. Neither for you nor for me would she have 
 spread the board suh Jove this side Midsummer- 
 Day. But she says she is sure the Poet was born 
 under a hedge, such is his restless craving for the 
 open air, and so she humours his gipsy tastes ! ' 
 
82 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ' Yes, I have heard him declare that any house 
 is more or less a gaol, and that he always feels the 
 loftiest roof on the top of his head.' 
 
 In another moment Veronica was seated before 
 the teacups, which are of exquisite design, but con- 
 structed with an absolute disregard of the main 
 purpose of a teacup — which is, I imagine, to keep 
 the tea hot as long as possible — being shallow, and 
 wide at the brim, instead of deep and narrow. 
 When I entirely sacrifice use to beauty in the 
 garden, I am chidden ; but I find even utilitarian 
 Veronica sometimes manifests a similar preference 
 indoors. I have often observed that even the best 
 of women are more anxious how a thing shall look 
 than what it shall be, though, I confess that, as 
 a rule, Veronica contrives to combine honest sub- 
 stance with graceful seeming. 
 
 ' Where is the Poet ? ' I asked. 
 
 'You may be sure he will be here directly,' 
 answered Veronica. 
 
 ' Yes, he has a fine material side to his imagina- 
 tion,' observed Lamia. 
 
 'As a poet ought 'to have,' I chimed in, in a 
 cowardly manner, wishing to propitiate both. 
 
 ' I did not mean that,' said Veronica, ' but only 
 that as he never does anything irregular, or pseudo- 
 
THE GARDEN THAT J LOVE 83 
 
 original, he is sure to be here immediately, since 
 he knows tea is at a quarter before five, and he does 
 not trust to the hedge-flowers to tell him the hour. 
 He will never be, do, or say anything odd, but 
 will comport himself in all small matters like an 
 ordinary mortal.' 
 
 At that moment, very much like an ordinary 
 mortal, he joined us, having in his hand a volume 
 which Lamia had asked him to read. 
 
 ' What do you think of it ? ' she* asked, 
 ' How can I think well of it,' he answered, 
 ' seeing that it is verse, yet is neither musical, 
 simple, nor lucid ? Poetry may be very thin poor 
 poetry, even though melodious, unaffected, and 
 transparent ; but, unless it possess those qualities, 
 it can scarcely be poetry. It may furnish an 
 excellent intellectual exercise, and be replete with 
 knotty problems of an absorbing kind ; but why 
 it should be put ostensibly under the protection of 
 the Muses, I do not understand. You tell me 
 that some persons regard the author as a master, 
 and in a sense he Is, since one may learn from his 
 writings how not to write. The greatest writers 
 write like other people, only better. He has 
 evidently been afraid lest he should not be original, 
 but originality is not to be attained by effort. I 
 
 o 
 
84 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 once saw an early volume of his, which in style 
 nowise resembled this one ; so that evidently he 
 did not bring his present manner into the world 
 with him. If he were younger, and I could venture 
 to counsel him, I should say, " Keep, in the matter 
 of style, to the Via Latina or the Classic Way. 
 It leads to the Capitol." ' 
 
 'But,' objected Lamia — for Veronica remained 
 spellbound, while I poured myself out another 
 cup of tea — ' Classicism is surely dead, and has 
 been replaced by Romanticism,' 
 
 ' I think not,' said the Poet. ' The Classic can 
 never die — I mean as a living and enduring mode 
 of expression, since it is a natural mode, through 
 the perfection of nature. Neither was it left to 
 the present age, nor to its predecessor, to invent the 
 romantic element in poetry. Every great classic 
 is a great romantic ; every really great romantic 
 is a great classic. Poetry should be romantic in 
 spirit, and classical in manner. Do not people, 
 nowadays, commit the curious error of mistaking 
 disproportion for novelty ? The classic, the roman- 
 tic, the realistic, are none of them new ; they are 
 all found in the best literature, and in proper pro- 
 portion and combination. Does the omission, or 
 the extravagant use, of any one of them exclusively, 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 85 
 
 constitute originality ? I should not have thought 
 so. It is so easy either to omit or to exaggerate, 
 to be nothing but realistic, nothing but classical, 
 nothing but romantic ; so difficult to be all three. 
 Exaggeration is a sign of poverty, not of power, 
 or at best of waywardness, not of judgment.' 
 
 ' You talk of poetry,' said Lamia, ' as though 
 it can be reasoned about.' 
 
 ' And so,' he answered, ' I think it can — being, 
 in its loftiest development, the highest expression 
 of human reason.' 
 
 ' And what is its loftiest development ? ' 
 
 ' As far as expression is concerned, the imagina- 
 tive presentation in verse of intellectual and moral 
 truths, in conjunction, and, best of all, in inter- 
 fusion with physical ones — as, for example, in 
 Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality.' 
 
 ' But I think I have heard you say that poets 
 should not dogmatise, much less argue.' 
 
 ' Neither should they ; Nature is not con- 
 troversial. She never contradicts. Her look is 
 all assent.' 
 
 ' I suppose,' broke in Lamia, ' that is why her 
 companionship is so agreeable.' 
 
 ' Precisely,' he went on, nowise disconcerted by, 
 and perhaps not observing, the barb that was 
 
86 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 aimed at him ; ' and Art should be equally 
 sympathetic and non-controversial. The greatest 
 works never excite noisy enthusiasm, but only quiet, 
 deep-seated assent. When we have read them we 
 say to ourselves silently, " Yes." ' 
 
 ' How true ! ' broke in Veronica, as though it 
 was time for her to do something more, herself, than 
 sit in rapt and silent assent. ' It is only second- 
 rate writers and imperfect works that are raved 
 about. People never rave about what is indis- 
 putable.' 
 
 I was getting interested in the conversation, — 
 for, as the sun sank behind the belt of trees at the 
 back of the house, the tulips had one by one closed 
 their petals for the night, — and I feared this some- 
 what combative proposition might bring it sum- 
 marily to a close. Happily the Poet happened to 
 be in an expansive mood, and Lanila, whom he 
 always treats with marked consideration, seems to 
 stimulate the flow of his conversation. 
 
 ' Is it not rather,' he asked, ' that people, even 
 in respect of poetry, rave about what expresses 
 their own sentiments, their own opinions, their own 
 bias ? The controversial attitude of mind neces- 
 sarily leads to utterance, often to violent utterance. 
 The appreciation of beauty induces silence. In 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 87 
 
 this volume many questions of immediate interest 
 are dealt with, I might almost say, argumentatively ; 
 and people who agree with the writer, incautiously 
 accept what he says as poetry because it is pre- 
 sented to them in the guise of verse. But poetry 
 is a luminous halo which makes thought clearer as 
 well as larger. Here I find nothing but unmusical 
 mist.' 
 
 ' But I am sure he is in earnest, and earnestness 
 is irresistible,' urged Lamia. 
 
 ' I have no doubt he is in earnest, and I think 
 he possesses what Diderot said Saint Lambert lacked, 
 rdme agitee, without which it would seem no one 
 can well be a poet. But then the agitation of the 
 soul must be controlled and corrected by the 
 serenity of the mind. Emotion, as Wordsworth 
 says so finely, must be recollected in tranquillity. 
 Indeed, I venture to go further, and to suggest 
 that Wordsworth stated but half the truth, and 
 that emotion and tranquillity must coexist and co- 
 operate at one and the same time ; passion or the 
 heart propelling, judgment or the mind steering and 
 steadying. • The finest passages in poetry must have 
 been written under the simultaneous operation of 
 fine frenzy and rigorous self-criticism.' 
 
 ' Apparently,' said Lamia, ' your Pegasus is a 
 
88 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 pair, like Veronica's ponies, Brandy and Soda, the 
 steadier nag being required to chasten the fretful 
 impulses of the other ! ' 
 
 ' Oh ! ' exclaimed Veronica, aghast at Lamia's 
 profanity, while I shifted my chair in order to 
 conceal from her my appreciation of it. 
 
 ' An excellent simile,' said the Poet, perfectly 
 unruffled, ' and a humorous representation of a 
 grave truth, which may be stated diiFerently. 
 When Bellerophon sought to mount and tame the 
 winged Pegasus, Minerva, the goddess of Wisdom 
 or Judgment, gave him a golden bridle. Without 
 it he would never have succeeded in his task.' 
 
 ' Poor Pegasus ! ' said Lamia ; ' but then, you 
 know, he had been drinking — not tea — but at the 
 fountain of Pirene, — at Acrocorinth, was it not ? — 
 and I suppose they managed to put the bridle on 
 him when he had had a little too much. Does 
 poetic intoxication date from that event .? I think 
 a sober poet is ' 
 
 ' In the sense in which you use the word, hardly 
 a poet at all. Yes, Vdme agitee is indispensable ; 
 but for that highest expression of human reason, 
 for poetry of the loftiest order, something more is 
 requisite. I heard a lady — and a lady of letters 
 of much distinction — declare the other day that 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 89 
 
 Shelley's Skylark is a greater work than Milton's 
 Paradise Lost, thereby only propounding the 
 limitations of her own taste. No doubt there is 
 a danger lest the poet in dealing with intellectual 
 or moral truths may cease to be a poet, and lapse 
 into the rhetorical philosopher. But if he does not, 
 if on the contrary he succeeds in transfiguring them 
 by the magic light of poetry, then his triumph 
 seems to me supreme.' 
 
 ' My objection to such poets,' said Lamia, ' is 
 that they take so serene a view of life. I prefer 
 the rebels.' 
 
 ' I suppose we cannot control our preferences, 
 though I should think we may improve them. 
 But, in literature, serenity is the invariable concomi- 
 tant of true greatness. The ocean is just as deep 
 in calm as in storm, and provides a better pathway 
 for man. Rebellion in literature, no doubt, im- 
 plies courage and a certain kind of power. But 
 Reconciliation — provided that the reconciling note 
 be true music, and true poetry — argues a deeper 
 vision, and demands a more majestic voice. I can- 
 not but think that the function of the poet is to 
 make harmony, not out of language only, but out 
 of life as well.' 
 
 ' Then what an inharmonious note you struck 
 
90 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 last night,' said Lamia mercilessly, 'with your 
 refrain, " If Love could last ! if Love could last ! " 
 Surely that was the voice of a rebel ? ' 
 
 I was thinking that tender resignation is not 
 rebellion, and should, perhaps, have fourtd courage 
 to say so, since the Poet remained silent under the 
 reproach, had not Veronica, after a little fidgeting 
 and a manifest heightening of her colour, said — 
 
 ' He did not repeat the whole of the poem.' 
 
 ' Is there more ? ' I asked. ' May we not hear 
 it?' 
 
 ' Yet Love can last ! ' he began — 
 
 Yet love can last, yes, Love can last, 
 The Ftiture be as was the Past, - 
 And faith and fondness never know 
 The chill of dwindling afterglow, 
 If to familiar hearth there cling 
 The virgin freshness of the Spring, 
 And April's music still be heard 
 In w6oing voice and winning; word. 
 If, when autumnal shadows streak 
 The furrowed brow, the wrinkled cheek. 
 Devotion, deepening to the close. 
 Like fruit that ripens, tenderer grows ; 
 If, though the leaves of youth and hope 
 Lie thick on life's declining slope. 
 The fond heart, faithful to the last, 
 Lingers in love-drifts of the past ; 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE gi 
 
 If, with the gravely shortening days, 
 Faith trims the lamp. Faith feeds the blaze. 
 And Reverence, robed in wintry white, 
 Sheds fragrance like a summer night, — 
 Then Love can last ! 
 
 I do not know what demon of contradiction and 
 discord possessed Lamia, but she seized the banjo 
 which happened to be lying by her chair, and 
 burst into' an atrocious music-hall medley with 
 which she had not hitherto favoured us. It was 
 quite irresistible — Lamia invariably is — and we all 
 three fairly burst out laughing. Soluta tabula 
 risu, and the five o'clock tea-table was abandoned 
 in spontaneous merriment ; though I could see 
 Veronica was vexed with herself for yielding to 
 the general levity. I strolled round the garden 
 alone, examining the lilacs, to see how far on they 
 were to flowering, and repeating to myself tjie 
 passage concerning the diiferent way in which the 
 tender passion comes to man and to woman, 
 probably recalled to me by the Poet's championship 
 of Love, and the latter lines of which are not, 
 perhaps, unapplicable to the young person who so 
 sacrilegiously followed him — 
 
 Love's way with us and you is different. 
 You mind me of the swallow that is here 
 
92 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 To-day, and all at once, that yesterday- 
 Was nowhere to be seen, so swift he comes ! 
 While we are like the lilac-tips, and bud 
 For a provoking season ere we break. 
 We dream, not even knowing that we dream, 
 Up to the very moment that we wake. 
 
 My lilacs were dreaming still ; and I was just 
 going to see if some new tea-roses from Lyons in 
 an open bed were likely, this year, to be beforehand 
 with them, when I heard Lamia singing to the 
 piano an air I had not heard before. So I sauntered 
 towards the house, to find she was improvising an 
 accompaniment of her own, most sweet and tender, 
 to the words — 
 
 If Love could last ! if Love could last ! 
 
 Also attracted by the strain, the Poet joined me, 
 and, on catching the words, he would fain have 
 entered and stood by her while she paid him this 
 charming compliment. But I laid my hand upon 
 his arm. 
 
 ' You had better not go in. If she knew you 
 were here, it is a hundred to one she would break 
 off again into her music-hall foolery.' 
 
 ' What a wonderful memory she must have ! ' 
 he whispered, as she went on tentatively singing 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 93 
 
 couplet after couplet of his lyric, never marring the 
 metre, though sometimes interpolating some less 
 happy word of her own, 
 
 'We remember what impresses us, and she is 
 
 very impressionable. You wrote the poem, but 
 she feels it. But is it not always so ? The poet, 
 with his gift of tongues, interprets the thoughts of 
 all the world.' 
 
 ' Hark ! ' he said. ' How beautiful ! She is 
 the interpreter, not I.' 
 
 There, spellbound, we listened to the young 
 
94 THE GARDEN THAT P LOVE 
 
 girl, surmising with that far-reaching instinct that 
 belongs only to women an experience she of course 
 as yet could never have had, and spontaneously 
 setting to music, as appropriate as sweet, the con- 
 soling words — 
 
 If, with the gravely shortening days, 
 Faith trims the lamp, Faith feeds the blaze. 
 And Reverence, robed in wintry white. 
 Sheds fragrance like a summer night, — 
 Then Love can last ! 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 21 St June. 
 
 Life is one long recantation, and I want to 
 recant what I said about the Garden that I Love 
 looking its best about the first of May. It is now 
 nearly the middle of June, and I protest that never, 
 never, never, was it so beautiful as now. You need 
 not believe me; and I daresay I shall contradict 
 myself afresh before the year is out. But do we 
 not all act thus ; being so constituted by a kindly 
 
96 THE GARDEN THAT 1 LOVE 
 
 dispensation that, when beauty or joy attains to a 
 certain pitch of intensity, we feel we have never 
 before experienced any so great ? This readiness 
 to exaggerate present pleasure is compensation for 
 the kindred inclination to magnify present pain. 
 Have we not all of us seen, a hundred times, the 
 loveliest view, the best horse, the most beautiful 
 woman, in the world? ''There is no call -to be 
 exact and consistent in our admirations ; and I 
 again declare that I have never seen the garden 
 looking anything like so fair as at this hour. Even 
 Veronica says the same ; and precision of statement 
 is one of her innumerable virtues. 
 
 Had it been my lot to be present at the ardent 
 discussion conducted in the time of Abelard be- 
 tween Nominalists, Realists, and Conceptualists, I 
 think I should have asked if, when any one used 
 the word Flower, as he fancied, in the abstract, he 
 did not think Rose in ,the concrete. The rose is 
 the typical flower all the world over, and the mind 
 cannot get away from its representative personality. 
 Withal, in most gardens the rose enjoys but a brief 
 reign, much briefer, indeed, than that of many 
 another flower. But, so long as it blooms in pro- 
 fusion, it throws into the shade all other pretenders. 
 At this moment fiilly one-half of the front of the 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 97 
 
 house, from ground to gable, is hidden under 
 bunches of one white clambering rose. 
 
 . . . Round my casement blow 
 
 Those clustering roses fancy hath baptized, 
 
 Maids-of-the- Village ; and adown they hang. 
 
 Like to a waterfall you see far off, 
 
 That foams but moves not. 
 
 Let me confess I did not plant that rose. I found 
 it here when I came ; but neglect was beginning 
 to curtail its mural territory. So I had it taken 
 down, and a very difficult, thorny business it was ; 
 cut out all the older wood, carefully pruned and 
 trimmed it, nailed it up again upon the wall, and 
 manured it richly about the roots. There must 
 be millions of roses on it now, and it is a glory 
 and a show through all the leafy month of June. 
 There is a little climbing blush-rose that tries to 
 compete with it, but ineffectually, for it is so much 
 less hardy, though I do my best to see that it gets 
 fair-play. It is curious to watch how the combative 
 instinct exists even in peaceful -looking flowers. 
 The flourishing rose I spoke of looks south-east, 
 and therefore enjoys a capital aspect. But on the 
 northern side I planted a white Ayrshire rose ; 
 and, not content with the domain assigned to it, 
 which is fairly extensive, and as if aware there is a 
 
98 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 rival round the corner, it is beginning to show 
 itself there also, and evidently means to enter into 
 competition. I shall tolerate its tendency to war- 
 fare, because it blooms a second time, though of 
 course less profusely, in October, when the Maids- 
 of- the -Village are thinking only of the Winter, 
 and make their sober arrangements accordingly. 
 Veronica admires these last heartily enough — who 
 could help doing so .'' — when they are in their first 
 virgin beauty. But, when they begin to go off, 
 they make a daily litter of fallen petals about the 
 door which are often blown into the hall ; and 
 then Veronica speaks of them somewhat slightingly, 
 as of things possessed of no sense of order or neat- 
 ness. In order to escape her reprobation — for she 
 always holds me responsible for anything that goes 
 amiss in the garden — I turned the Poet on to her, 
 who obligingly hummed — 
 
 Now that milch-cows chew the cud, 
 
 Everywhere are roses, roses ; 
 Here a-blow, and there a-bud, 
 
 Here in pairs, and there in posies. 
 Roses from the gable's cliff 
 
 With pale flaky petals strewing 
 All the garden paths, as if 
 
 Frolic Summer took to snowing. 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 99 
 
 The truth is — though I dare not tell her so — 
 Veronica, though she knows a good deal about 
 flowers, is a gardener only by accident, and because 
 I happen to be one. Otherwise, she would be 
 more indulgent with a certain untidiness there is in 
 Nature, and without a sympathetic toleration of 
 which one cannot have a garden of the better sort. 
 I am conscious of living in awe of her rooted 
 detestation of irregularity, but I cannot suppress 
 an emotion of pleasure when the fallen petals of 
 the Maids-of-the- Village baffle us both. Once she 
 threatened to have the hall-door shut upon them ; 
 but I quoted Goldsmith's line about the houseless 
 stranger, and she desisted. 
 
 If anything could make me wish to have a large 
 house instead of a small one. It would be that I 
 might have a wider expanse of wall up which to 
 grow clambering roses. Far from being surprised 
 that there was once a War of the Roses, I wonder 
 the world is not perpetually at war about them, 
 there are so many claimants for the crown. Every 
 one has a Marechal Niel, its early appearance, its 
 generosity in blooming, the exquisite arrangement 
 of the petals, and its dry aromatic fragrance, render- 
 ing it indispensable. But I wish it would hold up 
 its head and look one fearlessly in the face, as other 
 
 H 
 
100 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 roses do. The at present favourite white Niphetos^ 
 which has never quite won my affections, has rather 
 the same habit, and I infinitely prefer to it, at any 
 rate for outdoor life, the old Lamarck or Solfaterre. 
 It is unwise ever to dogmatise about a rose, and 
 therefore I will not say that William Allen Richard- 
 son does not thrive on a south-eastern aspect. But 
 with me it will not, though it faces the west most 
 cheerfully. On the recommendation of an expert, 
 I am going to try how Bouquet d'Or, Rive d'Or, 
 and Madame Berard will like fronting north. 
 These, of course, are tea-roses, and, even if they 
 fail me there, the hardy Ayrshire ones will continue 
 to console me for a disastrous experiment. It is 
 the signal distinction of the Gloire de Dijon to care 
 little or nothing towards which point of the com- 
 pass you place it. But, with the exception of one 
 that divides a wall, with an Ampelopsis Veitchii, 
 without suffering in the least from its tight embrace, 
 I grow all my Gloires de Dijon along a fence in 
 the stable-yard. Why should stable -yards not 
 have flowers to beautify them as well as more 
 romantic -sounding nooks and corners.'' Never, 
 from the middle of May to the end of November, 
 is the Garden that I Love — for I regard every hole 
 and corner round about "as belonging to it — with- 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE loi 
 
 out Gloire de Dijon roses. Sometimes they suffer 
 from grub and canker in the Spring, and many a 
 bud has to be nipped off, and assuredly they are 
 more healthy, and therefore more lovely, later in 
 the year. They then have a roseate heart, which 
 greatly beautifies their pale yellow petals ; and when 
 one would be perfectly happy for a few seconds, 
 one buries one's nose in one just full-blown. 
 
 Veronica has just been asking me what I mean 
 by sticking in small rose-stocks here, there, and 
 everywhere, in the most unaccountable places and 
 situations, and I can see she suspects I have got 
 roses on the brain, and that if I am not checked in 
 this tendency I shall soon qualify for the County 
 Lunatic Asylum. 
 
 ' Do you not remember,' I plead, ' the roses in 
 the Embassy Garden at Rome, which soared and 
 flowered right to the very. , top of the tallest 
 cypresses ; and surely you can • recall growth of 
 almost equal vigour in the yellow Banksia roses 
 in many a villa garden round Florence, nay, in the 
 very heart of Florence itself .'' ' 
 
 ' Yes,' was the reply ; ' but this is not Italy, 
 and these forlorn-looking little plants will never 
 grow higher than your head, even if they accomplish 
 that modest feat.' 
 
I02 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 Veronica is sceptical and pessimistic. I am 
 credulous and sanguine ; and so I mean to give a 
 number of hardy climbing roses a chance of getting 
 as high in this world as the comparatively diminu- 
 tive elevation of English evergreen trees will allow. 
 What would be the good or the pleasure of a 
 garden if one did not make experiments ? 
 
 One experiment I have made, which was de- 
 clared to be exceedingly rash, and yet it has suc- 
 ceeded beyond all expectation. I have planted a 
 couple of hundred tea-roses in open beds, and they 
 have done magnificently, and have given me greater 
 joy, I think, than any flowers I ever grew. As a 
 rule, people grow tea-roses against walls, as I myself 
 likewise do in the enclosed kitchen-garden. But 
 the belief that they are delicate, and absolutely 
 require the protection and encouragement of a wall, 
 is a sheer delusion. I do not mean to say the 
 flowers are not somewhat larger when the stems are 
 trained against red brick; but they certainly do 
 not bear as profusely, and all the beauty of their 
 natural habit is thereby sacrificed. For my part, 
 I should grow tea-roses in the open, even if they 
 did not open their flowers, if only for their long 
 lissom stems and graceful buds. But they flower 
 liberally and without interruption from May to the 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 103 
 
 end of November. When I first put them into 
 the ground, on their arrival from Lyons, Veronica 
 asked what they were, they seemed so diminutive 
 and to have so little life in them ; and, though I 
 sheltered them through the winter with a little 
 withered bracken, they had apparently dwindled so 
 by March that she again inquired compassionately 
 what I intended to do with them. She was 
 answered by the middle of April, when they put 
 forth long vigorous shoots, and were the pride of 
 the garden all through the Summer and Autumn 
 months. Last Winter I treated them similarly ; and 
 again, since we had twenty-eight degrees of frost, 
 they were cut down to the ground. But what they 
 are at this moment I should require the help of her 
 Poet to describe. Faultlessness in flowers is almost 
 as rare as in human beings ; but these tea-roses are 
 absolutely faultless. Their stems and their leaves are 
 as graceful as their buds ; they bloom continuously 
 for six months ; not one of them is of a bad, vulgar, 
 or tawdry colour ; and they never suffer from blight, 
 fly, or mildew. I carpet their beds with violas, 
 purple, white, or yellow ; and they tolerate, and 
 indeed favour, these dwarf intruders with the 
 utmost amiability. 
 
 With this honourable and blameless record 
 
104 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 compare the annual register of the Hybrid Per- 
 petuals. At this moment they are looking their 
 very best, having got over their troubles of the 
 Winter and Spring, and not yet suffering from the 
 trials of Autumn. A hundred and sixty are in full 
 blow at the farther end of the tennis-ground abutting 
 on the orchard ; and I daresay many of them would 
 be pronounced prize roses. But all through the 
 Winter months they were no more beautiful nor 
 sightly than currant-bushes. At the end of March 
 they were cut back by the pruning-knife, so that 
 they resembled young gooseberry-bushes similarly 
 treated. By the end of April, and all through 
 May, they were the favourite resort and provender 
 of grub and green-fly ; and now that, with the aid 
 of finger and thumb and syringe, they have out- 
 grown their enemies, many of them have flowers 
 which, however lovely for a day or two, fade in an 
 exceedingly unbecoming manner, and with no eye 
 for colour. In August and September most will 
 show rusty leaves, the miserable aspect of which is 
 not atoned for by the second flowering of the rest. 
 I must get rid of those congregated one hundred and 
 sixty, though I know protest will be raised in an 
 influential quarter. Still, I can see the tea-roses are 
 increasing in favour, and when I carry in a branch 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 los 
 
 a yard long, beautifully curved, of radiant colour, 
 and surmounted by a perfect posy of large delicate 
 flowers, I am employing the best form of advocacy 
 in order to carry my point. Once prove that you 
 can have rose-beds in flower for six months of the 
 year, and who will gainsay you ? Sometimes I 
 think I should like to have nothing but tea-roses ; 
 
 ^%^^£± 
 
 but the fit of unreasonable exclusiveness soon passes 
 away. 
 
 Thus, at present at any rate, ' everywhere are 
 roses, roses.' But the loveliest of all, be it said 
 with reverence, are in the June hedges. All the 
 rose-growers in France have not produced a flower 
 
io6 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 that gets so close to one's heart as the English 
 eglantine. 
 
 In Poet's Walk, the dog-roses find a congenial 
 home ; and the sweetbriars are gradually doing 
 themselves justice in the outlying borders. Just 
 now they are covered with their pale pink flowers, 
 which will, when Autumn comes, be glowing coral 
 hips. The yellow Austrian briar, which thrives so 
 heartily in many a cottage garden hereabout, ha? 
 not yet condescended to make much of a show 
 in mine, though I trust it will in due course. I 
 sometimes think there are flowers that refuse to 
 decorate the suferba civium potentiorum limina, the 
 porches and parterres of the well-to-do, and, with 
 the discriminating partiality of true kindness, 
 reserve their full beau|y for the narrow territory 
 of the poor. ' You cannot want me,' they seem to 
 say, ' for you have so many other flowers and shrubs. 
 Here I am the only flower dearly prized and exclu- 
 sively honoured. Must I not therefore do my best 
 for those who entertain me so tenderly .? ' 
 
 Lamia will not concede to roses the place of 
 primacy I claim for them, and puts in a good word 
 for the white pinks that are now in their Mid- 
 summer beauty. The whole of the North Border 
 is edged with them ; and thus there is 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 107 
 
 A running ribbon of perfumed snow. 
 Which the hot sun is melting rapidly, 
 
 a foot wide, and between fifty and sixty yards in 
 length. They are only the old-fashioned white 
 pinks, but they are far more sweet-scented than 
 their pretentious successors, for which it is easy to 
 find room elsewhere ; and, after sundown, they 
 follow one's footsteps with their penetrating 
 fragrance. They last in full beauty for a whole 
 'month ; and, when their withered heads have 
 to be clipped off with the shears, their silvery 
 foliage still makes a delicately effective edging. 
 Behind them, English, Spanish, and German irises 
 are competing with each other, though these last 
 flowered a little earlier than the others. I do not 
 pretend to grow the more .delicate irises, nor can I 
 boast of the recently-imported beautiful Japanese 
 irises. Irises like to be dry in Winter and moist 
 in Spring and early Summer ; and that is a combina- 
 tion of conditions not easily contrived in England, 
 and is rather beyond my resources. Veronica thinks 
 it is due to my incapacity, for she is so accustomed 
 to bend the inorganic to her will indoors, that she 
 imagines' the organic and the living can be made 
 equally pliable. Ever since she saw the Iris Susiana 
 flowering faultlessly on stalks nearly three feet high 
 
io8 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 near Florence, she has wondered why she does riot 
 find them in the Garden that I Love. But I have 
 watched them growing in English gardens more 
 favourable to the iris than mine, and they were but 
 doleful specimens of a gorgeous tribe. A garden 
 is not a collection of curios. It is for the most 
 vigorous, the most lovely, and the most fragrant 
 flowers that room should be found ; and many of 
 these demand, for the full display of their charms, 
 that the atmosphere should be seen all round them, 
 and that they should not be too much elbowed by 
 their neighbours. It is, perhaps, a little incautious 
 to say this, for it may be pressed into the defence 
 of those terrible villa borders, where every plant is 
 a specimen, is duly staked and tied and trained, 
 and they all stand at stated and goodly intervals 
 from each other. I pray you avoid it. But, if you 
 run into the opposite extreme, and crowd certain 
 herbaceous plants overmuch, you curtail their 
 growth and their grace, and incur the risk of losing 
 them altogether. I am greatly interested in seeing 
 the result of a new border I have made in the 
 extreme north angle of the garden, and which 
 Veronica has christened Poet's Corner, — I believe 
 she will in time label every nook and walk with 
 his name, — because, before I made the border, it 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 109 
 
 was a favourite resort of his when the wind was in 
 the east, and he wanted to read in the open air and 
 yet be snug and warm. There are two walls, at 
 right angles to each other, neither of them more 
 than thirty feet long. Both are old ; one of them 
 is of gray stone, the other of red brick. Against 
 them, and therefore hiding them completely, were 
 some tall but rather scrubby laurels, the favourite 
 nesting-place of the blackbirds. 
 
 The laurels were cut down and stub-grubbed, 
 and the roots, branches, and leaves all burnt in 
 a heap, whereby I provided myself with a certain 
 amount of wood-ash. The ground on which they 
 had been growing proved to be as bad as it well 
 could be ; so out it came to the depth of three feet. 
 Broken bricks, mortar waste, and accumulated dry 
 rubbish of all kinds, even to battered tin-cases and 
 empty blacking-bottles, were thrown in, inexpres- 
 sibly to the delight of Veronica, who thus saw 
 disorder disappear and buried out of sight, and 
 pound and shed cleared of their abominations and 
 made clean and sweet again. Effectual drainage 
 was thus secured. On the top of this I placed a 
 layer of half-rotted emmet-casts, so as to keep the 
 drainage fairly open. The superincumbent soil is 
 a mixture of loam, stable-manure, leaf-mould, river- 
 
no THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 sand, and burnt vegetable matter ; and if herbaceous 
 things, and bulbs as well, do not flourish in quite 
 lordly fashion in this compost, the connection 
 between cause and consequence must have been 
 severed. At any rate, Gaillardia grandiflora, 
 Helenium Pumilum, Funkia or Plantain Lily, 
 Telekia, Eryngium amethystinum, the hardy T lum- 
 bago — such a dear little cerulean flower, growing 
 among seemingly discoloured leaves! — Centaurea 
 macrocephala, Trollius europisus, will have a fair 
 chance of distinguishing themselves ; and, to judge 
 by their present appearance, they are going to do 
 so. Behind them, and either trained against the 
 wall, or standing in relief against it, are Kerria, 
 both single and double, Forsythia Buddleia, Pyra- 
 canthus, Pyrus japonica, Ceanothus, white and 
 lavender-coloured Clematis, and one or two tea- 
 roses, among them the dainty Marie van Houtte. 
 Where the walls meet, they rise into the air like 
 two waves that form a double crest ; and up their 
 joint buttress I am growing a Clematis montana, 
 with a sort of suspicion that it will end by running 
 all along the top of the wall. When it does so, 
 its white supramural band will be a worthy rival of 
 the white pinks, and will flower even before them. 
 I have not exhausted the list of herbaceous things 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE iii 
 
 in the border ; and in front of them are daffodils, 
 irises, lilies, among them Saint Bernard and Saint 
 Bruno, which the Italian devotional painters are 
 so fond of introducing into their pictures. Their 
 Latin names are Liliago and Liliastrum. The 
 border is six feet wide, and is edged by a narrow row 
 of rough stones, along the rim of which, next Spring, 
 shall flower Cyclamen Cpum, Chionodoxa Lucilia, 
 Scilla sibirica, Leucojum vernum or Spring Snow- 
 flake, crocuses, snowdrops, London Pride, and 
 many a stonecrop, saxifrage, and sedum. 
 
 Veronica and I often say we wish we could look 
 once more, just for a moment, on the little narrow 
 sward in front of the house, as we saw it that day 
 when old Father Time was mowing the neglected 
 grass. But sudden transformation scenes are to be 
 witnessed only in pantomimes, and Nature permits 
 things out-of-doors to change so gradually that one 
 is prevented from obtaining a sharp and definite 
 apprehension of the difi'erence between the present 
 and the remoter past. I came comparatively a 
 novice to the trade, and began with no arrested set 
 of dogmas concerning the making of a garden. 
 Accordingly, I educated myself on my mistakes, 
 planting trees, designing borders, and arranging 
 groups of beds in utterly wrong fashion. Is it not 
 
112 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 much better, and certainly it is far more interesting, 
 thus to pass through ignorance into knowledge, 
 rather than to put oneself a passive spectator into 
 the hands of a professional gardener, whether of the 
 formal or of the landscape school ? No one can 
 rightly call his garden his own unless he himself 
 made It. The Poet, too, has a garden, and one by 
 no means to be disdained ; and Veronica told me 
 that when, the other day, some tactless person 
 asked him which of his works he likes best, he 
 replied, ' My garden.' I think if I had written his 
 poems, and were asked that question, I should make 
 the same reply. A garden that one makes oneself 
 becomes associated with one's personal history and 
 that of one's friends, interwoven with one's tastes, 
 preferences, and character, and constitutes a sort 
 of unwritten, but withal manifest autobiography. 
 Show me your garden, provided it be your own, 
 and I will tell you what you are like. It is in 
 middle life that the finishing touches should be put 
 to it ; and then, after that, it should remain more 
 or less in the same condition, like oneself, growing 
 more deep of shade, and more protected from the 
 winds. 
 
 I am well aware that, according to orthodox 
 notions, against which I have not a word to say, 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 113 
 
 the approach to a house in the country should not 
 be through the garden, but on the other and 
 northern side of the dwelling, so that seclusion 
 should be secured against carriage-wheels, and you 
 may be able to say ' Not at home ' without incur- 
 ring suspicion of inhospitality or unfriendliness. 
 But we are humble folk, with a home which, if 
 beautiful, is unpretentious, and when you drive 
 through the orchard-walk to see us, you come on 
 the front door, standing wide open, on the dining- 
 room and drawing-room windows, and on that 
 cascade of foam-white roses I lately spoke of, so 
 that you see the whole charm of the greater portion 
 of the garden at once : north border, south border, 
 the front of the house, the lawn, the tennis-garden, 
 the oak, the orchard ; only the South Enclosure, 
 Poet's Walk, and, of course, the little walled garden 
 behind the older part of the manor, being withheld 
 from your view. There are seventeen beds on the 
 lawn, and there is a wide border of flowers under 
 the dining-room and drawing-room windows. But 
 the beds on the lawn are not congregated close 
 together, as in a terraced or strictly formal garden. 
 They lie upon the lawn, some of them being at 
 considerable distance from each other, but none of 
 them losing touch, so to speak, of the rest ; and. 
 
114 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 if one of them even were removed, the entire 
 harmony or balance would be destroyed. In the 
 centre of the lawn are two crescent-shaped beds of 
 rhododendrons, enclosing in their curve, but with 
 a circle of grass between them, a round bed whose 
 chief glory are two well-established and profusely- 
 flowering Clematis Jackmannii, clambering up 
 rough pine-stems. Of the seventeen beds, twelve 
 are what I may call permanent beds, containing 
 either herbaceous plants eked out in Spring with 
 bulbs and in Summer and Autumn with annuals, 
 or tea-roses and their carpet of violas. These last 
 are four in number, and run round the edge of the 
 gravel curve immediately in front of the house 
 two and two, with a non- permanent star -shaped 
 bed between them. There are only five beds not 
 thus disposed of; but I dwell on them because 
 they provide for me the solution of a controversy 
 about which so much has been said and written. 
 In Spring, as I have said, they contain tulips and 
 forget-me-not. But in Summer they are reserved 
 for and dedicated — yes — to geraniums, iresine, 
 white-leaved centaurea, ageratum, and even some- 
 times to calceolarias, geraniums, and lobelia. 
 
 No one can admire less than I do a so-called 
 garden — for a garden it 'is not — surrendered wholly 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 115 
 
 to symmetrical lines or groups of colour; and I 
 once nearly banished them from the Garden that I 
 Love. But careful experience showed me that they 
 serve as an invaluable foil to the other and more 
 numerous beds I have called permanent, and whose 
 flowers soar irregularly into the air, and which are 
 orderly without being prim or trim. I have a 
 great liking for the strong -growing cannse ; and 
 this year I have a couple of beds which Veronica 
 declares are already most successful, and which will 
 look much more luxurious a month hence, and 
 will continue in that condition till supervenes the 
 first sharp frost. The beds are parallelograms 
 twelve feet by eight. In their centre are the cannas, 
 liberally manured and copiously watered. Outside 
 them are rows of scarlet zinnias, and outside these 
 grows variegated maize, green -and -white. The 
 bed is edged with the dwarf profusely flowering 
 yellow zinnia. There is nothing formal about 
 these beds any more than there is in the neigh- 
 bouring ones, where larkspur, evening primroses, 
 ribbon grass or gardeners' garters, phloxes, fuchsias, 
 everlastings, blue cornflowers, annual gaillardias, 
 clarkias, lupines, dahlias, sweet-williams, pinks, 
 and mignonette, fight it out among themselves 
 as to which shall have the lion's share of the 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 117 
 
 space. But these carelessly -ordered and high- 
 growing flowers would not be a hundredth part 
 so effective as they are, were it not for the contrast 
 afforded by the beds of regular and low-lying 
 plants in their vicinity. Have I said, before, 
 that exclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great 
 as it is in society .'' If I have, may I say it again, 
 for it is an important truth that needs to be 
 reiterated. Moreover, it will sometimes happen 
 that, towards the beginning of October, if not before, 
 the more rampant flowers, having nearly outbloomed 
 themselves, begin to wane ; and then the lingering 
 bloom of the less beautiful bedded-out things acts 
 as a sort of compensation, and prolongs the life of 
 the garden, indeed even of the Summer. And then 
 their extremely brilliant hues suit the natural mood 
 of Autumn, 
 
 The last still loveliest till — 'tis gone, and all is gray. 
 
 ' It is all very well,' said Lamia, ' to prate of 
 your beds and your borders, your perpetuals and 
 your annuals, your tea-roses and your pseonies ; but 
 I shall never believe in you till you turn your 
 little walled kitchen-garden into a real pleasaunce, 
 intersect it with box edgings and paths of broken 
 
ii8 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 brick, grow rosemary, rue, lavender, old-fashioned 
 heartsease, little China-roses, and dwarf fuchsias, in 
 rectangular beds, have a sun-dial in the centre with 
 a sage apophthegm in a dead language inscribed on 
 it, educate a peacock to strut slowly along the coping 
 of the wall, and induce Veronica to let her maids 
 lean out of those fascinating windows in tnoh-r 
 caps and purfled aprons. To Jericho with your 
 Jerusalem artichokes, your early strawberries, and 
 your sybaritic asparagus. Grub up your Wal- 
 burton Admirable, your Kirkes Blue, and your 
 Louise Bonne, and let hollyhock and sunflower use 
 the old red brick for background.' 
 
 ' Dear Lamia,' I replied, ' why do you probe an 
 ever open wound ? I shall not die in peace unless 
 I fulfil that dream. The place is made for it, and 
 I plan it over and over again, day and night, night 
 and day. But what would Veronica say ? Already 
 she protests against the narrow space dedicated to 
 potato and onion, to cos lettuce and to curly kale, 
 and declares she is ashamed sometimes of the 
 paucity of our Winter vegetables. Moreover, she 
 bewails, not without some justification, my lavish- 
 ness on the Garden that I Love, and she knows 
 perfectly well, as I do myself, that the sun-dial and 
 the peacock project would mean another gardener, 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 119 
 
 to say nothing of the incidental making of kitchen- 
 garden ground elsewhere.' 
 
 ' What cowards men are ! ' murmured my com- 
 panion. ' Veronica might be your wife instead of 
 your sister.' 
 
 ' Are you calculating,' I asked, ' on intimidating 
 your husband.'' Do not make too sure of that. 
 And then, you see, Veronica is very good about it, 
 for I have flowers along all the kitchen-garden paths, 
 in the copse garden as well as in the walled garden ; 
 and if you will go and look, you will see sunflowers 
 and hollyhocks coming up there in various places 
 to bloom in September. Those white sweet-peas 
 you are wearing, and that become you so admirably, 
 were plucked where the sun-dial haply might stand ; 
 and scarlet-runners, later on, will diversify the sober 
 utility of cauliflower and parsnip. Life, Lamia, is 
 a lesson in compromise ; and we are never fiarther 
 from being satisfied than when we have got all we 
 want. That unattainable peacock is perhaps the 
 surest guarantee of my content.' 
 
 ' I shall never stir you into insurrection,' she 
 said. ' You are as bad as the Poet.' 
 
 She had been led to return to an old subject, I 
 discovered later in the day, by the perusal of a 
 volume she had brought with her, and which pro- 
 
120 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 fessed to give both sides of the question between 
 the advocates of landscape gardening and the 
 champions of the formal garden. She had it in her 
 hand again, when, after dinner, we betook ourselves 
 to a spot I have not described, but where, in the 
 warm Summer days, I always find our guests pass 
 much of their time. Almost adjoining the house, 
 and nearly in a line with it, is a long substantial 
 shed, in which in the old days the cattle must have 
 been stalled during the Winter months. On the 
 side towards the yard it is faced with rough, strong 
 weather-boards, but on the garden side, fortu- 
 nately, it is of stone. Both sides are now well 
 covered with Irish ivy ; and on the gravel path 
 which winds along its garden side stand six um- 
 brageous lime-trees. But, to Veronica's eternal 
 honour, for the scheme was mainly hers,' all the old 
 cattle-stalls were taken out and used for firewood ; 
 and, being of ancient, hard, and thoroughly seasoned 
 oak, they warmed us for nearly one Winter through. 
 She then summoned the village carpenter, lined the 
 whole of the inside with pitch-pine, which was duly 
 and daintily varnished ; made a window here, and 
 a skylight in the old red tiles there, and then con- 
 structed for us an outdoor smoking-room, the 
 upper part of which is well stocked with bookshelves, 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 121 
 
 and — final and greatest triumph of all — provided 
 me with a spacious Summer bedroom, which, from 
 the I St of May to the 31st of October, is the delight 
 of my existence. We thus acquired additional room 
 for Summer hospitality indoors ; and my outdoor 
 sleeping chamber is so arranged that, in the daytime, 
 it presents the aspect of an unostentatiously fur- 
 nished sitting-room. The Poet greatly envies me 
 this succursale, as well he may ; for, were it his, 
 he would be able to consort with the moon, the stars, 
 the dawn, the sunrise, as he listed. Out of the 
 capacious shed there still remained space enough for 
 a box-room — I am not sure that the obtaining of 
 this much-prized convenience was not the idee mere 
 of Veronica's entire project — an apple-loft, and a 
 recess for storing coals when they are at Summer 
 prices, whereby we avoid coming between the 
 hammer and anvil of capital and labour, when the 
 latter strikes or the former locks-out. 
 
 Under the limes, which are flowering for the 
 first time, la^st night after dinner we all repaired, 
 and found a brightly-burning Princess lamp — 
 Veronica prides herself on her lamps, which certainly 
 outshine and are more numerous than any I know 
 elsewhere-;— on» a wicker-table outside the smoking- 
 room, and four garden -chairs, awaiting us. The 
 
122 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 thermometer had, in the daytime, been seventy in 
 the shade ; the air was warm, dry, and balmy ; and 
 the round Midsummer moon was just getting clear 
 of the wych-elms in the north-east meadow. It 
 only needed the aroma of coffee, which was soon 
 forthcoming, and the fragrance of the cigarette, 
 which the Poet shortly lighted, to establish among 
 us a sense of perfect peace. 
 
 But peace is not what Lamia invariably loves ; 
 and I suspect she imagined she had brought with 
 her torch and sword, in the shape of the volume 
 from which she began to read a controversial and 
 most acrid passage. 
 
 'The Battle of The Gardens,' said the Poet. 
 ' That seems not quite as it should be. The serpent 
 of discord should surely be kept out of our modern 
 Edens. And might not one say to the champions 
 of this discussion, as in the dispute about the colour 
 of the chameleon, " You both are right, and both 
 are wrong " ? Must not the character of a garden 
 depend in great measure on the size and style of 
 the house it adjoins, on the extent and character of 
 the ground out of which it is to be made, on 
 the trees and vegetation in its vicinity .'' ' 
 
 ' I should have thought so,' I humbly pleaded. 
 ' Had I designed an absolutely formal garden where 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 123 
 
 this one now stands, I think I should have shown 
 a complete insensibility to art as well as to nature. 
 Lamia has just quoted from a gentleman who says 
 that a garden should be separated from the adjacent 
 country by a clear boundary-line, a good high wall 
 for choice. Surely this is the narrowest and most 
 pernicious dogmatism, that could have proceeded 
 only from the mind of an architect whose motto is, 
 " Nothing like bricks and mortar." ' 
 
 I paused, for I wanted the Poet to talk ; but he 
 was good enough to say, 
 
 ' Tell me, will you, what governed you in the 
 laying-out of the Garden that you Love ? ' 
 
 ' What governed me was what I found here : 
 the house, its time-consecrated architecture, its 
 immovable boundaries, the old oak, and not it 
 only, but all the ineradicable old timber within 
 sight, the park, and finally, when all these were 
 allowed for, the general fitness of things. I am 
 quite of opinion that a garden should look as 
 though it belonged to the house, and the house as 
 though it were conscious of and approved the 
 garden. In passing from one to the other, one 
 should experience no sense of discord, but the 
 sensations produced by the one should be continued, 
 with a delicate difference, by the other. Terraces 
 
124 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 and balustrades, box edgings or yew hedges, any- 
 thing obviously and intentionally formal, which is 
 imperative in the case of certain stately dwelling- 
 houses, would surely have been out of place here. 
 Near to the house, the garden, you will have 
 observed, is more formal and shapely, and you 
 never, I trust, altogether lose vague evidences of 
 design. But absolutely symmetrical it is not, 
 though a careless observer might imagine it to be 
 so ; and it gradually assumes a less definite and 
 disciplined air as it gets nearer to the tract of 
 orchard, meadow, and park, to which it is sunnily 
 open, and which it commands. Thus I have 
 obtained, I think, a certain sense of spontaneous 
 seclusion without wholly shutting myself in, or 
 wholly shutting out everybody or everything else. 
 Of course, there are nooks of perfect shelter, as 
 Goldsmith said, for whispering lovers made ; and 
 the South Enclosure curves and winds as it chooses, 
 as though there were no other curve or line in the 
 world. Poet's Walk comes on you as a surprise ; 
 and, when you think you have seen everything, 
 you suddenly discover the copse kitchen-garden, 
 which, I confess, contains fully as many flowers 
 as vegetables, and conducts to an orchard whose 
 existence you had not surmised.' 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 125 
 
 I paused again, for I really was ashamed of 
 having spoken so long and so inadequately. I 
 could see Veronica thought it a very poor per- 
 formance, and the critical expression faded from 
 her face only as the Poet considerately came to my 
 rescue. 
 
 ' If there be any association or analogy,' he said, 
 ' between your art and mine, and I cannot but 
 believe that all the arts are kindred, and that a 
 strong family likeness exists among them, you are 
 altogether right. I have read that volume, and 
 find it exceedingly suggestive ; the answer to it, 
 where I think it mistaken, being supplied by canons 
 of literary composition. There are some gardens, 
 like some poems, which, from the very nature of 
 the case, must be absolutely formal unless they are 
 to disappoint. The poetry of which Pope is the 
 chief representative and the most consummate 
 master, is absolutely formal, as becomes its subject, 
 which is nearly always social, and the treatment 
 of which is therefore stately and precise. I can 
 scarcely conceive the Essay on Man, or the Moral 
 Essays, being written in any other metre. Words- 
 worth, a poet of immeasurably higher and deeper 
 imagination than Pope, elected to treat kindred 
 subjects, as we all know to our sorrow, in a looser 
 
126 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 and less formal fashion — in other words, in illimit- 
 able blank verse, in The Excursion. I should call 
 that a glaring instance of infelicitous landscape 
 gardening, though, of course, as must always be 
 the case where Nature is left a more or less free 
 hand, you come upon lovely bits and fascinating 
 vistas. There are finer things in The Excursion 
 than in the Essay on Man ; but, taken as a whole, 
 the first is tiresome, and the second is not. The 
 design of The Excursion is a mistake, in so far as 
 there is design at all. The design of the Essay on 
 Man is appropriate, and the work, therefore, is 
 successful.' 
 
 * But surely you do not prefer Pope to Words- 
 worth } ' exclaimed Lamia. 
 
 ' Let us say as little as possible,' he replied, 
 ' about our personal preferences, for they do not 
 assist criticism, either on poems or on gardens. 
 Chatsworth is Chatsworth, and a cottage is a 
 cottage ; and though I might be disposed to say 
 " Give me the cottage " ' 
 
 ' Oh, but I should not,' interrupted Lamia. 
 
 ' — that would scarcely settle the question. But 
 remember it helps us to be tolerant in our tastes, 
 and to see there is room in this world for idyllic 
 gardens, for lyrical gardens, even for didactic 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 127 
 
 gardens, where, at every step, your mind seems to 
 be improved, even if your heart be not touched. 
 In Italy I have seen tragic gardens ' 
 
 ' And I,' said Lamia, ' have seen comic ones in 
 England.' 
 
 ' Tragic gardens,' continued the Poet, ' with 
 dark avenues of intertwisted ilexes immeasurably 
 old, where there might be lurking the emissary 
 of an ambitious D'Este ; gloomy labyrinths of 
 mediaeval yew concealing the panther-spring of a 
 vindictive Sforza, or the self-handled stiletto of a 
 fratricidal Borgia ; broad, stately steps, and open- 
 air staircases of cold-blooded marble, leading to 
 sombre conclaves of silent cypresses, where Paolo 
 Malatesta and the fair daughter of Guido da Polenta 
 that day read no farther on, but dallied to their 
 doom. Where these things have happened, why 
 should not the garden be as tragic as Othello or as 
 Romeo and Juliet? The idyllic garden would be 
 out of place there, just as would-be dramatic 
 gardens ill consort with peaceful England, and so 
 fail to produce their proper eiFect.' 
 
 ' You spoke of lyrical gardens,' said Lamia. 
 ' But may not lyrics be either regular or irregular ? ' 
 
 ' They may,' he replied ; ' but it takes a con- 
 summate artist to compose an irregular lyric ; and 
 
iz8 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 that, I think, is why landscape gardeners have so 
 often come to grief. In striving to be natural they 
 have ended by being meaningless. Nature is a 
 stupendous artist, but she conceals her design, and 
 man is sorely puzzled when he tries to imitate her. 
 Let him write his own works, and plan his own 
 gardens. Man is designed to design ; and he cannot 
 avoid endeavouring to reproduce, externally, the 
 proportion and harmony which are the very essence 
 of his own organism, and which permit of his 
 existence. But I agree with our host that the best 
 garden, like the best poem, is a formal one, in 
 which, unless you give yourself some trouble to 
 discover it, you will not perceive the form. 
 Nothing living is absolutely symmetrical, and a 
 garden should be alive.' 
 
 To the Poet's dictum there followed the silence 
 of assent, which seemed, moreover, adequately 
 filled by the moonlight filtered through the lime 
 leaves. When at length there slowly supervened 
 a craving for human speech. Lamia, who in- 
 stinctively felt that discussion had lasted quite long 
 enough, tenderly caressed Veronica's guitar, and 
 satisfied our longing with the following strain : — 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 129 
 
 Had I a garden, it should lie 
 
 All smiling to the sun, 
 And after bird and butterfly 
 
 Children should romp and run ; 
 Filling their little laps with flowers. 
 
 The air with shout and song, 
 While golden-crests in guelder bowers 
 
 Rippled the whole day long. 
 
 Had I a garden, alleys green 
 
 Should lead where none would guess, 
 Save lovers, to exchange, unseen. 
 
 Shy whisper and caress. 
 For them the nightingale should sing 
 
 Long after it was June, 
 And they should kiss and deem it Spring, 
 
 Under the harvest moon. 
 
 Had I a garden, claustral yews 
 
 Should shut out railing wind. 
 That Poets might on sadness muse 
 
 With a majestic mind ; 
 With ear attuned and godlike gaze 
 
 Scan Heaven and fathom Hell, 
 Then through life's labyrinthine maze 
 
 Chant to us, ' All is well ! * 
 
130 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 Had I a garden, it should grow 
 
 Shelter where feeble feet 
 Might loiter long, or wander slow. 
 
 And deem decadence sweet ; 
 Pausing, might ponder on the past, 
 
 Vague twilight in their eyes. 
 Wane calmer, comelier, to the last. 
 
 Then die, as Autumn dies. 
 
 ' How came you in possession of those lines ? ' 
 asked the Poet, in a tone of manifest reproach. 
 
 ' " The wind bloweth where it listeth," ' replied 
 Lamia, rising ; ' I found them under your chamber 
 window.' 
 
 I followed her into the open moonlight, leaving 
 Veronica and the Poet seated by the lamp under 
 the limes. As we neared the North Border, I 
 
 recited from Dante — 
 
 t 
 
 Quivi e la rosa . . . 
 
 . . . quivi son li gigli, 
 
 Al cui odor si prese il buon cammino. 
 
 But Lamia, as if heeding me not, exclaimed — 
 ' Oh, how delicious is the scent of those pinks ! 
 
 Your garden has all the Poet says his should have, 
 
 and more.' 
 
 ' And yet,' I added, ' it does not satisfy you.' 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 131 
 
 ' What does ? ' she answered. ' It is not always 
 June, always moonlight, always fragrant, nor is one 
 always just upon the edge of one's desire. One is 
 either remote from it, or one topples over. Yet I 
 want that garden, the one I told you of — without 
 the owner of it.' 
 
 ' Dear Lamia,' I observed, ' do you remember 
 what Socrates said, — that the gods sell all things, 
 at a price ? So, apparently, do the goddesses. But 
 some of them ask too much.' 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 31// August. 
 
 What would it profit one to cultivate a garden, 
 if one were not constantly reminded thereby to 
 cultivate oneself, and were not aided by the one in 
 the doing of the other ? Partnership with Nature 
 admonishes one to be continuously patient, to trust 
 and hope, to have implicit faith in the capacity of 
 time to work wonders, to put up with disappoint- 
 ments and disillusions, and, after repeated failure, 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 133 
 
 cheerfully to try again. In a word, the right 
 cultivation of a garden teaches one equanimity. 
 Equanimity and Magnanimity conjoined — equa- 
 nimity as regards oneself, magnanimity in respect 
 of others — seem to me to sum up all the virtues. 
 I have asked Lamia to make two devices over the 
 doorway of my study. Over it, within, she is to 
 inscribe the word Equanimitas ; over it, on the 
 outside, the word Magnanimitas. ' Why in Latin? ' 
 she asks ; and it is not possible to make her under- 
 stand the special savour there is in the vocabulary 
 of a dead language acquired in one's boyhood. 
 But she is going to do as I wish. 
 
 I have often required all my equanimity, — and, 
 be it confessed, have occasionally lost it, — in dis- 
 covering mishaps in the Garden that I Love. Yet, 
 as a rule, when Nature disappoints your expecta- 
 tions, it will turn out, on due inquiry, that you 
 have not treated her fairly. 
 
 Therefore, suspect your own or somebody's 
 shortcomings rather than those of Nature, when 
 the harvest of your expenditure falls short. Doing 
 things in good time is the main secret of successful 
 gardening, which I did not acquire till after sorrow- 
 ful experience of the results of amiable procrastina- 
 tion. For want of observation of this simple fact 
 
134 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 I have had more than one fit of depression, and 
 have been taunted by Veronica with the superiority 
 of some of the flowers in neighbouring gardens. 
 Then it is that both equanimity and magnanimity 
 are needed, — equanimity under Veronica's odious 
 comparisons, magnanimity towards those who have 
 outshone me. 
 
 I daresay you will think that loving a garden 
 is, like every form of love, little better than slavery ; 
 and verily it is. But how one cherishes one's 
 chains ! 
 
 ' Do you indeed? ' asks Lamia. ' At any rate they 
 give you a pretty long tether. Am I mistaken in 
 thinking you spent February, March, and the better 
 part of April, on the other side of the Alps ? ' 
 
 There it is. I did so, and I am paying for it 
 now. My gardener is a pattern of conscientious 
 docility and intelligent solicitude ; but he is a 
 gardener, and he is human. Upon the discrimi- 
 nating prevision of February, March, and April, 
 depends the efflorescence of July, August, and 
 September. 
 
 ' Arid if,' continues Lamia, ' you will read Dante 
 amid the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, philo- 
 sophically bestride a donkey on the slopes of 
 Tusculum, or collect majolica ware for Veronica in 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 135 
 
 the purlieus of Gubbio, instead of staying at home 
 like the honest Englishman you pretend to be, you 
 must not let your equanimity be ruffled because 
 your zinneas are this year not up to the mark, 
 or because the new annual that was to do such 
 wonders ' 
 
 ' The Kosmos, you mean ? ' 
 
 ' Yes : — is such an arrant failure.' 
 
 Yet what a thing is prestige ! It pleased 
 Veronica, last Saturday, to inflict on us a Garden- 
 Party. Knowing how we abominate it, she began 
 by cautiously observing that she had asked a couple 
 of men to play lawn-tennis, in order to gratify me 
 and the Poet. But these men have wives, or sisters ; 
 and if you ask men's wives or sisters, you must ask 
 other men's wives, or sisters, or daughters to meet 
 them; and then, in turn, other men have to be 
 invited to meet all this gathering of sociable 
 womenfolk. 
 
 ' My dear fellow,' said the Poet, ' you might 
 just as well be both equable and magnanimous, for 
 we are in for it. Your sister, you may be quite 
 sure, has asked the entire neighbourhood.' 
 
 ' It is all very well for you,' I answered testily, 
 ' to display equanimity, because you flirt, — all poets 
 do, — and I do not. I shall have to take a succes- 
 
136 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 sion of maiden aunts round the garden, as though 
 it were a show, and I the showman.' 
 
 He was quite right. Veronica hadgisked the entire 
 neighbourhood. There were so many rectors, and 
 vicars, and curates, that you might have supposed 
 yourself at Convocation, and sprightly spinsters 
 so abounded that I felt my celibacy to be almost a 
 species of crime. They clustered thickly round the 
 oak, Veronica said, as though its respectable age was 
 a sort of chaperonage for them ; and superlatives of 
 admiration were almost as plentiful as Veronica's 
 cakes, peaches, iced-coiFee-spoons, and I know not 
 what. But I verily believe she had got all these 
 people together in order that they might contem- 
 plate her Sheffield plated urns, — she has now got 
 four of them, — and not in the least that we might 
 have those lawn-tennis games she had professed to 
 be benevolently projecting for us. The Poet and 
 I did play all the same, and were reproved after- 
 wards for' our selfishness. But then, as the Poet 
 pleaded, men are ' such selfish brutes ' ; though, in 
 truth, I spent most of the time in listening to 
 ejaculations of admiration over flowers that were 
 far from reaching my own private standard. The 
 Garden that I Love has somehow acquired a reputa- 
 tion in these parts ; and so, I verily believe, most 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 137 
 
 of my neighbours would declare it to be a marvel 
 and a show if it was covered with burdocks and 
 darnels. Such, I say, is the force and value of 
 prestige. 
 
 ' I am glad to see you are not elated,' said 
 Lamia, 
 
 ' Nor misled,' added Veronica. 
 
 ' — by the fulsome eulogiums passed upon 
 vour garden by all the young and old impostors 
 whom you dragged from bed to border, and from 
 South Enclosure to copse.' 
 
 ' Not in the least,' I answered humbly ; ' good 
 is good, and bad is bad, and the garden to-day did 
 not look as I should wish it to look.' 
 
 ' I am glad,' said the Poet, ' you remember the 
 wise saying of Goethe, that he never accepted, from 
 the public, commendation he had not already 
 bestowed on himself, and that you act up to it.' 
 
 I don't mind saying, now that I am no longer 
 under the stress of these qualifying criticisms, that 
 the garden looked perfectly lovely, and that the 
 language contains no superlatives too good for it. 
 Did not Veronica's guests employ equally laudatory 
 epithets concerning those absurd urns? If they 
 were sincere in the one case, why not in the other ? 
 An agreeable person is not so much a person who 
 
138 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 agrees with you, as one who makes you agreeable 
 to yourself, by putting you in good-humour with 
 yourself, encouraging your self-complacency, and 
 leaving you with the impression that you are some- 
 body after all. It was a most agreeable gathering. 
 
 As for Lamia, she behaved in a most exemplary 
 manner — singing several exceedingly passionate 
 love-songs, to the accompaniment of the guitar, to 
 the maiden ladies, and throwing her whole soul 
 into sentiments she did not feel in the very least. 
 She is wonderful on these occasions, and would 
 make any garden-party a success, even if there was 
 not a flower In the place except herself. On one 
 of our guests, it is true, she exercised her sprightly 
 wit ; but I fancy he had been paying her common- 
 place compliments, and flattery has to be very 
 original to please her. I heard him boasting that 
 his pastures were the best in the neighbourhood, 
 and that there was not a thistle on the ground. 
 
 ' Have you eaten them all ? ' she asked. 
 
 But though I may seem as arrant a donkey as 
 the one thus ingeniously reproved, I again ask. Did 
 a garden ever look more beautiful ? 
 
 In the first place,^was there ever such a lawn ? 
 And even if there were, the lawn one stands on is, 
 after all, the most important lawn in the world ; 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 139 
 
 and a greener, smoother, or more weedless one does 
 not exist from Chiswick to Cashmere. The tennis- 
 ground was such an example of level verdure that 
 it seemed, at first, almost desecration to play on it ; 
 and it was only after Lamia and I had won a couple 
 of setts that one lost the sensation of sacrilege. 
 As for the tea-roses, I think all Veronica's 
 apparatus and flummery, the urns into the bargain, 
 should have been called a Rose Tea, so completely 
 did they entrance the beholder, though they have 
 been flowering since the ist of May, and to-day 
 is the 31st of August. Women, no doubt, when 
 they wish to please do not stick at a little men- 
 dacious flattery. But a clergyman of the Church 
 of England, who is himself a rose-grower and a 
 member of I know not how many Horticultural 
 Societies, may surely be trusted to speak the truth ; 
 and he declares, in the hearing of Veronica herself, 
 that my tea-roses are, on the whole, the finest he 
 has seen, — finer even than those in the garden of 
 the professional grower who has laboured so bravely 
 to make them popular. He is repairing the east 
 window of his church. I think I must send him 
 a subscription. 
 
 I have gone round again, by myself, and for the 
 life of me I cannot understand how any one can 
 
i+o THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 help falling into raptures. Lamia affects to belittle 
 the spectacle in order to tease me ; and I believe 
 Veronica thinks it necessary to ' take me down a 
 peg,' lest I should become excessively enamoured 
 of the work of my own hands. The Harpalium 
 Rigidum or Prairie Flower has stems seven feet 
 high, which branch into clusters of golden dials ; 
 and though I confess it is a most aggressive plant, 
 how is one to dispense with it, unless one substitute 
 for it the giant perennial Sunflower, which, I dare- 
 say, when one knows it better, will behave just as 
 usurpingly .f* The Helianthus, double and single, 
 are a mass of bloom ; and the Phloxes, scarlet, 
 salmon-coloured, and white, have done splendidly. 
 The Japanese Anemones, both the white, the pink, 
 and the red, are just beginning that delicate but 
 profuse flowering they will prolong till they are 
 chidden by an austere frost. Some of the golden- 
 rayed lilies of Japan, the Lilium auratum, have 
 shed their petals and their incense ; but others 
 are still in all the pride of their Oriental beauty, 
 especially among the tea-roses, where I took care to 
 plant some of them. The Orange lilies are on the 
 wane, after a short life and a merry one, and now 
 the tall Tiger lilies — Lilium tigrinum splendens — 
 are justifying their pretentious name. Many of 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 141 
 
 the clematis tribe, notably the white and paler- 
 coloured ones, are breaking into bloom ; others are 
 flowering a second time. The Cape Hyacinth — 
 Hyacinthus candicans — bears its dainty white bells 
 on long graceful stalks ; the Torch Lily is throw- 
 ing up the stout, hollow racemes which will gradu- 
 ally taper into flame — some people call it the Flame 
 Flower, — with which to light the dying year to its 
 doom. The old-fashioned Hydrangea, which I 
 dearly love, and which may be made, with the 
 addition of iron to the soil, to bear blue trusses, 
 is not a success in the Garden that I Love ; but 
 Hydrangea paniculata, whose trusses are white, 
 revels in bloom, and is just now a very joy to 
 behold, whether blended with the beautifully dis- 
 colouring leaves of the pasony, or mixed with the 
 yet more heightened hues of the fading foliage of 
 the azalea. The castor-oil plants — cod -liver -oil 
 plants, as one dear simple creature spoke of them, 
 when extolling my garden to a friend — have 
 attained what in our non-tropical climate we regard 
 as a colossal height, and are now in flower, as are 
 all the Canna. The dwarf bronze-leaved castor- 
 oil plants have grown taller than I wanted them to 
 do, having been over-manured ; but I can see that, 
 dexterously treated, they can be turned to several 
 
142 
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ornamental purposes in combination with various 
 shrubs and flowers. 
 
 But it is the annuals that now contribute the 
 greater portion of the splendour, and all the scent, 
 
 that make the Garden that I Love at this moment 
 a paradise of sensuous delights. Do you grow the 
 sweet-smelling night-stock ? If not, mind you do. 
 It is a modest little plant, bearing an insignificant 
 flower, something like Venus' s Looking-glass, but 
 as soon as the sunlight fades from lawn and flower- 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 143 
 
 bed, and the dew begins to rise from the ground, 
 it saturates the air with an aroma you would think 
 could proceed only from some strong and tall- 
 growing plant, such as the Nicotiana affinis or 
 white-flowering tobacco, whose habit it is to close 
 its petals and go to sleep in the daytime, and to 
 remain awake all night till well after the dawn. 
 This tropical custom it has retained in northern 
 latitudes. I plant this last anywhere and every- 
 where, but always under the windows of the 
 house, so that its perfume agreeably assails you 
 every time you pass. I think the South Enclosure, 
 with its long curving avenue of almost every flower 
 I grow, at this particular moment bears away the 
 bell. For there one finds — 
 
 Moon-daisies tall, and tufts of crimson phlox, 
 
 And dainty white anemones that bear 
 
 An Eastern name and Eastern beauty wear ; 
 
 Lithe, haughty lilies, homely-smelling stocks, 
 
 And sunflowers green and gold, and gorgeous hollyhocks. 
 
 The South Enclosure is a veritable medley of 
 growth and bloom, and I daresay a certain number 
 of things are crushed out of existence, or seriously 
 repressed, in the luxuriant struggle for primacy. 
 But somewhere or other along it I come upon 
 specimens of, I think, all the annuals that were 
 
14+ THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 sown. Gaillardia and Godetia are particularly 
 conspicuous in front, and are run pretty close by 
 Clarkia. Marvel of Peru, which, of course, is not 
 an annual, and Mallows of various hue, flourish 
 amazingly a little farther back, even in the half- 
 shade of permanent shrubs. Sweet Sultan is cheek- 
 by -jowl with the Helichrysum or Everlasting ; 
 and as for the Violas — those persistent, untiring 
 bloomers — where are they not ? Snapdragons, white, 
 yellow, and red, are much haunted by the sedulous 
 bees, which sometimes experience no little difficulty, 
 after once getting in, to persuade them to answer 
 to the magic ' Open sesame.'' What is there that 
 grows more willingly, flowers longer, or displays 
 greater variety of colour, than Pentstemons ? and I 
 have a small variety of them called Chelone, which 
 is especially graceful. A sense of ancient peace 
 abides amidst this republic of flowers ; but the rose, 
 the Rose, is Queen. 
 
 Over and above fostering equanimity, the culti- 
 vation of a garden promotes the tenderer graces 
 and extends the sweet charities of life. I need no 
 introduction to a person who has a garden ; and, 
 be his or her rank what it may, in I go, opening 
 the gate, whether a huge iron or a humble wicket, 
 with a proud confidence, certain to find a man and 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 145 
 
 a brother, or a woman and a sister. Love of 
 gardening creates a safe freemasonry among those 
 who cherish It. I stand on no ceremony, tender 
 no excuse nor apology, proffer no introduction, but 
 say at once, ' What magnificent honeysuckle ! ' 
 or, ' Where do you get those splendid tuberous 
 begonias .'' ' and lo ! we are friends at once. 
 
 I have made many a life-long friend by a bold 
 intrusion and instant conference over a Pseony or 
 a Michaelmas Daisy I had not seen before. I beg, 
 borrow, and, I verily believe, if need were, would 
 steal, a cutting of any beautiful plant that was a 
 novelty. But petty larceny is unnecessary ; for 
 we who have Gardens that we Love willingly give 
 of our superfluity. I like to think I have helped to 
 beautify many a garden that, before, hardly deserved 
 the epithet, and I am sure I have received far more 
 than I have given ; from cherished friends, one 
 especially, whose garden, not above fourteen miles 
 from Hyde Park Corner, is a very home of bounte- 
 ous intelligence ; from generous Head-gardeners, 
 from kindly Rectors, from clergymen's wives with 
 little plots of old-world flowers, handed down from 
 generation to generation, and tended with a truly 
 Christian love ; from village blacksmiths, cottagers 
 earning fourteen shillings a week, neighbours I see 
 
146 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 frequently, strangers I never saw but once, when I 
 got out of the saddle or Veronica's Baddlesden Car 
 to go in and say, ' Will you give me a cutting of 
 your Woodruff? ' or, ' Can you spare me a piece 
 of your Rosemary ? ' It is so pleasant to remember 
 who it was that gave you your Holy Thistle, whom 
 you petitioned for your Statue or Sea Lavender, 
 and from what fair plot you brought the Blue 
 Polyanthus you coddle so carefully, and with im- 
 perfect results. A flower-border thus becomes a 
 living record and diary of your wanderings, your 
 visits, your friendships, a perpetual reminiscence 
 of the generosity of the rich, of the graciousness 
 of the poor. When I read the debates on Parish 
 Councils, and what some people say about the 
 relations of squire, parson, and labourer, I fail to 
 recognise the England that I know. I hope they 
 will not legislate it out of existence, nor substitute 
 for ' blue spires of cottage smoke 'mid woodlands 
 green ' what one sees too often in France, 
 
 Dismantled towers, mean plots without a tree, 
 A herd of hinds too equal to be free. 
 Greedy of others', jealous of their own, 
 Envy, and hate, and all uncharity. 
 
 How well the rustic children, themselves the 
 sweetest of woodland wild-flowers, know who it is 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 147 
 
 that cares for the white water-Hlies that grow in 
 remote ponds and pools, and so bring them to 
 Veronica, six in a basket woven of green and 
 brown reeds, quite a work of art and taste, and 
 say Hspingly and with shy faces, when she asks 
 them how much it is, ' Thickthpenth, pleath, mith ! ' 
 Whereupon Veronica gives them a shilling and an 
 orange apiece, or some bread and jam, and away 
 they scamper, all their shyness gone as soon as they 
 have turned the corner and are out of sight. 
 
 Shakespeare calls Spring ' the sweet of the year.' 
 But I sometimes think the sweetest season of all is 
 that when 
 
 . . . You scarce can say 
 If it be Summer still, or Autumn yet : 
 Rather it seems as if the twain have met, 
 And, Summer being loth to go away, 
 Autumn retains her hand, and begs of her to stay. 
 
 That is the season, just now — season of ripe 
 fruits and quiet thoughts. Even Lamia cannot 
 rouse nor fret me, and she has herself taken on 
 something of the assenting aspect of the afternoon 
 of the year. She follows me with all the quietness, 
 and with more than the charm, of an Autumn 
 shadow. Her speaking voice, always a contralto. 
 
148 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 seems to have acquired a yet deeper, rounderj and 
 mellower tone, from the cheerful gravity of the 
 season. She gibes more rarely, and hesitates to scofF 
 even at my foibles. When we went, yesterday, 
 into the nearest hop-garden, she picked sedulously 
 for ten minutes into the basket of a comely villager 
 with five youngsters round her, liberated from 
 attendance at school for a more profitable task, and 
 then emptied her purse, which I allow was not very 
 full, among the nighest workers. They all brushed 
 her feet, and I thought them very privileged to 
 do so. 
 
 I do not quite know how it is, but I observe 
 that Veronica and the Poet seem to care for each 
 other's company more than for ours, so that 
 Lamia and I are left much together. She has, 
 therefore, to accompany me in my garden rounds, 
 and to make herself useful, which she appears 
 more willing to do than formerly. She was always 
 sweet ; now she is serviceable as well. She carries 
 the basket, when I make my daily scrutiny into 
 the condition of the peaches, nectarines, plums, 
 and pears, in the walled garden. As a rule, it is 
 women who minister to the gourmandise of men ; 
 and Veronica invariably does her feminine best to 
 promote masculine indigestion. But flowers and 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 149 
 
 fruit are among the finer gifts ; and so I gather 
 the loveliest tea-roses on the wall for Lamia, while 
 she bends fascinatingly forward, so that the juice 
 of the luscious peach I have also plucked for her 
 shall not fall on her clean bib and tucker. Of 
 course, she gets her skirt caught in the accidental 
 rose bushes, as she steps over the border with her 
 basket, and forgets all about the fruit if she happens 
 to espy an early violet. She makes a charming 
 picture with the hollyhocks and the great sun- 
 flowers. 
 
 ' Do you think,' she asks, ' men are not mature 
 till, like pears, they are black at heart, or the pips, 
 as you call them ? ' 
 
 'Possibly,' I answer; 'just as women, like 
 peaches, soften as they ripen.' 
 
 ' You think I shall never be ripe ? Oh, I have 
 dirtied my frock ! Lend me your handkerchief.' 
 
 Whereupon all the nectarines roll out of the 
 basket, among the rank leaves of the seakale bed 
 hard by, and we have such quiet pleasure in picking 
 them up again. Those that are bruised we give 
 to the housekeeper, to turn into jam ; and woe 
 betide the credit of the Garden that I Love if it 
 fail to furnish Veronica with an ample supply of 
 material, in that form, for her store-room. 
 
I50 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ' Do give me a pear,' says Lamia plaintively, 
 as though I ever refuse her anything ! ' No, not 
 those. I want a Conseiller de la Cour, the best 
 pear that grows, for it is, as the Poet says of love, 
 both sweet and bitter.' 
 
 ' The wasps seem to be of the same opinion.' 
 ' They never sting me. Perhaps that is because 
 I am only bitter,' she answers, and proceeds with 
 the pear, with absolute confidence in her immunity. 
 ' We are going to take their nests to-night.' 
 ' What fun ! May I come .'' I saw a big one 
 yesterday in the hedge-bank, in the lane going 
 down to the bridge. Let us go and put a stick 
 there, to mark it.' 
 
 The lane she speaks of leads to the river, and 
 to an old mill beyond, — a mill centuries old, and 
 still worked in ancient fashion, and with every 
 obsolete device. Long may it stand upon its 
 antique ways, and link one yet closer with the past. 
 I know nothing quieter than the pool above it ; 
 and where a trembling little wooden bridge crosses 
 the narrow end near the sluice. Lamia and I have 
 more than once held discourse that dips into the 
 inner life. To-day not a breath rippled the surface 
 of the water, or stirred a leaf of the woodlands that 
 girt it. 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 151 
 
 ' How charming ! ' she exclaimed. 
 
 ' What is charm ? ' I asked. 
 
 ' Charm,' replied Lamia, ' is mystery that is not 
 wholly mysterious ; the unknowable that is not 
 altogether unknown. Sunshine, unqualified, un- 
 tempered sunshine, does not charm, though it may 
 delight ; but sunshine-shadow does, and Autumn 
 is the most charming of the seasons, because its 
 shadows are the longest, the softest, and the most 
 stationary. Charm withholds what it professes to 
 reveal ; and your garden is charming because it 
 keeps back as much as it confers. Nature is 
 charming, because, while seeming to hide nothing, 
 she hides everything. Poetry charms, because it 
 employs the real only to obtain credence for the 
 ideal. Music is charming, because it touches the 
 intangible. Who is it that says, " Les chases qui 
 arrivent nous touchent. Ce nest que les chases qui 
 narriveront jamais, qui naus f assent fkurer" ?' 
 
 ' I do not know,' I answered, ' but it is a true 
 and a lovely saying.' 
 
 ' And so,' continued Lamia, ' it is only the 
 things that are not that are charming. Charm is 
 suggestion. Who are the charming people .'' The 
 people whose manner is a frank reserve. It is as 
 fatal to charm to seem to be concealing anything, 
 
IS2 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 as it is to unveil everything. Charm is an open 
 secret which no one knows.' 
 
 I cannot say that Lamia's serious paradoxes left 
 me much wiser, but I confess I thought her frank 
 reserve more charming than ever. 
 
 ' Yes, you are right,' I said ; ' and I am sorry 
 for those people whom what is called Science has 
 so familiarised with life, that life has lost for them 
 its mystery, and, therefore, its charm. Charm, to 
 add to your definition, is unsuspected illusion.' 
 
 ' Illusion ! ' she sighed. ' If one could but 
 
 always be illuded. 
 
 ... It is well 
 To see all things in heavenly fantasy ; 
 Ourselves, and others, even as we scan 
 The inaccessible bright stars and deem 
 Their silence music, so that nothing gross 
 Can reach the elevation of our thoughts, 
 Wherein we dwell transfigured. 
 
 But it is difficult to see a Garden-Party in heavenly 
 fantasy.' 
 
 You would scarcely have thought we were the 
 same persons that had held colloquy by the mill, 
 had you seen us, at half-past nine that night, sally- 
 ing forth to take the wasps' nests, or at any rate 
 to see them taken by the old woodreeve, who 
 prides himself, not without just cause, on being more 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 153 
 
 knowing, in most matters, than the unobservant 
 and unhandy pupils of free education. A lantern, 
 a tin can containing cowdung, a spade, and a 
 pocket full of fuses, were his stock-in-trade. Lamia 
 had been reading, at Veronica's suggestion, an 
 account of a new way of killing wasps, by placing 
 tow steeped in cyanide of potassium at the entrance 
 
 to their nests, and she could not help airing her 
 new information. Her sciolism was treated with 
 
154 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 much fine scorn by the unlettered expert : ' You 
 see, miss, they don't knoyv nothing about it, and 
 that's why they writes in the papers. Them that 
 knows doesn't write ; they acts, miss, as I'm agoing 
 to, now. Here's a big 'un, and no mistake. Look 
 out, miss! the're some on 'em outside, crawling 
 about the hole, and they might take a fancy to git 
 up yer pettercuts.' 
 
 ' What are the fuses made of? ' said Lamia. 
 
 ' Brimstone and saltpetre, miss, with a little pinch 
 o' powder. But don't you go buy fuses, or they'll 
 happen blow yer hand oiF, they've so much powder 
 in them. I makes these myself. Now you see 
 how they work.' 
 
 He lighted one of his fuses, which burned quietly 
 and steadily, laid it, rammed it into the hole, and 
 then daubed the aperture over with the contents of 
 his can. 
 
 ' But I don't hear it explode,' said Lamia. 
 
 ' And you won't, miss. And they won't hear 
 it, neither ; but it'll quieten 'em, I reckon.' 
 
 ' And are they all done for ? ' 
 
 ' Them that's grown up, yes ; but not the little 
 'uns that hasn't yet come out. And whether you 
 use fuses or that other stufF you spoke of, you 
 must dig out the nest to-morrow, and swamp 'em 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 155 
 
 with water, and stamp all the life out of 'em, or you 
 might just as well have stayed in bed.' 
 
 ' How much better,' said Lamia, after we had 
 bidden our companion and his lantern good-night, 
 ' these peasant tolk talk than we do, when they 
 talk at all.' 
 
 ' I am glad you have observed it,' I said ; ' they 
 are so much nearer to the fact, whereas, as a rule, 
 we utter only the literary representation of the 
 fact. After all, is Literature more than an excres- 
 cence on natural human speech ? ' 
 
 ' A fungus, in fact. Let us go and communicate 
 our discovery to the Poet.' 
 
 ' Where are he and Veronica, I wonder ? ' 
 
 ' Honeysuckling, no doubt,' said Lamia. There 
 is a honeysuckle that rambles up an acacia-tree, 
 under which Veronica and the Poet sometimes sit ; 
 and Lamia has coined a not inapt word to represent 
 the state of mind they are supposed by her to 
 be in. 
 
 As a fact, they were indoors, as we found when 
 we ourselves entered. Lamia went straight to the 
 piano ; and I felt certain that, with her passion for 
 sudden contrasts, and her impatience at the pro- 
 longation of any mood into which she might have 
 been betrayed by surrounding circumstances, she 
 
iS6 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 would now sing something grave and sad. I was 
 not mistaken, for she at once began : — 
 
 Let the weary world go round ! 
 
 What care I ? 
 Life's a surfeiting of sound ; 
 
 I would die. 
 
 It would be so sweet to lie 
 Under waving grasses. 
 
 Where a shadow fleeting by 
 
 Of a cloudlet in the sky 
 Sometimes passes. 
 
 Why, why remain ? 
 Graves are the sheltering wimples 
 
 Against life's rain ; 
 Graves are the sovran simples 
 
 Against life's pain ; 
 Graves are a mother's dimples, 
 
 When we complain. 
 
 Death ! beautiful Death ! 
 Why do they thee disfigure ? 
 
 To me thy touch, thy breath. 
 Hath nor alarm nor rigour. 
 Thee do I long await ; 
 
 1 think thee very late ; 
 
 I pine much to be going : 
 Others have gone before ; 
 I hunger more and more 
 To know what they are knowing. 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 157 
 
 Weak heart, be thou content ! 
 Accept thy banishment ; 
 
 Like other sorrows, life will end for thee : 
 Yet for a little while 
 Bear with this harsh exile. 
 
 And Death will soften, and will send for thee. 
 
 ' When did you write that ? ' I asked, 
 
 ' Oh, long ago,' said the Poet ; ' more under the 
 influence of Rome, the Rome ruinous that then 
 was, than from any personal feeling. It is rather 
 elementary, not to say naif, in expression, but it 
 was sincere when written.' 
 
 ' I am prepared,' said Lamia, ' to defend its 
 elementariness. I wish there were more elementary 
 verses. Too many persons to-day write as though 
 they had a Prize Poem in their head.' 
 
 ' I fear you are right,' he answered. ' It is fatal 
 to a writer of verse to think, or even be aware, of 
 an audience. As Mill said so admirably, Poetry 
 should not be heard, but overheard. The self- 
 consciousness of the stylist — forgive the employ- 
 ment of his designation of himself — is intolerable.' 
 
 ' Does it not,' asked Veronica, who was only, I 
 felt quite sure, reproducing, with touching servility, 
 one of the literary canons the Poet had, at some 
 time or another, expounded to her, ' does not an 
 
158 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ever-present anxiety as to style indicate poverty of 
 matter and shallowness of feeling ? ' 
 
 ' I should have thought so,' he said. ' If a man 
 have the singing faculty, and have, got anything to 
 say, the matter will dictate the style. The moment 
 one notices how a thing is being said, more than 
 what is being said, one may be pretty sure either 
 that little or nothing is being said, or is being said 
 wrongly. A poet whose style is more noticeable 
 than his thought or his sentiment resembles a man 
 whose clothes you look at, rather than at himself.' 
 
 ' Or,' suggested Veronica timidly, ' whose accent 
 you remark rather than his observations.' 
 
 ' But surely,' said Lamia, who could not stand 
 this amoebean style of criticism, ' a' poet must be 
 aware of what he is doing when he writes a long 
 ti-agic, epic, or idyllic poem, and must give himself 
 some conscious concern as to how he is doing it.' 
 
 ' I presume so,' said the Poet, ' more especially 
 in the conceiving or shaping of it, though I think 
 he will act wisely to wait and allow the germ or 
 embryo of it, when it first comes tQ him, to grow 
 of itself, and naturally, within his mind, rather than 
 force and artificially develop it. Growing by this 
 method, a poem becomes an organism. Produced 
 by the other, it is a mechanism. The latter may 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 159 
 
 be a most beautiful piece of -work, but it simulates 
 rather than possesses life. I suspect the schemes 
 even of the greatest and the longest poems are, like 
 the language and music of the best lyrics, fortuitous 
 felicities.' 
 
 They were getting a little beyond my depth, so 
 I quietly slipped out of the room, and therefore 
 cannot say how the conversation ended. I might, 
 however, just as well have remained, for I could 
 not sleep, and was up and about in the garden the 
 better part of an hour before sunrise. It is the 
 most beautiful of all the twenty-four, and whenever 
 I have the good fortune to awake about that time 
 during the months when I occupy my summer bed- 
 room, I always, like the youth to fortune and to 
 fame unknown in Gray's poem, brush, though with 
 no hasty feet, the dews away. So the dawn be 
 clear, leaf and flower, under and above, are then 
 delicately varnished with dew, even in the hottest 
 and driest summer weather, not altogether unlike 
 the moisture one sees sometimes on the face of 
 sleeping children. In spring and early summer so 
 many birds are singing at that hour, one would 
 almost think there could scarcely be room in the 
 air for all their notes. Just now, however, they 
 are silent ; and therefore one notices the flowers all 
 
i6o THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 the more. The evening primroses were lighting 
 up the garden with their yellow cressets, and smell- 
 ing, thus bedewed, just like new-made butter. 
 Their Greek name oi Mnothera signifies a wine-trap, 
 and is there not a certain roundabout appropriate- 
 ness in the designation, since they certainly make a 
 night of it, and refuse to go home till morning ? 
 Wandering round to the back, I found the black- 
 caps fluttering about and feasting on the ripened 
 seeds of the giant Kex, or New Zealand parsnips, 
 that grow among the gooseberry-bushes, and they 
 were so pleased with their occupation that they 
 took no heed of me, though I stood within a couple 
 of feet of them, watching their graceful but greedy 
 antics as they fed or flew, head downward, about 
 the seeded umbels. Now, there were no goose- 
 berries to distract me, but I remembered how 
 deliciously cold, indeed iced, they used to be at that 
 hour in the month when they were ripe, and how 
 the blackbirds, discriminating epicures that they are, 
 would not look at any but the hairy red ones, the 
 sweetest and most satisfactory of all. The Gloire- 
 de-Dijon roses along the wire fencing were all be- 
 dlam onded with dew, and I lingered among them 
 till the sun rose, and the charm of the dawn was 
 over. I daresay I had a presentiment that darker 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE i6i 
 
 days were coming. Perhaps we love the flowers 
 most, as we do our friends, when they are on the 
 point of leaving us, 
 
 22rd October. 
 
 The first October frost has come, and the Garden 
 that I Love presents a sadly altered aspect. Many 
 of the flowers have turned black, going into 
 mourning, I suppose, for the death of Summer • 
 nearly all of them are wilted, and hang heavy heads 
 on sodden stalks. There are exceptions to the 
 general havoc, but one hardly cares to notice or 
 go in search of them when the bulk of their fair 
 companions are fair no more. The tea-roses in the 
 open beds, supposed to be so delicate, have taken 
 but slight notice of the frost, and are the main 
 survivors of the wreck. But there is a bite in the 
 air which tells that, deceive oneself as one may 
 under the influence of recurring genial days. Winter 
 is on its way. Nature, however, always provides 
 compensation for any destruction she may have to 
 wreak ; and, if the flower-beds are piteous to look 
 on, the shrubberies and copses have assumed a 
 warmer glow, and the elms, sycamores, chestnuts, 
 and beeches in the park, will soon glorify them- 
 
1 62 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 selves exceedingly. For some distance in the lane 
 outside the northern gate, a curious and singularly 
 beautiful eiFect has been produced. On either side 
 of it are a good many tall ash-trees ; and the frost has 
 stripped these, at one fell stroke, of all their sprays, 
 while the leaves were still undiscoloured ; so that 
 the ground is covered deep, under other trees which 
 have retained their foliage, with a spft green carpet. 
 The apples in the orchard that are yet ungathered 
 have taken from the frost, as the cheeks of children 
 do, a ruddier glow ; and the bushel baskets are round 
 them, and the men, with their aprons turned back, are 
 in the trees, gathering them. When they have all 
 been plucked and stored, and the ladders and barrows 
 been carried back to the shed, the last definite 
 interest of the year is over. Lamia has a garden- 
 basket in her hand, and in it she puts some of the 
 rosiest apples, some stained leaves of the liquidamber, 
 — no tree, not even the American sugar-maple, 
 takes such dazzling colours, — and a sprinkling of 
 jet-black fruit from the cut-leaved blackberry. We 
 are all exceedingly pensive, and Lamia has not made 
 merry over anything since yesterday. I can see 
 what a weary time of ' clearing the beds ' is before 
 me, and I already snifF in imagination the smell of 
 the bonfire that will have to be made in the pound. 
 
THE GARDEN THAT 1 LOVE 163 
 
 It is a veritable pound, not merely so called, but 
 one that belonged to the old manor, and there are 
 neighbouring peasants not so very far gone in years 
 who remember stray cattle being impounded in it. 
 I maintain its old rough-stoned walls with reverent 
 care, and plant wall-flowers, valerian, and poppies 
 in its cracks. But I am sure it still wishes to be 
 useful in these newer days ; so within it rubbish is 
 shot for a time, thubarb is grown, and polyanthuses, 
 primroses, and such like things, are laid in, when 
 taken up for the Summer. More perhaps than any 
 other object, it links the place with the past, one's 
 tenderness for which does not diminish as the days 
 pass on. I suppose that, as we ourselves become 
 a portion of the past, that sympathetic sentiment 
 grows in us. How very absurd ! The years of 
 all four of us, if added together, would scarce 
 reckon a hundred. But, as I said, we have suddenly 
 become pensive. 
 
 ' One can hardly,' said Lamia, as we moved 
 away from the stripped apple-trees, and walked 
 across the open ground where once stood the old 
 orchard, — ' one can hardly now distinguish what you 
 added to the house from what you found there.' 
 We stood and gazed at it from near the oak, and 
 I was obliged to agree with her. 
 
 M 
 
164 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 ' Yes, it was not unskilfully done, and, when one 
 is considerate. Time invariably helps one.' 
 
 ' Not always,' answered Lamia, and I confess I 
 have not a conception what she meant. I suppose 
 the remark arose only from her artistic tendency to 
 give shade to every assertion, and by qualifying 
 each observation to confer on it tone and value. 
 
 ' I have never regretted the. alterations we made,' 
 I resumed. ' The house was too small, and the 
 Martha- like mind of Veronica had not proper 
 scope for its talents. Moreover, small it still 
 remains. Parva domus magna quies, and we have 
 had some few years of exquisite peace in it. I saw 
 that inscription first on a house outside the Porta 
 del Popolo in Rome, on the way to the Ponte Molle. 
 I suppose it has disappeared by this time, like 
 everything once quiet presided over by the Seven 
 Hills. But I remember being asked to translate 
 
 the words by , well, you may guess what sort 
 
 of a person, when I tell you that he observed, in 
 perfect good faith, that he thought small houses are 
 always noisy.' 
 
 This was our nearest approach to merriment 
 that morning ; and I once again described, as 
 though Lamia had never heard it before, how we 
 had taken a slice off the old drawing-room and 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 165 
 
 thrown it into the passage, so as to make a little 
 hall, had then added to the drawing-room at the 
 other end, making it half as large again, had built 
 new offices and a new bedroom, invented fresh 
 lights, and done all this with a scrupulous respect 
 and deference for what already existed. We seemed 
 unable to get away from reminiscences. 
 
 We had walked through the meadow beyond 
 the orchard, comparatively bare when I first saw it, 
 but now boasting its avenue of limes, and so onward 
 into the park. 
 
 ' The Garden that I Love may be mostly of my 
 own making,' I remarked, ' but the house is the 
 work of the hands and the mind of Veronica.' 
 
 ' I suppose so,' said Lamia, who evidently did 
 not regard the observation as very original, or as 
 tending particularly to the development of valuable 
 conversation. 
 
 We walked on over tangled tussocks and the 
 split bristly husks of fallen horse-chestnuts, till we 
 came to a stile in a right of way that emerges from 
 a copse into the park. Lamia mounted the stile 
 and sat on it, whilst I leaned against its adjoining 
 posts. We had both gone silent. Now and then 
 an acorn dropped. Now and then a cock pheasant 
 repeated his somewhat harsh and self-asserting call. 
 
1 66 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 A yafFel flew, in iridescent plumage, Joudly scream- 
 ing, from one tree to another. A squirrel, unaware 
 of our presence, enabled us to compare his tawny 
 tail with that of the yellowing bracken, as he hunted 
 for beech-mast. 
 
 'I have something to tell you. Lamia,' I said. 
 ' Veronica and the Poet ' 
 
 'Well, of course. But it is a pity. Poets 
 should never marry. No one should ever marry, 
 for that matter ; but poets are peculiarly bad 
 subject-matter for that hackneyed but perilous 
 experiment.' 
 
 ' Why ? ' I inquired. 
 
 ' Why ! Don't you remember .'' 
 
 ' Nay, marry not a poet. He will have 
 As many changeling mistresses as moods. 
 He wantons with the February winds, 
 And toys with March's forward daffodils. 
 He is an April fool each cuckoo-call 
 Can set agaping, and he falls in love 
 With every lamb that frisks its pretty tail.' 
 
 ' You forget the reply,' I resumed. ' How does 
 it go.? 
 
 ' He may love all, so that he loves me too. 
 Who would monopolise a poet's heart, 
 Large as the universe ? ' 
 
THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 167 
 
 ' Yes, but there is more,' rejoined Lamia. 
 
 ' . . . May you never find 
 Its vastness cold. But, meanwhile, warm yourself. 
 
 Where are the interesting couple going to live ? ' 
 
 ' Here, of course. I could not let Veronica 
 quit the home she has revivified.' " 
 
 ' And the Garden that you Love .? ' 
 
 ' I must make another.' 
 
 Off to another perch flew the yaffel, again 
 laughing loudly, as if in woodland mockery of my 
 specious fortitude. 
 
 ' But / also have news,' said Lamia, ' though 
 of a less important character. I too am going 
 to be ' 
 
 ' To whom ? ' I asked. 
 
 ' To the Garden,' she answered ; ' the Garden I 
 told you I cannot go without.' 
 
 ' But the owner of the Garden ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, the owner ? When he is tiresome I shall 
 repeat to him the lines from the Divina Corn- 
 media — 
 
 ' Perche lafaccia mia si f innamora, 
 Che tu non ti rivolgi al bel giardino ? ' 
 
 ' But do you love him.? ' 
 
i68 
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 She sprang from the stile with, I thought, a 
 touch of impatience. 
 
 ' Love him ! ' she exclaimed. ' Don't talk to 
 me about love ! Love is a literary invention.' 
 
 Printed hy R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh. 
 
A COLLECTED EDITION 
 
 OF 
 
 THE POETICAL WORKS 
 
 OF 
 
 ALFRED AUSTIN 
 
 Poet Laureate 
 
 I. LYRICAL POEMS. One vol. Crown 8vo. 53. 
 IL NARRATIVE POEMS. One vol. Crown 8vo. 5s. 
 
 III. THE TOWER OF BABEL: A Celestial Love 
 
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 IV. SAVONAROLA : A Tragedy. One vol. Crown 8vo. 
 
 , 5s. 
 
 V. THE HUMAN TRAGEDY. One vol. Crown 8vo. ' 
 
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 VI. PRINCE LUCIFER. One vol. Crown 8vo. Ss. 
 
 VII. FORTUNATUS THE PESSIMIST. One vol. Crown 
 8vo. Ss. 
 
 ENGLAND'S DARLING. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 ENGLISH LYRICS. Globe 8vo. 3s. 6d. 
 
 MADONNA'S CHILD. One vol. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON. 
 
 [Turn over. 
 
- Crown Svo. ^s. 6d. 
 
 ENGLISH LYRICS 
 
 A SELECTION FROM THE LYRICAL 
 POEMS OF ALFRED AUSTIN 
 
 EDITED, WITH A PREFACE, 
 BY WILLIAM WATSON 
 
 EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE 
 
 "A nobly filial love of Country, and a tenderly passionate love of the 
 country — these appear to me the two domin&t notes of this volume. 
 The phrases themselves stand for things widely different, but it seems 
 fated that the things themselves should be found present together or 
 together absent. . . . Our literature prior to Lord Tennyson contains 
 no such full utterance of this dual passion, this entl^siasm of nationality 
 underlying an intimate and affectionate knowledge of every bird that 
 makes an English summer melodious, and every flower that sweetens 
 English air ; and it seems to me that if the question be asked, ' Who 
 among the poets of a later generation can be said to share with Lord 
 Tennyson the quality of being in this double sense English through and 
 through ? ' any competent person trying to answer the question honestly 
 will find the name of the author of this volume oi English Lyrics the 
 first to rise to his lips. 
 
 "Mr. Alfred Austin would seem to love England none the less, but 
 rather the more, because he has also felt the spell of other countries 
 with a keenness only possible in natures which present a vfide surface to 
 impressions. In The Human Tragedy he has projected himself by 
 imaginative sympathy into the very life and spirit of the land 
 
 ' Where Milan's spires go up lo heaven like prayer,' 
 and 
 
 ' Where once-proud Genoa sits beside the sea. 
 
EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE 
 
 But that very poem, full of Italian feeling and aglow with Italian colour 
 as it is, opens with a chant of English .springtime which is assuredly 
 hard to match outside its author's own vernal verse. As pictures to 
 hang up in one's mental gallery side by side with the exquisite ' spring ' 
 of The Human Tragedy, perhaps one would choose the autumn land- 
 scapes in Love's Widowhood, though some of these are harder to detach 
 without loss or injury from their setting, being not so much examples of 
 deliberate description as of that rarer art by which a poem is saturated 
 with autumnal sentiment till the lines seem to rustle with fallen foliage, 
 and their melody to come muffled through an indolent September haze. 
 " Mr. Alfred Austin may in a special sense be styled the laureate of 
 the English seasons, for he seems equally happy whether he be champion- 
 ing our northern April against the onslaught of a critic who had fallen 
 foul of that best-abused of months in an evening journal, or colouring 
 his verse with the gravely gorgeous pigments of the time when nature 
 seems sunk in reverie, and leaf by leaf the pageant of verdure crumbles 
 down, or painting for us [etching would perhaps be the better word) the 
 likeness of earth in that interval of apparent quiescence or suspended 
 life, when her pinched and haggard features have put on an ascetic 
 severity, and she seems to be doing penance alike for her summer 
 revelries and the extravagant pomps of autumn, — when 
 
 ' in the sculptured woodland's leafless aisles 
 The robin chants the vespers of the year.' 
 
 Thus it is that he seems among modern poets especially and saliently 
 English, in the sense in which most of our best singers, from Chaucer 
 onwards, have been English ; a sense implying neither insularity nor 
 prejudice nor any resistance of foreign impressions, but an out-of-door 
 breeziness and freedom such as bring with them an almost physical 
 consciousness of enlargement and space. None have imbibed more 
 deeply than he the spirit of Italy, or surrendered themselves with franker 
 gusto to the intoxication of southern air, yet when he comes back to 
 these shores he comes back 
 
 * Blessing the brave bleak land where be was bom,* 
 somewhat as a loiterer in courts and palaces might return with a newly- 
 quickened affection to the hearth and rafters of an unforgotten rustic 
 
EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE 
 
 home. Wlmtsoever is worthily and nobly English is endeared to him 
 by every early association and innate prepossession, but most of all the 
 older and simpler modes of our national life, when still unmenaced with 
 displacement by less comely and more mechanical conditions. The 
 old-world charm and grace which yet ennoble the labours of tilth and 
 husbandry ; the kindly charities of rustic good-neighbourhood and human 
 relations of cottage and farm and hall ; the unique blending of stateliness 
 and homeliness which makes the rural abodes of the gentle class in this 
 country seem the most delectable of possible dwelling-places; — all these 
 things are found mirrored in this poet's verse, not with any conventional 
 idealisation, but with such simple faithfulness to the fact as is natural in 
 one to whom the fact is as familiar as it is dear. And together with 
 these things, but oftener felt as an implicit presence than overtly uttered, 
 is the underlying sentiment of England's greatness on the historic and 
 constitutional side, the enthusiasm for whatever is splendid and heroic 
 in ' our rude island-story,' the chivalric passion of loyalty and allegiance 
 which flames up in quick resentment if any affront be offered to the 
 object of its devotion — as witness the noble sonnet 'To England,' 
 written at the moment when the action of a great British minister, in 
 despatching our Fleet to the Black Sea and calling out the Reserves, 
 checked the advance of Russia upon Constantinople. 
 
 ' Men deemed thee fallen, did they ? ' 
 he asks — 
 
 • Not wholly shorn of strength, but vainly strong, 
 
 and lapped in the luxury of a fool's paradise, because secure, in the last 
 resort, 
 
 * Behind the impassable fences of the foam.* 
 
 But ' thou dost but stand erect,' he says, and the interloper falls back 
 foiled, while 'the nations cluster round,' and above them 
 
 ' Thou, 'mid thy sheaves in peaceful seasons stored, 
 Towerest supreme, victor without a blow, 
 Smilingly leaning on thy undrawn sword.' 
 
 " This is the language, and these the feelings, of a man who has not 
 taken up patriotism as a theme whereon he can conveniently and 
 
EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE 
 
 effectively descant, but whose habitual mood is one of proud thankful- 
 ness in belonging to a country where, if anywhere, he may feel 
 * The dignity of being alive. 
 " Wordsworth has told us how, 
 
 ' Among the many movements of his mind, 
 there were times at which he felt for England ' as a lover or a child. ' 
 It is as a lover that Mr. Austin habitually regards her, and if to a 
 lover's fervour he unites somewhat of a lover's unconsciousness of any 
 blemish in the worshipped face or form, such partiality is a thing we 
 should be loth to exchange for any spirit of more coolly critical ap- 
 praisement. Readers familiar with his whole contribution to poetry do 
 not, however, need to be told that such emotion of heart in the presence 
 of this ideal mistress is with him, as with Wordsworth, but one of 
 ' many movements ' which in their entirety represent a wide circuit of 
 thought and feeling. In The Human Tragedy alone the complexity 
 of elements is such as would have begotten in the work of an inferior 
 artist an inevitable obscurity of design or incoherence of detail. Yet 
 that poem assimilates easily into its narrative fabric such multifarious 
 material as the collision of faith and reason ; the conflict between 
 human love and transcendental passion in a soul dedicated to heavenly 
 uses but drawn aside for a time by an earthly emotion ; the secret of 
 the subtle spell exercised by Catholicism upon a pure and radiant 
 human spirit which knows Doubt but as a shadow and Sin as a 
 rumour ; the immense, tragic irony of chance, as seen in the bewildered 
 crossing and fortuitous overlapping of human lives, with all their 
 momentous mutual interaction ; the passionate abnegation or splendid 
 immolation of self in the service of a great public cause ; the heroic 
 spectacle of a people that have long lain ' pillowed on their past ' rising 
 at the sudden summons of an idea to incarnate their dream of unity and 
 freedom ; the clash of theories, the dissonance of parties, the shock of 
 hosts on the field ; —such are some of the constituents of a poem, the 
 monumental scale of which, and the variety of its component parts, are 
 not more remarkable than the artistic fusion of so large a mass of 
 material as its argument comprehends. '' 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON. 
 
 \Turn over. 
 
With Fourteen Illustrations. Sixth Thousand. 
 Extra Crown 8vo. Price gs. 
 
 THE GARDEN THAT I LOVE 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED AUSTIN 
 
 TIMES — "It is a description in lucid and graceful prose of an old-fashioned 
 garden and its cultivation, interspersed with genial colloquies between its owners and 
 their guests, and enriched with occasional verse. Mr. Austin, who is greatly to be 
 envied the possession of this delightful gardien, and not less to be congratulated on 
 his sympathetic appreciation of its charms, has rarely been so happily inspired. . . . 
 Some of his admirers will wish for more of Mr, Austin's verse ; for ourselves we are 
 content with a volume which, though not in verse, is unmistakably the work of a 
 poet." 
 
 SPECTATOR. ~-*^^e are glad to welcome Mr. Alfred Austin's delightful 
 Garden that I Love in a compact book form. Mr. Austin is the laureate of gardens ; 
 he is, as Addison says, ' In love with a country life, where Nature appears in the 
 greatest perfection, and furnishes out all those scenes that are most apt to delight 
 the imagination.' In the preface to Mr. Austin's English Lyrics^ Mr. William 
 Watson writes : ' A nobly filial love of country, and a tenderly passionate love of the 
 country — these appear to me the two dominant notes of this volume ' ; and in the 
 new volume that has just appeared, the same dominant notes recur again and again. 
 In his poems, Mr. Austin has described Spring's youthful face, where sunny smiles 
 chase away the fleeting tears ; Summer's serene rose-tinted beauty ; the matured 
 brilliance of Autumn ; and the withered hcimeliness of Winter ; and now he takes his 
 readers behind the scenes, as it were, and shows them an ideal country-house with 
 its heavy muUioned windows looking towards the morning and noontide sun, and its 
 gabled front almost smothered in climbing roses and creepers. . . . The Garden that 
 I Love is sure of a large and appreciative audience." 
 
 SATURDA V REVIEW.—" Inthis sunshiny book with the Tennysonian title, 
 Mr. Alfred Austin makes a charming addition to the literature of the Englisli 
 garden. Not wholly of the garden and of gardening is the poet's discourse, nor 
 wholly descriptive of the gardener's aims, his hopes and fears and joys. In part it 
 treats of the designer's projects and handiwork ; and in part it is a poetic descant on 
 the work not made of hands — the glories, the surprises, the magic of Nature, that 
 reward the single-hearted love of the gardener with a prodigal show of delights, ever 
 varied and ever new. From both points of view Mr. Austin's volume is deh'ghtful. 
 . . . Some pleasing interludes of conversation occur, in which Lamia and Veronica 
 intervene with the writer and the Poet, not in a panegyric of the garden, but in per- 
 sonal talk, generally of a light and sportive humour. The Poet, indeed, recites some 
 charming lyrics, and in his observations on poets and poetry assumes a gravei 
 tone." 
 
P/?£SS NOTICES 
 
 GUARDIAN,—" The Garden that I Love, by Alfred Austin (Macmillan), is the 
 work of a poet, artist, and gardener, who, having had the great luck to meet with an 
 ideal house, surrounded it with an ideal garden. How this house and garden 
 formed a convenient meeting place for ' friends in council,' and what these friends 
 said and did, till the garden that they loved became the garden in which they loved, 
 and the happy termination of their labours and loves, is most pleasantly told by Mr. 
 Austin." 
 
 ACADEMY, — " Scarcely has the reader got through half a dozen pages of this 
 bright little book before he finds himself on terms of close friendship with the author. 
 Mr. Austin takes you at once into his confidence— or at least he appears to do so : he 
 tells you by what good fortune he chanced to light upon his rural retreat ; he lets 
 you pry into the details of his domestic arrangements ; and then, taking you kindly 
 by the nand, goes with you round the Garden that he Loves. Month after month, 
 from April till October, he depicts his garden in varying phase ; but, whatever its 
 aspect, he somehow contrives to make tlie reader a partner in the simple pleasure 
 which it yields.^ It is true that one is never quite sure, when listening to a poet, how 
 far his descriptions are a direct reflex of the concrete, and how far the creation of his 
 own imaginings. But no matter : whether real or imaginary, Mr. Austin's descrip- 
 tions of his garden are equally delightful. . . . The volume is one which will Se 
 heartily enjoyed by every cultured reader. He who opens its pages shall find 
 enshrined in ^em many a sage apophthegm, many a sparkling bit of dialogue, and 
 many a verse of tenderness and grace. " 
 
 STANDARD. — "The freshness of the morning sunlight^ the perfume of the 
 flowers, the songs of the birds, the sense of tranquil leisure are m this volume side by 
 side with the companionship of pleasant women and of books, ajn air of culture, a gay 
 philosophy of life, a dash of old-fashioned gallantry, and the give and take of happy 
 humour. . . . There is much else in the book over which we could gladly linger ; for 
 neither the garden that was loved, nor the love that was returned in its privacy of 
 shade, exhaust the charm of this wholesome, imaginative, and genial outlook on 
 Nature and on life." 
 
 DAILY TELEGRAPH.— "Mr. Alfred Austin has produced in The Garden 
 that I Love (Macmillan), a little book full of delightful prose interspersed with 
 equally charming poetry, the whole radiant with wit and mirth and delicate fancy. 
 . . . The scientific pomologist may be glad to know how the author i)rotects his 
 orchard from grubs, and the lover of dainty poetry will certainly thank him for such 
 a gem as the verses beginning ' Had I a Garden.' " 
 
 PALL MALL GAZETTE.—" Mr. Austin is a good writer of prose as well as 
 verse ; and though he cannot conceal that he is a man of sharp insistent sensibilities, 
 taste and scholarship combine to keep them in due restraint when literature is the 
 business in hand. And here his style fits the subject very well indeed ; for, writing 
 of an unformal garden, his language is negligent of formal grace, spreading over his 
 pages as his wandering old rose-vine spread^ over his walls. And the book is not all 
 garden. A certain Martha-like Veronica is introduced into it, and a sparkling Lamia, 
 and an unnamed Poet, in whom Mr. Austin (he need not deny it) doubles his part. 
 These friends talk together on affairs of life and art and song ; jmd very good talk 
 it is. But best of all is a piece of verse, 'If Love could Last,' more sweetly musical 
 than anything else that we can remember in Mr. Austin's poetical work." 
 
 ST. JAMES S GAZETTE.— " Mr. Austin's good fortune has proved the 
 exceeding good fortune of his readers ; for never surely was the sense of the blessed 
 beneficence of a garden, its boon of peace and refreshment to the spirit, expounded 
 with more winning charm, or with more delicate truth of sentiment, than in this inti- 
 mate and tender discourse about the Garden that he Loves. In no kind of writing, 
 perhaps, than in this is it easier to miss just that nuance of tone and treatment that 
 makes the difference between literature and twaddle, _ In these pleasant pages that 
 nuance is most delicately apprehended. They are written not in poetic prose, but 
 in prose that is essential^ the prose of a poet, with the feeling and fancy of the 
 poet. There is just the right mingling of actual poetry, just so much as to make 
 us long for more ; and the snatches of verse introduced are in themselves most 
 exquisite — it may be that their charm is heightened by their setting, but one does 
 
PRESS NOTICES 
 
 not remember verse of Mr. Austin's that has charmed one more. There is sentimenl 
 enough to give life to the garden lore, and enough garden lore to give character to 
 the sentiment. , . . Mr. Austin has seldom given us anything better than this 
 delightful book. It is certainly one not to be missed by any lover of Nature— or any 
 lover of graceful and charming prose." 
 
 SPEAKER.—'* The Garden that I Lave is pure delight. The sense of what 
 Milto%.termed 'retired leisure' is in the book, and with it the scent of the flowers 
 and much quick appreciation of country sights and sounds. Even whilst we 
 ramble along the shady walks, or stop to gossip with the gardener, we never feel 
 that we are 'buried' in any hopeless sense in the country, or that the charm of 
 books and human fellowship is far to seek." 
 
 OBSERVER.— '* Tyro ladies of temperaments that differ vastly, the Poet, and 
 the creator of the garden — these four are the dramatis persona in The Garden 
 thai I Lovej the dainty volume which Mr. Alfred Austin has provided for the 
 delight of many a weary town dweller, whose imagination, mayhap, has done him 
 the good service to picture him, if only for an hour, the dweller in just such a haven 
 of old-world loveliness as is here depicted. ' Lamia,' the brilliant perverse, 'Veron- 
 ica,' the Martha-Hke mistress of the house that sat within the garden, the 'Poet,' 
 with his verses and his delicate wisdom, and the narrator himself — in all of these 
 humans we are deeply interested, and their apt meditations and meanderings are 
 exquisitely attuned^t^p the varying moods of the garden ; but it is the garden itself 
 that we [earn to love in turning o^^er Mr. Austin's enchanting pages. . . . He has 
 succeeded with rare skill in suggesting the atmosphere of perfect peace that hangs, 
 like a golden mist, over gardens which some one loves ; and there is no garden lover, 
 be he rich or poor, who will not feel that in The Garden that I Love^ Mr. Austin 
 has interpreted much that he has ofttimes felt, but for which; perhaps, he could 
 find no adequate expression in words." 
 
 LITER AR Y WORLD.— '^^ The most fragrant and refreshing book that we have 
 had the happiness to review for many a long month. . . . Those who never care to 
 see their favourite poet taking to prose, or their cherished prose-writer dropping 
 into poetry, will find some comfort in the fact that there are some beautiful verses in 
 The Garden that I Love. . , . Reviewing often means finding fault, but in this case 
 that would be impossible. The Garden that I Love is a book to be thankful for. It 
 is beautiful. It goes very close to perfection," 
 
 SCOTSMAN.—** It is a new thin^ for Mr. Alfred Austni to favour his readers 
 with prose ; and, indeed, the prose of his book The Garden that I Love is such as 
 can be appreciated only by those who love poetry. The human interest of the book — 
 that which lies in its touches of character — is not the less strong because it is inter- 
 mittent and impressionist. The workis delightfully written. It will please in an 
 immoderate degree men who are addicted to gardening, but one does not need to 
 have so much of the original Adam in one as all that to enjoy a book so healthy and 
 of so refined a sentiment, for a bookish man who had spent his life in towns will be 
 refreshed by it as well." 
 
 LIVERPOOL DAILY POST.—" Why it should be so one finds it impossible 
 to say, but the fact remains that to write about a garden a man must be a gentleman. 
 Mr. Alfred Austin is the happy possessor of the necessary qualities, and his new 
 book entitled The Garden that I Love is as fresh as the evening breeze across the 
 whitened orchard tops of spring, in these days when, in literature, whiffs from the 
 gutter strike the senses more frequently than the scent of new-mown hay. . . . We 
 recommend every one to read his most delightful book." 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., 
 
 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, LONDON, W.C. 
 
Now Ready. With Fourteen Illustrations. Fourth Thousand. 
 Extra Crown Svo, Price gs, 
 
 IN VERONICA'S GARDEN 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED AUSTIN 
 
 TIMES. — " Although sequels and continuations are proverbially perilous under- 
 takings, we have little doubt that Mr, Alfred Austin's readers will gladly renew the 
 acquaintance with Veronica's delightful garden and its genial occupants which they 
 made in The Garden that I /.^.''^■The scheme of the new volume is the same as 
 that of its predecessor. The garden is richer and more luxuriant, and its owner's or 
 creator's lovefor it is more intense, than ever, and the illustrations with which the 
 volume is enriched will make Mr. Austin's readers more eager than ever to share his 
 love for anddelight in it. The 'friends in council' whose colloquies enliven the 
 garden and give an air of cultured retirement to Mr. Austin's pages are also the same 
 as before, though their relationships are somewhat different. Veronica is now the 
 wife of the Poet, while the anonymous gardener and the winsome Lamia appear to 
 revolve somewhat erratically around this domestic centre. In both cases Mr. Austin 
 blends in very delightful fashion his love of flowers and of simple rural delights 
 with his love of gentle thoughts and gracious converse." 
 
 GUARDIAN. — " Mr. Austin has done well tofullowup The Garden that I Love 
 by In Veronica! s Garden. It is really a second volume of the same work, and not 
 only presupposes that the reader has read the first by frequent references to it, but is 
 written on exactly the same lines, with the same dramatis persons, the same quiet 
 humour, and the same mixture of gardening, poetry, and moralising that made The 
 Garden that I Love such pleasant reading. In one respect only can we trace any 
 difference : the garden is still the central pomt of the book, but there is less of garden- 
 ing in it, and more of moralisings and short essays ; still the moralisings come in very 
 naturally, and the essays, though short, are always to the point. There is the same 
 healthy tone in this second volume that there was in the first ; the same love of the 
 country in all its aspects." 
 
 PRESTON GUARDIAN'.— ^* In Veronica's Garden has grown as did The 
 Garden that I Love. They are as twin apples from one bough. The last-named 
 was ripe first, being a little nearer the sun, and gave our palate its first sweet taste of 
 a new fruit. But the second is in the same style. Page after page one is plunged 
 into the country. One has not merely a skilful word-painting of remembered beauty, 
 but shares the emotion from the sight of the new leaves on the sweeping boughs, the 
 lush grass, or the first swallow. The joys of the country are set out for town-bred 
 people. There are* several charming poems in the volume. A delightful one describes, 
 in over a score of verses, *The Passing of Spring. '_ Another embodies the real 
 Christmas spirit better than any I have read. There is an imperial ring about the 
 lines which appeal to 
 
 All of British blood, — 
 Whether they cling to Egbert's Throne, 
 
 Or, far beyond the Western flood. 
 Have reared a Sceptre of their own, 
 
 that should bring tender thoughts of the Motherland from many a far-off shore. 
 I do not need to say more about the book. Whoever loves a garden will love it." 
 
 DAILY TELEGRAPH.— " K dainty piece of work is Mr. Alfred Austin's 
 little volume, called In Veronica's Garden, which may be described as a continuation 
 of his charming description of an English manor-house and its inhabitants — The 
 Garden that I Lave. Here, again, we meet with the modern representatives of 
 Lamia and Veronica, with the amateur gardener himself, ai\d with the Poet who is 
 always ready to "oblige" with verses of delicate workmanship, written to suit 
 place or season. Indeed, one of the chief charms of the book is the deft, unobtrusive 
 way in which Mr. Austin has contrived to mingle poetry with his prose, and to 
 gratify both those who love an elegant prose style and those who admire the lyrics 
 of the author of The Human Tragedy. There is one especially beautiful sonnet, 
 called ' A Dream of England,' in which a dweller in Italy imagines himself to — 
 
FUESS NOTICES 
 
 Hear the home-music of your Kentish skies. 
 And dream Chat I am drenched with English dew. 
 Equally delightful in its own way is the ' Passing of Spring,' " 
 
 STANDARD — ^^Tho%R'\/ho wander with Mr. Alfred Austin 'in Veronica's 
 Garden' will be glad to find that it is none other than the Garden that he Loves. 
 Not only is the place the same, but the company remains unchanged. Veronica is 
 here again with her grave imperiousness and sweet addiction to household cares, 
 and the playful Lamia is by her side trembling in mock earnest at her nod. He who 
 tells the tale — the Keeper, shall we call him? of the pleasaunce — has lost nothing of 
 his meditative delight in the infinite mutations of its loveliness, and the Poet comes 
 back from Italy full of apt Virgilian learning, and ready at every turn to burst into 
 English song that has a classic grace and freshness of its own. How much is fancy 
 and how much portraiture ? Where does the writer put himself into his «fcord, and 
 where is he content, with dainty dramatic touch, to furnish side lights to the picture 
 of sincere and enthusiastic feeling? These are questions we 4o not care to ask, even 
 if we believed that we could give dogmatic answers. _ The mind must be singularly 
 ill-attuned to the finer spirit of the workmanship, which worries itself with analysis 
 of this sort. It is enough to accept the volume gratefully as a delightful blending 
 of the results of delicate observation and subtle thought with humour both kindly 
 and refined. The dignity and rhythmipal melodiousness of the prose would tell us, 
 if we did not know in other ways, thapthe writer of this volume is a pbet." 
 
 ^PEA ICER — *' Mr. Austin, in givin|: us this book, has essayed to do an exqiiisite 
 
 thing twice, and though some who like to have enjoyed their sensation and be done 
 
 with it, may grumble, others will thank him for this further instalment of quiet days 
 
 , and quiet ways. The charm of his subject lies upon the book, so that even the list 
 
 of flower-names becomes fragrant. . . . A delightful book." 
 
 ST. JAMES'S BUDGET— "This delightful volume has the full and fresh 
 charm of The Garden that I Love." 
 
 NA TIONAL REVIEW—^' A delightful book, which will be cordially welcomed 
 by, those who enjoyed The Garden that I Love. It has no mission, settles no 
 problems, and is content to be charming, simple, and pleasure-giving." 
 
 DAILY NEWS — " Mr. Alfred Austin in Veronicas Garden continues his praises 
 of The Garden that I Love. Once more he celebrates the delights of that secluded 
 spot, the high walls of which shut out the ' ephemeral fret, fume, and turmoil of 
 to-day,' and enclose a thousand simple enchantments ; once more in those shaded 
 walks and radiant borders we meet the perverse and lovely Lamia, the solicitous 
 Veronica, the Poet whose verse gives the kindling touch that draws us into closer 
 amity with the life of rikture. "^Again it is the lover and tender of the garden that is 
 the narrator. White of Selbome was not more precise than is Mr. Austin in, noting the 
 advent and ways of the>blossoms and birds, or in observing the wayward, laggard, 
 or hurrying steps of the season. The friends converse on many themes, on art, on 
 the philosophy of life ; their banter is gay" and genial, their gravity never deepens 
 into gloom. The poet quotes much from his favourite Virgil, and sings in graceful 
 lyrics of the simple things of nature, of love, of friendship. He is the same gentle 
 Conservative and patriot ; the old faiths, the old ways are dear to him. 
 And every wildlSig bird and leaf 
 That gladdens English lanes. 
 His verse has the sinterity and spontaneily the talk of the friends sometimes lacks ; 
 and the note rings true tl^t tells 
 
 I would live nestled near my kind. 
 Deep in a garden garth, 
 - That they who loved my verSe might find 
 
 A pathway to my hearth. , 
 
 The beautiful old manor house and the garden are charmingly represented in the 
 illustrations by A. Kohl and O. Lacour. " 
 
 BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZ/NE—" Berorti the "winter* has finally set in, and 
 while still th^ trees are in all their glory, Mr. Austin leai^ us back in his delightful 
 way into the Garden which we all love. ... It is just the book to lie in the embrasure 
 of the window looking out upon a garden full of tangled sweetnesS, where lilies have 
 lifted their tall heads, and roses blown from the beginning of time. ' 
 
 di . . 
 
 MACMILLA^J AND CO., Ltd,, 
 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, LONDON, W.C. 
 
Cotne 
 
 U innivetsit^ 
 
 
 Uibrari? 
 
 
 OF THE 
 
 IRew l^orft State CoIIefie of Hariculture 
 
 A<^sm. 
 
 rjrh^'f... 
 
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