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When the drought was here I watered my lawn profusely (and the Water Board need not rage and swell, for I never left the hose unattended for one moment). A little later I walked over the lawn to collect its gratitude, as it were, and I saw hosts of strange and horrid things. They were white, and yellow, and yellowish brown. They had come out of the crevices, and they had crawled. When I thought that for weeks past, this, my garden, had been providing them with sustenance, I was moved to fury. But I did not lose my head. There is a right way and a wrong way of doing everything. There is even a right way of killing slugs.

I have read in books that the gardener takes the slug and crushes it under his heel on the gravel path; a jobbing gardener might possibly do that–jobbing gardeners will do anything. Any man who does that is not fit to have a garden. He is only fit to collect house refuse in an open cart during hot weather.

My own method is simple and refined. I have a large jar filled with a strong solution of salt and water. I have, moreover, a large pair of surgical forceps serrated on the inner edge, price one shilling at the shop in the Strand. With the forceps I lift up the slug and I place him in the salt water; he dies incontinently and very neatly. My best time so far is a hundred and one in a quarter of an hour. I have found out the thing which the green fly absolutely cannot stand, and I give the green fly plenty of that thing with the syringe. I destroy earwigs. I destroy caterpillars. I have not yet reached the fine Tennysonian sensibility of the gentleman “whose eyes were tender over drowning flies.” I kill some things that other things may live. They cannot all have it their own way in my garden, and I must settle which side is to prevail. All the same, I do sometimes try to look at it from the slug’s point of view. What does the slug think about it? Let us hope and believe that the slug does not think about it.

With what brutality, too, does the gardener fight against the prolific impulses of nature. The dead flowers must be picked off from the sweet peas; otherwise they give up work early. If you cut down the lupine spikes as soon as the beans have formed, you will get more spikes. (I am told that this will not weaken the plant if it is well fed, but I never do it myself.) And what does it all mean, when one comes to think of it? These poor beautiful things live and struggle only for the perpetuation of their kind. When that is done, their warfare is accomplished. We make lovely gardens by thwarting and baffling this natural instinct.

Even among the plants that I tend there is civil war. My garden is surrounded by tall trees, so that at any hour of the day I can get shade. I would not have it otherwise. I would not lose one of the trees. But they are all unprincipled robbers. Their roots spread far underneath the ground. The fight goes on, and they steal the sustenance that one has given to the roses.

I knew a man who admired in his neighbour’s garden the golden stars of the stone-crop. He put a little piece in an envelope and planted it in his own garden. A few years later he turned out of his garden three cartloads of stone-crop; that, I admit, was in the country. Australian bamboo is determined and rapacious. It is easy to get it into the garden. It is next to impossible to get it out. The smallest fragment of root seems to be enough, and up it comes again. The perennial sunflower is terrifically aggressive. It has a disregard of limits and wants the world. If its masses of yellow flowers were not so exhilarating, I would turn it out of my garden altogether. One would like to be able to argue with these things. I should like to say to those sunflowers: “Try to take example by the bergamot. It has the same perennial advantages as yourself, and it is quite beautiful. In addition, the scent of its leaves pressed in the fingers reminds one of Egypt. You do not find the bergamot shoving itself forward wherever it has a chance. Contemplate it and learn modesty.” But argument does not avail with the perennial sunflower. The knife and the spade are the things that it understands.