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In A London Garden
by
I began to see encouraging factors. I had not to think about fruit and vegetables. I had not to think about a greenhouse, because the garden has no greenhouse. It has not even got a frame. I shall buy one next year, or possibly the year after. London is simply crawling with florists, and for a few shillings you can buy things all ready to put in. The shilling that goes to the taxicab driver is gone for ever–sacrificed to a fit of laziness. The shilling that buys six sweet-williams provides pleasure for many weeks. The sweet-william is, I believe, a two-year thing, or as the sacred jargon of the gardener puts it, a biennial. You start it one year and it flowers the next. It may be a mean and cowardly thing to do to let the florist do the first year’s work on it, and buy it when it is ready to flower that season, but I do it, and I shall continue to do it. I shall continue to do everything that I can think of that will save me trouble in my garden without injuring the garden. But the Iceland poppies are from seed that I myself sowed. I have sown blood-red wallflowers and Canterbury bells to flower next year. One can be lazy without being wholly bad.
Things which looked hopeless at first sight proved better on further consideration. There was the lawn, for instance. The jobbing gardener turned up his nose at the lawn. It slopes. It slopes in several different directions simultaneously.
“There’s only one thing to be done with that,” said the jobber, “and the sooner you make up your mind to it the better. That all wants to be taken up, levelled, and relaid. It’ll cost a bit of money, but it’ll never be satisfactory till it’s done.”
He produced figures and they frightened me. The lawn still slopes deviously, and every day that I see it I am thankful for it. Nobody can possibly play lawn-tennis on it. I hate white rectilineal lines on grass almost more than I hate underdone mutton or “The Lost Chord”. Therefore it is a perpetual joy to me that my lawn slopes.
I asked the jobbing gardener what the roses were, planted in odd corners of the lawn.
“Roses!” he said scornfully. “They ain’t roses. It’s just some common sort of brier. What anybody put it there for, I don’t know. It has never flowered for the last three years, and never will flower, and if it did, you wouldn’t like it.”
Those despised briers are all covered with flower at the present moment, and I like them very much. They are not gardeners’ roses, but they are nicer to look at than the Putney bus.
Are there any plantains in my lawn? There are. There is also more grass than there used to be. You can do a lot of things with plantains. If you turn guinea-pigs loose on your lawn, so one newspaper informs me, they will eat the plantains and leave the grass. But I have not got any guinea-pigs, and I am not going to provide a manly but barbarous sport for the cats of the neighbourhood by buying guinea-pigs. Another method is to cut off the head of the plantain and apply lawn-sand. I shall very likely do that one day when there is nothing in the garden which wants doing more, and if I happen to feel like it. A part of a summer day you must work in a London garden, but it is equally true that for another part of the summer day you must just sit and enjoy it. Otherwise you sacrifice the end to the means.
“As for that old box tree,” said my jobbing Jeremiah, “it never ought to have been put there at all, right on the edge of a bed. If you take my advice you will have it out. Of course, if it had been properly trimmed and looked after, that might have been made into a peacock, but it would take you years to get it into shape now. You can’t grow anything under it, and it’s no good trying.”