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In A London Garden
by
I am glad the old box tree is not a peacock. It has grown the way it wanted to grow, and it suits it. It is perfectly true that nothing will grow under it, and therefore I have not tried to grow anything under it. I found me a handy man and sent him out to buy me a hundred bricks, what time I marked out under the box tree a place where one might sit–a place dry to the feet after the rain. I sent him for red bricks, and he came back with white, because the red bricks were (a) too expensive, and (b) too soft. But the white bricks have done very well with some old bricks mixed in with them, and soon lost their aggressiveness. So underneath my box tree is an L-shaped pavement of bricks, with room for a seat and a table.
People look at it and sniff. It is too unusual. Then they go away and buy bricks. It is astonishing, by the way, how very few bricks there are in a hundred. What I mean, of course, is what a very small pavement they make.
I made another seat under the big scarlet thorn, but this is more ambitious. I got me broken pavement stones–not very easy to get nowadays–and paved a semicircle. On that I put a semicircular seat with a back to it. Irreverent people have compared it (a) to a pew, and (b) to a loose-box; but it is a pleasant place to sit in in the evening, and just catches the last of the sunlight. After that I dealt firmly with myself, and said that I could not be always making seats.
I began to see ways by which I might make the garden a little less rectilineal. I need hardly say that I wanted a pergola, because of course everybody wants a pergola. The best house-agents say that a riverside cottage lets better if it has a pergola and no dining-room than if it has a dining-room and no pergola. My pergola is built of rustic wood creosoted, which costs very little. It forms a big semicircle with a short tail projecting from the middle of the curve. On it I grow ramblers and glory-roses. I told an expert with some pride what I had done.
“Yes,” said the expert sadly and thoughtfully, “almost any rose does well in London, except the Gloire-de-Dijon.”
My glory-roses look all right at present, but he is probably correct. When you do a work and do not know how to do it, you are handicapped. Almost the first thing I did in the way of gardening was to put in some gaillardias, which I had bought in a box. Three of them died. It takes a good deal to kill a gaillardia. Things that I plant now do not die. I am certainly getting on. I shall soon be able to say Gloire-de-Dijon when I mean glory-rose.
Perfection is not for me. But there are some pleasant halting-places this side of it. I consult that book for amateur gardeners at intervals, principally because it is such a delight to be able to skip the long chapter about sea-kale. I still struggle, and tell myself frequently that I shall continue to struggle. But, as I have said, there are pleasant halting-places this side of perfection, and I have a great tendency to get out at the next station.
When that tendency comes over me I try to remember the smallness of my garden. In a small garden you may cut the caterpillar nests off the scarlet thorn, and burn them to ashes so that no spark of life remains. You feel sure that not one caterpillar is left in the garden. You may then get to work and pick caterpillars off the rose trees. You may hunt the ubiquitous green fly. You may weed properly with a small fork, instead of perfunctorily with a hoe, after the manner of the jobbing gardener. In time of drought you can water everything. In a small garden much is possible.