HORTICULTURAL

I admit that I hesitate at the thought of pressing into the elect company of those who have discoursed upon gardens. From Lord Bacon down to the Poet Laureate, from the Poet Laureate up to that self-sufficing and yet voluble "Elizabeth," of whose German Garden all the craft have read, there seems no inch of garden sod that has been left unturned. I ask myself: Have I any original suggestions on, for example, The disbudding of 'Mums? (a term of horrid familiarity that I have seen applied to Chrysanthemums). Any high thoughts on Manures? Any special convictions in the matter of mulches?

My conscience, far from admitting ability to treat of these solemn things, reminds me that but little more than a year ago I should scarcely have been entrusted with the weeding of a gravel path, and hints at that Affair of the Coltsfoot. It is, in fact, the Coltsfoot Affair that decides me. I cannot be a guide or a sign-post, but I can be a scarecrow. I would say a moral scarecrow, though it may be conceded that the costume of the gardening amateur often lends itself to the more practical r?le.

I was not at all aware of being in the movement when I found myself snatching at my weekly copy of Gardening Illustrated in preference to the daily paper, and brooding heavily upon delphiniums when I might have been profiting by the sermon. It was only by degrees, as I went about the world, that I noted how quick and strong would beat the answering conversational pulse at the mention of a garden, at the sighing reference to the arrangement of a herbaceous border. It seemed that every second person I met was as much of a gardener as I was, in the matter of enthusiasm, and, as they might easily be, something more in the matter of practice. This discovery revolutionised society for me. It has doubtless done so for many another. The most penal afternoon visit may have its alleviations in a valuable hint on "the desire of the rose"—not for the star—but for the cleanings of the scullery drain; the most inveterate dowager may be found to be a man and a brother, profoundly versed in daffodils, full of lore about "Alpines." How astonishing it is to find oneself cheerfully, even ardently, assenting to what would once have been regarded as the hideous proposal to "Walk round the garden!" Such a walk has ceased to be a penance; it has become something, not quite a scouting expedition, not quite a (herbaceous) border-foray, not quite a "beggar's lay"; but it has something in it of the charms of all three. Which element preponderates depends on the character. There are moss-troopers born, who will twitch off a cutting, and filch a seed head, uncontrollably. There are heaven-endowed mendicants who will yearn and flatter the filling of a flower bed into a knotted pocket handkerchief. It is a useful principle to accept everything, regardless of the accident of the seasons. There are many other accidents of far higher importance to be considered—lapse of memory on the part of the giver, for instance, or repentance. In the amenities of gardeners, as in love, the advice to "Take me when I'm in the humour," is sound, and a cutting in the hand is well worth six in or on the bush, when the bush is another's.

I believe it is the gambling element that gives to gardening so potent a charm—that, and the seedmen's catalogues. One of my first adventures was in response to a singularly seductive advertisement—"Humulus Lupulus," it said, "The finest creeper in the world. Grows forty feet in a single night. Massive clusters of yellowish blossoms. Beautiful; Healthy." I have the constitutional misfortune to believe, unquestioning, the printed word. Even now I find it hard to discount the flights of fancy of that poetic idealist, the advertising nurseryman. I despatched eighteenpence by the next post; received by return an undemonstrative bundle of little roots, planted them prayerfully in a choice place, and then, as it happened, left home for a time. On my return to my garden I found the usual crop of catastrophes and compensations, but disregarding all alike I sped to the site of the Humulus Lupulus. There had been near the same spot a highly esteemed rose, "Climbing Captain Christie." The first thing that greeted me was the wan, indignant face of a Captain Christie, who, having climbed for all he was worth, was none the less overtaken, and was now gazing at me in strangled pallor from the depths of a thicket of common hops. The Poetic Idealist had triumphed.

I have never been able precisely to ascertain to what extent Bat Whoolley found me out in the Affair—already alluded to—of the Coltsfoot. Bat is my gardener, and I value his opinion highly, almost as highly as he does himself, though possibly with more limitations. Winter Heliotrope was what my neighbour called Coltsfoot. I felt there was something not quite sound in the lavish way she pressed it upon me. She said there was nothing like it for covering bare places, and that I might dig it up for myself and take all I wanted. That specious permission might have warned me; so also might the singular fact that my neighbour's shrubbery had for undergrowth naught save the curving leaves of the winter heliotrope. None the less, I planted out two or three colonies of it on the outskirts of the rock garden.

One morning, at the turn by the pine tree (one of my colonies had been unostentatiously planted in a bare place behind the pine tree), I met Bat. His face was redder than usual, and there was something very searching in his eye. Mine did not meet it.

"Look at that!" he said.

He held up a handful of long white roots, and brandished it, much as Jupiter is represented brandishing a handful of lightning. "Look at that dam-root"—he pronounced the words as one pronounces beet-root—"that some"—here a powerful variant on the usual definition of fool—"is after planting in your honour's consarns! See here! If ye left no more o' that in the ground than as much as ye couldn't see itself, it'd have the place ate up in one fortnight! I gave the morning to it, an' if I give the day itself it's hardly I'll have it all dug—Divil's cure to the—" (Here more variants in connection with the imposter.)

Something wavering in Bat's eye, even while the denunciation proceeded, made me conscious of the smirch of suspicion. I remained silent as the grave. Secretly I visited the other colonies, and found that one of them was already swinging an enveloping wing round the rearguard of the Iris Kaempferi, and that another had flung outposts into the heart of the helianthemums. At a bound I ranged myself with the opposition.

"Bat," I said, "the Dam-roots are in the garden!"

That night a fair-sized bundle of winter heliotrope was restored to my generous neighbour. Bat threw it over the wall.

I am slowly acquiring some insight into my gardener's likes and dislikes. He despises anything that he suspects of being a wild flower.

"'Sha! that's no good! That's one of the Heth family! The hills is rotten with it."

But on the other hand, he will lavish such a wealth of attention upon potatoes as would, if bestowed on the despised daughter of Heth, cause it to blossom like the rose. There are, in his opinion, but three flowers really worthy of cultivation. Red geraniums, blue lobelias, and yellow calceolarias. With these, had he his will, should all my garden be glorious. I never buy them; I never see them in their earlier stages, but suddenly, in the herbaceous border, the trio will appear, uttering a note of colour only comparable to the shriek of a macaw.

"Why then, there isn't a gentleman's garden in Ireland but thim have the sway in it!" Bat says, when he finds me brooding over a shattered ideal. "There was Mr. Massy's was the grand place! The garden steps big slobs of marble, and the gate lodges dashed and haberdashed, and the gardens fit to blind yer eye by the dint o' thim!"

What "haberdashed" may mean I cannot say, but "thim" meant the combination so dear to his heart that a stouter than mine would be needed to abolish it, even from a herbaceous border.

Sometimes, chiefly on Sunday afternoons, I am visited by compunction in the matter of the prohibited "calcies" and "lobaylias," for it is on Sundays that Bat is "at home" to three favoured enemies of his own profession. They move, very slowly, and, for the most part, silently, from bed to bed, like doctors making a clinical inspection at a hospital; at intervals they put a horny finger under a patient's chin and gravely study his complexion, or, wishing perhaps to show generosity to a rival, they pick off some malign bug or caterpillar, and squash it between an unhesitating finger and thumb. It is at such times that I feel how far my garden in its lack of that gorgeous trio lags behind that of any other gentleman in Ireland.

But my gardener has his alleviations. There was one bright day which, having begun with the funeral of a relative, culminated in a visit as prolonged as it was satiating from the chief mourner. King Solomon did not exploit his Temple more thoroughly for the discomfiture of the Queen of Sheba than did Bat his gardens for the Chief Mourner. The latter, a "mountainy man from back in the counthry," paced heavily round after Mr. Whoolly, his hands folded on the apex of his back under the voluminous skirts of his blue frieze coat, a stick hanging from them like a tail. The deep silence of his native hills was on him; he suffered his emotions without expression until the tour of the kitchen garden was made, its climax—fortunately stage-managed by Bat—being "a bed of greens." There is that in such a bed that, in such a nature, touches an even more vibrating chord than potatoes.

"And cabbages!" said the mountainy man, almost in a whisper.
"AND CABBAGES!" SAID THE MOUNTAINY MAN
"AND CABBAGES!" SAID THE MOUNTAINY MAN

The Queen of Sheba herself was not a more gratifying audience. Mr. Whoolley seems to have observed the parallelism of the cases, and assuming that the visitor, in spite of the funeral, had no more spirit left in him, the couple adjourned to a convenient public house and were no more seen.

On the whole, I think I may say that I give Bat satisfaction. He is generous in judging rather by intention than achievement, and he sees the advantages of fostering a disposition to weed. Only once has he been tried too high, and that was when I planted out a bed with what he calls "pushoch-bui," a most pestilent weed whose English equivalent is, I fancy, charlock. To me he passed over the error in a very handsome manner, but I heard him the same afternoon say to the subordinate who was making good my misdoing:

"Is it that one! Sure he's no more good than a feather!"

Another act of folly of mine, however, carried with it more serious consequences. I was so far left to myself as to give permission to a Sunday School excursion of unknown dimensions to disport itself in my domains. Dates were discussed, and times arranged, and then a sponge of kindly oblivion wiped the affair from my mind. It was a couple of months afterwards—I was inspecting my wall fruit in the kitchen garden at eleven o'clock in the morning, and being eaten by midges in a way that foretold immediate rain, when there was a sound of thunderous driving on the avenue. Just then the rain began to fall, and almost at the same moment there arrived to me a rushing messenger from the house saying "there were ladies in the drawing-room."

I am a lone man, and there is no one to share with me the brunt of such a moment. I hurried in, and was confronted as I neared the hall door by four huge yellow brakes, full of children, and roofed with umbrellas. Two, already empty, were emulously pressing towards the yard, one taking a short cut across a strip of lawn, and two more were disgorging their burdens at large. I went into the drawing-room and found it lined with ladies in black. It was explained to me that on account of the rain the party, which comprised the Patrons, Teachers, and Pupils of four Sunday Schools, had "taken the liberty of coming to the house for shelter." Even as they spoke a strange murmuring sound arose from beneath my feet—the hum as of an angry hive. The house, like many old country houses in Ireland, stands upon a basement storey, and I realised that its cavernous recesses were being utilised as a receptacle for the Amalgamated Sunday Schools.

I cannot clearly recall the varied events of that day of nightmare. I remember finding, at one juncture, one of my subordinates stemming the rush of the Sunday Schools up the back-stairs with the kitchen table and an old driving whip. At another, my honoured presence was requested in a cave-like place, once a laundry, wherein a shocking meal was being partaken of. I noticed a teacher with a "cut" of cold salmon, wrapped in newspaper. She ate it with her fingers, quaffing raspberry vinegar the while. Kettles, capacious as the boiler of a man-of-war, steamed on the ancient fireplace; the air reeked of damp children and buns. Later on it cleared, and I led a company of female patrons forth to see the garden. Already the sward of the tennis ground looked like Epsom Downs on the day after the Derby, and an animated game of Hide-and-Seek was in progress among my young rhododendrons. I averted my eyes. In the flower garden the usual amusement of leaping the beds had taken place, with the usual results of chasm-like footprints in the centre of each. The first endurable incident of the day was the discovery that Bat had locked the kitchen garden gate, and that my strollings with the patronesses were perforce ended. But even as I was expressing my regrets (coupled, mentally, with a resolve to raise Mr. Whoolly's wages) there arose from within the walls cries of the most poignant, accompanied by roars comparable only to those of a wounded tiger. On the top of the wall, just above us there shot into view the face of a boy, a face scarlet with exertion, vociferous in lamentation. Quickly following it there appeared down the length of the wall other faces, equally agitated, while from within came a sound as of the heavy beating of carpets. Other sounds came also. Sounds of indignation too explicit to be printable. I blushed for the patronesses. None the less I endorsed every word of it as I realised that my best peach trees were being used as ladders by the Amalgamated Sunday Schools.

I think that was about the last act in the tragedy. Not long afterwards, in a yellow glow of late, repentant sunlight, the four brakes drove—with further cuttings of grassy corners—up to the hall door. The Sunday Schools were condensed into them, each child receiving an orange as it took its seat, and thin cheers arose in my honour. Simultaneously the brakes snowed forth orange peel upon the gravel; the procession swept out of sight, still cheering, still snowing orange peel.

For reasons darkly and inextricably mixed up with the Sunday School excursion, dinner that night was served at nine o'clock, and as I was aware that every servant in the house was in a separate and towering passion, I refrained from inquiry.

Yet, even through the indigestion following on this belated repast, I was upheld by the remembrance of Bat's face, as he glared at me through the bars of the kitchen garden gate, and said:

"Thanks be to God, I'm after breaking six pay-sticks on their backs!"