26 April: Boreham on the Garden

Green Fingers
At this time of the year, most people are busy with their gardens.[1] Why, one wonders, does the average man, in selecting a home, insist that it must have a garden? And why, having secured his garden, does he devote to it so much time and energy? It is not a matter of money. It may or may not pay a man to cultivate his little plot; he cannot be certain; he keeps no account; he does not dig and weed and plant and perspire as a mere matter of domestic economy. Again, the exercise is probably very good for him; the open air, the manual labour and the smell of the upturned soil are all of them wholesome things; but he does not take his gardening as he takes his meals and his medicine. In nothing else that he does, in fact, is he actuated by such a medley of motives. Jack London would probably write it down as an instance of race memory. Just as the domesticated dog occasionally harks back to the wolfish youth of his breed, so humanity amidst its highest culture and intensest civilisation swings back to the garden in which its existence began.

The average man spends nine-tenths of his waking moments among things so modern that his grandfather would have regarded their very existence as ludicrously impossible. He steps from the plane in which he has made a business trip, commits a few urgent letters to a dictaphone, drives to his home in a streamlined car, and, whilst enjoying his evening meal, listens to distant voices on the radio. He spends practically all his time amidst contrivances of which his forefathers never dreamed. But when he dons an old suit and seizes his spade, he escapes from the isolation of a period and gets into touch with all the ages. Ever since his earliest ancestor tore down the limb of a tree and began to scratch the virgin soil, all his forbears have been gardeners, and, as he potters about with his rake and hoe, the instincts of a thousand generations leap to vigorous life within his blood.

The Garden As A Garrison Incessantly Besieged
Darwin says that life consists of a fight against fate, a fight against foes, and a fight against friends. Darwin's axiom is certainly true of life in the garden. The gardener fights against fate in the form of the weather and seasonal conditions. He fights against foes that invade his little plot from every point of the compass. The sentimentalist speaks ecstatically of a garden as though the only thing one had to do was to put things into it. The very reverse is the case. One's main business is to keep things out of it. A gardener is in a state of perpetual seige. All the vegetation of the world is marching towards his precious beds, and he is valiantly engaged in resisting the invaders. Thistle and dock, sorrel and couch, chickweed and dandelion; they come from everywhere. Then there are the slugs and the snails, the beetles and the caterpillars, the starlings and the blackbirds, the tits and the sparrows; the gardener's enemies are innumerable. They advance upon him from all the surrounding acres; they spring up mysteriously from the ground beneath his feet; they swoop down upon him from the air above. They come from everywhere—and nowhere. Through the four seasons of the year they allow him not a moment's truce.

Then comes the fight with friends. One can have too much of a good thing or, at any rate, he can have too many good things. "Civilised man," says Filson Young, "has ransacked the earth for the embellishment of his garden. The tender flowers that grow on Alpine heights, the stately orchids from the jungles of the Amazon and Borneo, have paid their toll alike." It would be a revelation, even to many a gardener, were he suddenly to learn from what lands his fruit and flowers and vegetables originally came, and to discover how all the continents and islands of the world are represented in his narrow plot. Here they are, the growths of a thousand climes, all clamouring to be admitted to a man's small garden. The seedsman presses them upon him; the magazines almost persuade him to open the gate and admit them every one. But he must steel his heart against the insidious temptation.

Best Literature And Best Life Born In Gardens
In "Les Miserables," Victor Hugo vividly describes the Bishop who, showing such kindness to Jean Valjean, has captivated all our hearts. The good old man spent half his spare time in his study and half in his garden. "It is all the same," he used to say, "it is all gardening, for the mind is a garden." It is of course, perfectly true. Milton lived in many houses in the course of his chequered career but, although blind, he would take no house that could not show a pleasant garden. He loved to sit where, inhaling the fragrance of the thyme and the lavender, the musk and the mignonette, he could hear the bees humming in the beds beside him.

Nor is Milton alone. In "The Task," Cowper tells of the innumerable back-aching tasks in which his garden involved him yet we know how much of his best work was done in the pretty old summer-house down in the corner. "Here," he says, "I write all that I write in Summertime." And, in Winter, he consoled himself with a seat in the greenhouse! The most pleasing description that has been given us of Chaucer, too, is of an elderly man, of gracious bearing, carrying a bunch of red and yellow roses in his hands. "The word garden," he observed, "is ever a music to my soul. I love flowers more than all things else. See how beautiful these roses are!" It is because some vague awareness of all this is at the back of our minds that we insist on a house with a garden, and, having obtained it, are willing to labour there. With a modern poet we feel that:

"A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
Rose plot.
Fring'd pool,
Fern'd grot—
The veriest school
Of peace and yet the fool
Contends that God is not!
Not God! in gardens, when the eve is cool?
Nay, but I have a sign;
'Tis very sure God walks in mine."

And in this we recognise a musical echo of that garden in which our little race began.

[1] This editorial about gardens and change appears in the Hobart Mercury on March 17, 1945.

F W Boreham

Image: Flowers from our garden, GP.