Elizabeth and her German Garden | Page 9

industrious person I
ever saw, and has the great merit of never appearing to take the faintest
interest in what we do in the garden. So I have tried to keep him on, not
knowing what the next one may be like, and when I asked him what he
had to complain of and he replied "Nothing," I could only conclude that

he has a personal objection to me because of my eccentric preference
for plants in groups rather than plants in lines. Perhaps, too, he does not
like the extracts from gardening books I read to him sometimes when
he is planting or sowing something new. Being so helpless myself, I
thought it simpler, instead of explaining, to take the book itself out to
him and let him have wisdom at its very source, administering it in
doses while he worked. I quite recognise that this must be annoying,
and only my anxiety not to lose a whole year through some stupid
mistake has given me the courage to do it. I laugh sometimes behind
the book at his disgusted face, and wish we could be photographed, so
that I may be reminded in twenty years' time, when the garden is a
bower of loveliness and I learned in all its ways, of my first happy
struggles and failures.
All through April he was putting the perennials we had sown in the
autumn into their permanent places, and all through April he went
about with a long piece of string making parallel lines down the borders
of beautiful exactitude and arranging the poor plants like soldiers at a
review. Two long borders were done during my absence one day, and
when I explained that I should like the third to have plants in groups
and not in lines, and that what I wanted was a natural effect with no
bare spaces of earth to be seen, he looked even more gloomily hopeless
than usual; and on my going out later on to see the result, I found he
had planted two long borders down the sides of a straight walk with
little lines of five plants in a row--first five pinks, and next to them five
rockets, and behind the rockets five pinks, and behind the pinks five
rockets, and so on with different plants of every sort and size down to
the end. When I protested, he said he had only carried out my orders
and had known it would not look well; so I gave in, and the remaining
borders were done after the pattern of the first two, and I will have
patience and see how they look this summer, before digging them up
again; for it becomes beginners to be humble.
If I could only dig and plant myself! How much easier, besides being
so fascinating, to make your own holes exactly where you want them
and put in your plants exactly as you choose instead of giving orders
that can only be half understood from the moment you depart from the
lines laid down by that long piece of string! In the first ecstasy of
having a garden all my own, and in my burning impatience to make the

waste places blossom like a rose, I did one warm Sunday in last year's
April during the servants' dinner hour, doubly secure from the gardener
by the day and the dinner, slink out with a spade and a rake and
feverishly dig a little piece of ground and break it up and sow
surreptitious ipomaea, and run back very hot and guilty into the house,
and get into a chair and behind a book and look languid just in time to
save my reputation. And why not? It is not graceful, and it makes one
hot; but it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in
Paradise and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that
sad business of the apple.
What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds,
and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town
acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and burying, and I don't
know what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if
condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all
my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily. I believe I
should always be good if the sun always shone, and could enjoy myself
very well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life in town offer in
the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any one of the calm evenings
I have had this month sitting alone at the foot of the verandah