My Summer in a Garden | Page 5

nor divinity has always been able to
restore.
Wherefore, thanking you for listening to a former letter, which begged
you to consider whether these curious and ingenious papers, that go
winding about like a half-trodden path between the garden and the field,
might not be given in book-form to your million readers, I remain,
yours to command in everything but the writing of an Introduction,

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

BY WAY OF DEDICATION
MY DEAR POLLY,--When a few of these papers had appeared in
"The Courant," I was encouraged to continue them by hearing that they
had at least one reader who read them with the serious mind from
which alone profit is to be expected. It was a maiden lady, who, I am
sure, was no more to blame for her singleness than for her age; and she
looked to these honest sketches of experience for that aid which the
professional agricultural papers could not give in the management of
the little bit of garden which she called her own. She may have been
my only disciple; and I confess that the thought of her yielding a simple
faith to what a gainsaying world may have regarded with levity has
contributed much to give an increased practical turn to my reports of
what I know about gardening. The thought that I had misled a lady,
whose age is not her only singularity, who looked to me for advice
which should be not at all the fanciful product of the Garden of Gull,
would give me great pain. I trust that her autumn is a peaceful one, and
undisturbed by either the humorous or the satirical side of Nature.
You know that this attempt to tell the truth about one of the most
fascinating occupations in the world has not been without its dangers. I
have received anonymous letters. Some of them were murderously
spelled; others were missives in such elegant phrase and dress, that
danger was only to be apprehended in them by one skilled in the
mysteries of medieval poisoning, when death flew on the wings of a
perfume. One lady, whose entreaty that I should pause had something
of command in it, wrote that my strictures on "pusley" had so inflamed
her husband's zeal, that, in her absence in the country, he had rooted up
all her beds of portulaca (a sort of cousin of the fat weed), and utterly
cast it out. It is, however, to be expected, that retributive justice would
visit the innocent as well as the guilty of an offending family. This is
only another proof of the wide sweep of moral forces. I suppose that it
is as necessary in the vegetable world as it is elsewhere to avoid the
appearance of evil.
In offering you the fruit of my garden, which has been gathered from
week to week, without much reference to the progress of the crops or
the drought, I desire to acknowledge an influence which has lent half

the charm to my labor. If I were in a court of justice, or injustice, under
oath, I should not like to say, that, either in the wooing days of spring,
or under the suns of the summer solstice, you had been, either with hoe,
rake, or miniature spade, of the least use in the garden; but your
suggestions have been invaluable, and, whenever used, have been paid
for. Your horticultural inquiries have been of a nature to astonish the
vegetable world, if it listened, and were a constant inspiration to
research. There was almost nothing that you did not wish to know; and
this, added to what I wished to know, made a boundless field for
discovery. What might have become of the garden, if your advice had
been followed, a good Providence only knows; but I never worked
there without a consciousness that you might at any moment come
down the walk, under the grape-arbor, bestowing glances of approval,
that were none the worse for not being critical; exercising a sort of
superintendence that elevated gardening into a fine art; expressing a
wonder that was as complimentary to me as it was to Nature; bringing
an atmosphere which made the garden a region of romance, the soil of
which was set apart for fruits native to climes unseen. It was this bright
presence that filled the garden, as it did the summer, with light, and
now leaves upon it that tender play of color and bloom which is called
among the Alps the after-glow.
NOOK FARM, HARTFORD, October, 1870
C. D. W.

PRELIMINARY
The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest.
Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are
dirty, we are pure. Fondness for the ground