My Garden in Spring 



powers lie in wait with trouble or failure for him who 

 boasts of continued success, just as surely as the clerk of 

 the weather does with a sudden shower, for those who 

 venture afield without mackintosh or umbrella. 



At no time am I more timid of these avenging fates 

 than when openly rejoicing in some garden success, and 

 more especially so in print. So often has dire calamity, 

 sudden death, or uprooting by storm, followed the publi- 

 cation of a photograph and exultant note describing one 

 of my best specimens, not only with Clematis, and 

 Mezereon, and such "here to-day and gone to-morrow" 

 subjects, but with many steady-going old plants, that I feel 

 an uncanny dread creeping over me, that unless I touch 

 wood in some way to disarm the overlooking witch and 

 blind the Evil Eye, I had better not describe my successes. 

 Now, as I do not wish for a blasted heath, or a landscape 

 like that around the chemical works at Stratford, in place 

 of my crowded old garden, and as I always use a stylo- 

 graph pen made of vulcanite, and won't go back to a 

 wooden penholder, my epistolary method of touching 

 wood must consist of an assumed distrust in the future 

 prosperity of my treasures, and so readers will please help 

 me by understanding that the "so fars" and " apparently 

 establisheds " I must sprinkle among my descriptions of 

 flourishing colonies of healthy plants are amulets designed 

 to protect my darlings from the maw of the mollusc and 

 the blasting of the bacillus. 



So far, then, my turquoise treasure which I call 

 Cantab has thriven, and besides two clumps here, I have 

 been able to send it out a little way into the world, J?y 

 36 



