GARDENERS 223 



gardener at work and despising him in his heart. 

 He is the slave of a brainless routine. When there 

 are things of real importance to be done, he is clipping 

 edges because it is Thursday, or sweeping up leaves 

 because it is Saturday. He forgets that it is also 

 autumn and that grand new schemes are to be exe- 

 cuted for the winter. 



Gardeners have a great power of passive rebellion. 

 They take your orders and seem to be carrying them 

 out, and yet nothing comes of it. You may have a 

 fanatical dislike of bedding plants, and think that 

 you have extirpated them, yet all the while there 

 are Geraniums and Calceolarias and even Echeverias 

 lurking through the winter in some secret frame; and 

 in due season they will appear in the garden again, 

 and the gardener will say that he had to fill up with 

 something. If you are a ruthless man, perhaps you 

 will have them pulled up. But you will find that for 

 some reason nothing else will grow where the gar- 

 dener thinks they ought to be. It is a place ordained 

 by nature for bedding plants; year after year they 

 will come there unless you turf it up; and if you do 

 that they will break out somewhere else. There is 

 also a curious difficulty about the planting of bulbs 

 in the grass. You tell your gardener that he is to 

 arrange them in a natural disorder, you may even 

 make a plan for him with dots for the bulbs on a piece 

 of paper, and he will seem to listen and observe, and 

 will say that he understands. But in the spring the 

 bulbs will come up in orderly rows, or, worse still, in 



