40 A GARDEN DIARY 



" flesh is grass " ; that man groweth up in the 

 spring time, and is cut down in the autumn 

 such innocent and obvious sprouts of morality as 

 these may certainly be gathered in a good many 

 of its neglected corners. With regard to all the 

 larger and more vital growths of philosophy, 

 I am afraid that they require to be success- 

 fully sought for upon wider and more strenuous 

 battlefields. 



Lessons of course may be gathered in a garden, 

 as in most other places. For the owner, the most 

 wholesome of these is perhaps that he never 

 really is its owner at all. His garden possesses 

 him many of us know only too well what it is 

 to be possessed by a garden but he never, in 

 any true sense of the word, possesses it. He 

 remains one of its appanages, like its rakes or 

 its watering-pots ; a trifle more permanent, per- 

 haps, than an annual, but with no claim assuredly 

 to call himself a perennial. 



In no garden is this fact more startlingly the 

 case than in those that we have, as we fatuously 

 call it, " made " ourselves. For the owners of 

 such a garden, the precariousness of their tenure 

 is the first thing, I think, that is forced upon their 

 attention. And the reason is simple. In older 

 ones, the reign of the primitive has, to a greater 

 or less extent, ceased, and the reign of the arti- 

 ficial has become the rule. The Wild still flourishes 

 in them, but it has become a mere pariah, a 



