A GARDEN DIARY 41 



vegetable outcast. Chickweed on the walks, 

 nettles in the shrubbery, daisies in the lawn. 

 " What does this mean ? Who gave you leave 

 to be here ? Away with you at once, intruders 

 that you are ! " that is the habitual standpoint. ^ , 

 Now in a new garden, especially a garden that 

 has been won out of the adjacent woodlands, the 

 sense of intrusion is felt ought to be felt to be 

 all the other way. It is the so-called owners who 

 are here the trespassers ; the unwarrantable in- 

 truders ; the squatters of a few months', at most 

 of a few years', standing. The bracken, the 

 honeysuckles, the briers, the birds these are 

 the established proprietors ; it is they that can 

 show all the documents of original possession. 

 We may have to eject them, but at least it 

 should be done respectfully ; with such compen- 

 sation for disturbance as would be adjudged in 

 any properly constituted agrarian court in the 

 Universe. 



Only yesterday these reflections were forced 

 upon my mind as I found myself, for the third 

 time engaged in a life and death struggle with 

 the bracken, which has once more invaded our 

 newly made flower borders, and threatens to 

 gather their whole contents bodily into its capa- 

 cious grasp. This is, and always must be, a pecu- 

 liarly humiliating sort of struggle to be engaged 

 in, and not the less so if one remains tempor- 

 arily the victor. In the first place, one is deeply 



