A DESCENT INTO PARTICULARS 



HIS chapter will be dull dull and useful as work 

 clothes and garden boots. It would be impossible 

 to write such a chapter early in May, when all is 

 joy and beauty, and the heart is light with the ex- 

 pectation of fulfilling at last the promises of former years. By 

 the middle of September, one has grown calmer and can see 

 that a slight gain has been made in definite knowledge; the 

 purple light of spring has mellowed to russet and tawny 

 shades; though the horizon of the unachieved has moved but 

 a little further off, its rim is still supported by fair hopes. 

 With the summer's successes and failures immediately before 

 the eyes, one can grasp the situation more clearly, and gen- 

 eralize a multitude of apparently slightly related facts. 



Gardening is not the mere growing of a few pretty flowers, 

 nor sending a man out to dig and trim, or a maid to gather the 

 bloom which the chatelaine arranges indoors while she talks 

 volubly of my garden. Gardening is the gateway through 

 which we approach another world than ours, a world gov- 

 erned by inflexible laws, a world made up of units as individ- 

 ual as human beings are; yet many bear close family resem- 

 blances by which we trace their ancestry back to a remote 

 common stock; a world in which some of its members are 

 rapacious and self-seeking, othersso sensitive and delicate that 

 any unfavorable condition destroys them; some so prolific that, 

 if unchecked, they would soon cover the globe; others bearing 

 but a single child at long intervals; still others sterile and to be 

 propagated only by cuttings or division of the root. 



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