The Happy Garden 



gardener develops, so must the garden. A spinster's 

 garden would never satisfy a wife ; an unhappy 

 woman's garden would make a happy woman weep. 

 But it is essential to be happy in a garden, and 

 happiness is so enormously a matter of luck. The 

 means for it may come into your hands when you 

 are not ready for it, or when it comes, you may 

 waste the opportunity by timidity, or through some 

 fond imagined need for sacrifice. Slips and failures 

 which hardly emerge into the region of admitted 

 fact may snatch it away ; but, for the purposes 

 of a garden, an effort must be made to grasp and 

 hold it, or the garden will suffer. 



Perhaps I don't really mean happiness, but 

 rather that condition of strength and courage when 

 all the events of life can be accepted as one ; and 

 it is perfectly clear that sorrow is only the cloud 

 drawn over the sun, or that certain watery joys are 

 like the misty moon, foretelling days of rain. In 

 the garden one is glad of rain. Indeed, one is glad 

 of everything, except, perhaps, caterpillars, slugs, 

 blight, June frosts, weeds, and incompetent seeds- 

 men ; and then even these blackest of all evils 

 serve only to make success all the sweeter when it 

 comes, and the July pride of a garden is a very 

 mighty thing. 



I am proud of my garden, proud with that salt 

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