Annuals 



region in which rich, and poor, and good, and bad, 

 and vice, and virtue, are all one, the region in 

 which the poets dwell, a region, not as is gener- 

 ally supposed, high above the world of actual 

 things, and commerce, and stocks, and shares, and 

 food, and household requisites, and law, and police, 

 and crime, and companies, and Harrod's Stores, 

 and music-halls and kinematographs, and slums, 

 but, as I have learned in the happiness of my 

 garden, in it, pervading it all. It is not a refuge 

 from the storm and stress of life : it is the region 

 nearest life, the depths on the surface of which 

 is everything, from Buckingham Palace to the 

 vilest slums in Glasgow. 



Which brings me back to annuals. I fancy they 

 like being treated as herbaceous plants. It is a 

 sort of promotion. At any rate, they live up to 

 it nobly. ... I have known a pansy so obsti- 

 nately emulous that, having fallen under the 

 shadow of a mauve cranesbill, he grew a stalk 

 two feet long, and poked his head up out of the 

 thick green growth. He had outgrown his strength, 

 poor thing, and did not live long, but at least he 

 had asserted himself. 



I am not certain whether it is bookishly correct 

 to end a border with an apple tree, as mine does : 

 an apple tree that bears the finest fruit of any in 



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