SEPTEMBER 5 



personal experience. All that I state is by way of 

 suggestion, not by any means as a law to be carried out 

 at all times and in all places. Several letters of approval 

 I received from working gardeners gave me great pleasure, 

 and one said that he found the book * very bright and 

 holding.' This seems to me a most expressive word. An- 

 other complaint came from a Londoner, representing the 

 opinion of the inhabitants of towns. He was in exact con- 

 trast to the gardener-friend in the suburbs and the country. 

 He complained bitterly of the long lists of plants, the many 

 details about gardening, and asked pitifully if this part 

 might not have been relegated to an appendix, suggesting 

 that this would make the book much more readable. 



One man who professed to be no gardener at all said 

 his leading idea in gardening was to dismiss the under- 

 gardener. This is a very common theory with the master 

 of the house who thinks gardens can be well kept very much 

 under-handed. As a rule the best gardens are those where 

 the master of the house superintends the gardening himself. 



A woman friend who dislikes both garden books and 

 gardening wrote : ' Notices of gardening books might 

 for the sake of the village idiot, for whom everyone writes, 

 have been put in a chapter quite at the end. " Fat," as the 

 actors call it, should come at the beginning of a book to 

 encourage the reader.' Perhaps she was not wrong, for I 

 believe, so far as I can gather from the letters, that the 

 non-gardening people like my book best gardeners after 

 all being, as they are the first to acknowledge, one-idea'd. 

 And yet no, it cannot have been really so, as by far the 

 most genuine and sympathetic letters I have received 

 have been from real garden lovers the sick, the old, the 

 expatriated, all joining in one paean of praise over the 

 soul-satisfying occupation of gardening. 



A few of the London booksellers were rather amusing 

 on the subject, and I have considerable sympathy with 



