SEPTEMBER 5 



gestion, not by any means as a law to be carried ont at 

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

 received from working gardeners gave me great pleasure, 

 and one said that lie 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 

 contrast to the gardener -friend in the suburbs and in 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 underhanded. 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 begin- 

 ning 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 sympa- 

 thetic letters I have received have been from real garden 

 lovers — the sick, the old, the expatriated, all joining in 

 one pffian of praise over the soul -satisfying occupation 

 of gardening. 



