20 A GARDEN DIARY 
SEPTEMBER II, 1899 
ERE on the bench beside me is a basket- 
ful of plants, not garden ones by any 
means, but weeds, mere ugly weeds, detested, 
and detestable, which, having pulled up, I was 
about to throw away. And, sitting down for a 
moment before doing so, I chanced to turn over 
two or three of them in idle mood, and in so 
doing have been captured unawares, as I have 
often been before, by the wonder, the mystery, 
of those ordinary processes of nature, which we 
all of us know so remarkably well, and which 
we certainly as a rule take such uncommonly 
little heed of. 
Matthew Arnold has somewhere counselled us 
to let our minds dwell upon that great and 
inexhaustible word “ Life,” till we learn to enter 
into its meaning. It was a critic’s and a poet’s 
counsel, but it might still more appropriately 
have been a naturalist’s or a botanist’s. Life 
is indeed one of the unescapable mysteries, a 
mystery that expands and grows as we consider 
