40 A GARDEN DIARY 
d 
“flesh is grass”; that man groweth up in the 
spring time, and is cut down in the autumn— 
such innocent and obvious sprouts of morality as 
these may certainly be gathered in a good many 
of its neglected corners. With regard to all the 
larger and more vital growths of philosophy, 
I am afraid that they require to be success- 
fully sought for upon wider and more strenuous 
battlefields. 
Lessons of course may be gathered in a garden, 
as in most other places. For the owner, the most 
wholesome of these is perhaps that he never 
really is its owner at all. His garden possesses 
him—many of us know only too well what it is 
to be possessed by a garden—but he never, in 
any true sense of the word, possesses it. He 
remains one of its appanages, like its rakes or 
its watering-pots ; a trifle more permanent, per- 
haps, than an annual, but with no claim assuredly 
to call himself a perennial. 
In no garden is this fact more startlingly the 
case than in those that we have, as we fatuously 
call it, ““made” ourselves. For the owners of 
such a garden, the precariousness of their tenure 
is the first thing, I think, that is forced upon their 
attention. And the reason is simple. In older 
ones, the reign of the primitive has, to a greater 
or less extent, ceased, and the reign of the arti- 
ficial has become the rule. The Wild still flourishes 
in them, but it has become a mere pariah, a 
