A GARDEN DIARY 41 
vegetable outcast. Chickweed on the walks, 
nettles in the shrubbery, daisies in the lawn. 
“What does this mean? Who gave you leave 
to be here? Away with you at once, intruders 
that you are!” that is the habitual standpoint. 
Now in a new garden, especially a garden that 
has been won out of the adjacent woodlands, the 
sense of intrusion is felt—ought to be felt—to be 
all the other way. It is the so-called owners who 
are here the trespassers; the unwarrantable in- 
truders ; the squatters of a few months’, at most 
of a few years’, standing. The bracken, the 
honeysuckles, the briers, the birds—these are 
the established proprietors; it is they that can 
show all the documents of original possession. 
We may have to eject them, but at least it 
should be done respectfully ; with such compen- 
sation for disturbance as would be adjudged in 
any properly constituted agrarian court in the 
Universe. 
Only yesterday these reflections were forced 
upon my mind as I found myself, for the third 
time engaged in a life and death struggle with 
the bracken, which has once more invaded our 
newly made flower borders, and threatens to 
gather their whole contents bodily into its capa- 
cious grasp. This is, and always must be, a pecu- 
liarly humiliating sort of struggle to be engaged 
in, and not the less so if one remains tempor- 
arily the victor. In the first place, one is deeply 
