A DESCENT INTO PARTICULARS 
. HIS chapter will be dull—dull and useful as work 
m4, clothes and garden boots. It would be impossible 
Na to write such a chapter early in May, when all is 
—"l joy and beauty, and the heart is light with the ex- 
pectation of fulfilling at last the promises of former years. By 
the middle of September, one has grown calmer and can see 
that a slight gain has been made in definite knowledge; the 
purple light of spring has mellowed to russet and tawny 
shades; though the horizon of the unachieved has moved but 
a little further off, its rim is still supported by fair hopes. 
With the summer’s successes and failures immediately before 
the eyes, one can grasp the situation more clearly, and gen- 
eralize a multitude of apparently slightly related facts. 
Gardening is not the mere growing of a few pretty flowers, 
nor sending a man out to dig and trim, or a maid to gather the 
bloom which the chatelaine arranges indoors while she talks 
volubly of my garden. Gardening is the gateway through 
which we approach another world than ours, a world gov- 
erned by inflexible laws, a world made up of units as individ- 
ual as human beings are; yet many bear close family resem- 
blances by which we trace their ancestry back to a remote 
common stock; a world in which some of its members are 
rapacious and self-seeking, others so sensitive and delicate that 
any unfavorable condition destroys them; some so prolific that, 
if unchecked, they would soon cover the globe; others bearing 
but a single child at long intervals; still others sterile and to be 
propagated only by cuttings or division of the root. 
68 
