SOILS 71 



beneficent than others, but gardening is an art ; its 

 primary business 



* To study culture, and with artful toil 

 To meliorate and tame the stubborn soil ; ' 



and its success certain, wherever this cura colendi is 

 undertaken by working heads and hands. I know of 

 only one soil in which the attempt to grow grand 

 Roses would he hopeless — a case of ^ Patience sitting 

 by the Pool of Despondency and angling for impossi- 

 bilities,' with never a nibble — and that is the light 

 barren sand called ^ drift ' and ' blowaway,' of which 

 the clay farmer said derisively that it might be 

 ploughed with a Dorking cock and a carving-knife ! 

 Mud, we are told in Mortimer's ' Husbandry,' makes 

 an extraordinary manure for land that is sandy, but 

 this gritty rubbish demoralises whatever comes. You 

 may expel Nature with a muck-fork on Monday, but 

 on Tuesday morning she will be back, and grinning. 



This exception, however, only proves the rule, that 

 difficulties must yield to cultivation, and to free-trade 

 in soil. This is, no doubt, a matter of Radical 

 Reform {Radix^ genitive radicis^ a root), but the 

 Conservatories have taken a decided lead in it. The 

 growers of stove and greenhouse plants collect their 

 material from all quarters : from India, the fibres of 

 the cocoa-nut ; their sand from Reigate ; their peat 

 from Bagshot ; their leaf-mould, their Sphagnum, 



