78 



A BOOK ABOUT ROSES 



in a waggon or a wheelbarrow,^ in accordance with 

 ways and means. Let Horticulture in this matter 

 learn a lesson from her younger sister ; and let the 

 gardener who is whimpering over his rood of un- 

 kindly soil remember what the farmer has done and 

 is doing, the wide world over, amid the forest and 

 the fen. And such pusillanimity is specially comic 

 in the case of a Scotsman or Englishman who is 

 surrounded by a thousand proofs of triumphant 

 cultural skill ; who may walk, from dawn to dusk, 

 among golden corn, where once the antlered monarch 

 spent his life, unscared by hound or arrow ; among 

 flocks and herds, knee-deep in herbage, where fifty 

 years ago the blackcock crowed amid the purple 

 heather, where 



* The coot was swimming in the reedy pond, 

 Beside the water-hen, so soon affrighted ; 

 And where, by whispering sedge, the heron, fond 

 Of sohtude, alighted.' 



* Richard ' — thus I spoke to the indolent and obese 

 proprietor of a small freehold in my neighbourhood, 

 who was complaining to me that his garden, about 

 as highly cultivated as Mariana's at the Moated 

 Grange, was viciously and desperately incapable of 



^ A gardener remarked to a friend of mine, who had won a first 

 prize for Roses at Newark, * I believe, sir, that you have got the only 

 garden in all Lincolnshire which could grow such blooms.' * And 

 I brought it there,' my friend responded, ' in a wheelbarrow.^ 



