"Discontent in a Garden" 
We have always considered gardeners, as a class, genial if anx- 
ious. Now suddenly appears, in the Atlantic Monthly for June, a 
searing commentary called "Discontent in a Garden." 
The gentleman author, for his words and manner betoken a mascu- 
line superiority of the old school, claims that he has lived many years 
and finds amateur gardeners utterly lacking in faith and charity 
but largely endowed with hope. We admit that hope must spring 
eternal but we deny that all are sordid and suspicious, crabbed and 
dissatisfied. 
Says this gentleman assertively, "Intelligence, however, is not a 
quality to be looked for a priori in a gardener." He then goes on to 
complain that "Often have I welcomed a roomful of visitors and 
launched them into spirit-warming talk, only to have them, at some 
unguarded allusion, make for the open, demanding the titles of the 
lady-roses at the windows and pressing on into the private life of the 
spinach and the cucumber — conversation that leaves me out in the 
cold, for not even appendicitis can produce the clacking congeniality 
of comparing flower beds." Might it be that our critic's idea of 
" spirit- warming talk" drives even non-gardeners into the open? 
Could it be that even the private affairs of spinach are interesting in 
comparison? He speaks of a lust for fertilizers. Surely the topic 
is not less delicate than a discussion of appendicitis. 
"I have noted with pain," says he, "the subtle disintegration of 
mind and character which awaits those addicted to horticulture — 
the sanest become superstitious." Since when has a mild faith in the 
new moon's power or the incoming of spring been a sign of mental and 
moral degeneracy? A poetic fancy and superstition frequently go 
hand in hand, and gardeners must be fanciful to cope with hard 
fact. 
His last and most baleful accusation is this: "A love of gardening 
is the root of still another evil: misanthropy. Gardeners become 
suspicious of even their nearest and dearest; they bring monstrous 
accusations, charging them with rolling upon the asparagus bed, with 
blighting the strawberry blossoms, with devouring a ten-foot row of 
young onions." Emphatically, for our craft and for our kind, we 
deny it. Undoubtedly, disagreeable people are sometimes interested 
in gardens (there is one who isn't) and apparently it is in the midst 
of these our critic fives. Probably he has a hobby which leaves un- 
touched his family and friends. Surely he resents an interest else- 
where. 
