GENERAL CULTURE 193 
successful gardening to know how to unplant 
as it is to know how to plant. 
Patience is the greatest of virtues, and most 
virtuous of handmaidens in all gardening, but 
nowhere so necessary as here. Yet nowhere is 
she so likely to elude the gardener as when 
he stands, anxious and eager and baffled and 
perspiring, before the feeble plant which he is 
bent on transferring to another spot, and which 
is equally bent, in its own inert plant way, on 
staying where it is. Clutching the earth 
frantically, but secretly, it refuses to be budged 
— and the struggle is one surely calculated to 
make or break character. The one hope of the 
toiler is to take time, thereby retaining patience 
— but even then it is a fierce trial more often 
than not. I am saying all this that you may 
be prepared — fully prepared — and hence may 
approach the task warily and with a chance of 
victory, moral as well as physical. For the 
man who has never tried to unplant an estab- 
lished growth, and who attacks the proposi- 
tion unwarned and unsuspecting, needs sym- 
pathy — and has mine. 
Begin at the tip of the roots; that is, begin 
taking off the earth at the circumference of 
the plant’s circle rather than at its center. This 
circumference can be pretty accurately deter- 
