THE FOUR BLESSINGS 
OF THE GARDEN 
"The garden mystically ... a place of spiritual repose, 
stillness, peace, refreshment, delight." 
TN four ways do the blessings of the garden 
-*■ (and in many another way, no doubt) descend 
upon those who love it. And all four blessings 
follow on active participation in its work. For it 
—John Henry Newman 
is a truth, too vital ever to be forgotten, that the 
joy of the garden is to the gardener, just as the 
song is to the singer and the love to the lover. 
It never fails. 
The First Blessing is the Benediction of a Tired Body 
We tire in many ways, we modem people, but 
the demands and complications of our civiliza¬ 
tion rarely leave us animal tired. We tire in 
exhausted nerves, we tire in worry, we tire in 
bewilderment, we tire in ambition. Being health¬ 
ily tired in body is quite a different matter, and 
being tired in body from gardening is a form of 
exhaustion that carries its own peculiar bless¬ 
ing. It is the weariness that comes from the 
thrust of the spade and the clouting of the clod, 
it is the weariness of patiently handling infini¬ 
tesimal seeds and tiny seedlings, of the entomb¬ 
ment of bulbs and the arduous labor of setting 
out trees and bushes, it is the bending and the 
kneeling and the constant play of hands that at 
nightfall bring a healthy, placid, animal exhaus¬ 
tion and sound sleep as its award. 
The Second Blessing of Gardening Comes 
Whereas the physical work of gardening 
satisfies the animal in us, our participation in 
its beauty gratifies many of our spiritual long¬ 
ings. The up-thrust of the tulip through the icy 
soil—the tulip we have planted—its unfolding 
into gorgeous color above a sea of lower flowers 
our hands have set out—who can escape the 
exultation of it? The unfolding of the iris bud, 
the uncurling of the rose, the great spires of 
delphinium breaking into azure, the dramatic 
opening of the lily—these climaxes of emotion 
the gardener shares, and in them finds at once 
From Having a Share in Creating Beauty 
an uplift of spirit and a satisfaction that only an 
artist can know. Through each of us, to a greater 
or lesser degree, pulsates the creative energy— 
the desire to have a hand in fashioning those 
things that exalt the soul, the desire to take the 
unpromising and inert and make them throb 
with life and beauty. Such an artist is everyone 
who gardens, from the humble housewife labor¬ 
ing over her patch of zinnias to the skilled 
artist in horticulture who brings to abundant 
flowering the difficult gentians and obscure 
primulas. 
The Third Blessing of the Garden is the Blessing of Adventure 
Most of us live and labor in well-defined ruts, 
our lives are so circumscribed by customs and 
responsibilities that rarely can we leap out of 
them. We jogtrot along familiar paths, we tread 
the accustomed round, we do the daily task— 
and if we keep in these narrow ways for long, 
interest flags and ambition is stifled. The same, 
the same, always the samel That way lies decay 
and old age. But youth and adventure are the 
gardener's portion. He is constantly reaching 
out into a new and strange world, constantly 
new planets swim into his ken. He is gambling 
against the odds of the elements, against pest 
and blight. He is plunging into a new cosmos 
every time he plants a seed unknown to him. 
Even more adventuresome are those men and 
women who hybridize new kinds of plants— 
new narcissi, new roses, irises, gladioli. Here's 
a sport ready to hand for anyone with a drop 
of adventure in his blood. The valiant Cortez, 
having struggled through the jungle to his first 
view of the Pacific, which he gazed at, silent, 
from a peak in Darien, knew no wilder surmise 
nor greater satisfaction than the hybridizer of 
the first blossoming of the new flower his crosses 
have made. 
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