OF GARDENERS 
EDITORIAL 
W E must acknowledge in the begin¬ 
ning that gardening is not for 
everyone. Although with each recurring spring there comes to 
all the desire to touch and handle and be one with the soil, not to 
all is vouchsafed the patience that watches the plant struggle up to 
fruition. In the heart of everyone, it would seem, the seed of 
garden love has been planted. We can never cease to love a 
garden, albeit we may have never loved gardening. The two 
differ, and have to do with different spheres. The love of a gar¬ 
den is akin to the appreciation of anything lovely — we may look 
upon a flower with the same rapture that we see a picture or listen 
to music. The love of gardening, on the other hand, is an ex¬ 
pression of the love of life. The two may be co-ordinated, but 
the presence of the one does not necessarily connote the presence 
of the other, for the love of a garden is a condition of being, sired 
by heritage and reared by education; the love of gardening, a con¬ 
stant state of becoming that knows no parent nor instruction. 
Because of this difference, the genus gardener is a type that 
runs through all sorts and conditions of men — a golden thread 
wound in and out the varied woof of humankind. 
Could one visualize all the gardeners of the world foregathered, 
one would see such a motley as had never before been assembled: 
bankers and laborers, unlettered men and scholars, sinners and 
saints. Charney, the prisoner of Fenestrella, whose captivity was 
lightened by la poveva picciola, would stand beside the poor, little 
man of Assisi, who so loved flowers that he preached to them. 
Walpole would be there, and I J ope and Chaucer. Burns would 
come, and Bacon, and with them Browning, who sang “the soft, 
meandering Spanish name” of roses. There would be Nero and 
Sir Henry Wotton, Addison and Montesquieu, the Jesuit Attiret 
and the German Prince Piickler, Pere Huet and Dufresny, Canon 
Hole and Benedetto Croce and Richard Jeffries. And one would 
almost dare to think that Another Presence would attend (“and 
they all rise up as He passes by!”)—He of whom it is said that 
He planted a garden eastward. 
By many indications can you tell the gardener. He has a mel¬ 
lowness, an urbanity. He is a cosmopolite, though of cities 
other than those in which men dwell, and his acquaintance is with 
folk of an order different from mankind. He is usually a meek 
man, for his comrade in work is the worm that helps him plow the 
soil; he is usually an industrious man, for he labors in season and 
out of season with things that know no respite day or night. 
There are triumphs in his life: he can look upon a perfect flower. 
There are also defeats and sorrows, for wind and winter and 
drought and pest are leagued against him. 
In whatever walk of life you find him, the gardener will prove a 
man in whom is active the vital forces of poetry. He is a poet, 
making rhythms of color and growth, planting for succession of 
bloom, just as a poet sings the refrains of his triolets. 
He is, moreover, a radical, as have been all great poets. By 
intricate and secretive ways he strives to turn aside from the 
paths of the accepted varieties and eternally is he seeking out the 
new types that will set the old at naught, ever finding new methods 
of plant culture that will revolutionize the old. One can never 
say that his life is unromantic or commonplace, for each new bud 
may prove a new kind, and these inexplicable vagaries of Nature 
lead him into new worlds and set his feet upon paths that no man 
has ever trod. 
Revolutionary, fickle, undependable Nature! Only a fool or a 
blind man would say that you obey your own laws or ever do a 
thing twice in the same fashion. Every rose is a new creation, 
unlike those that have gone before or will come after. Every 
plant is the beginning of a new history. Little wonder that he 
who works with you as guide leads a romantic life! 
The good gardener may not be a profound philosopher, but one 
will have to travel a great distance before he finds a body of 
men and women who are more innately philosophic than garden¬ 
ers. The reasons are obvious: they have ample time to think, 
and they consequently gather the fruits of solitude; they work 
with fundamental verities, such as the dust from which we are 
sprung. Moreover, being initiated into a life and a companion¬ 
ship different from that of the mercantile world, or even the 
world of books, they are led far afield by problems of which the 
average man knows little. The very fact that they can create 
new varieties leads them to speculate on the reasons why they can. 
And the deeper they delve into the universe of plant life, the 
more complex grow the problems. Perhaps it is awe that makes 
the gardener a silent man, even as that silence makes him a 
philosopher. 
To be a questioner in the garden is no far cry from being a be¬ 
liever, and taken, man for man, there is more acute perception of 
the Divine in Nature among gardeners than in many another 
walk; there is more of that rich, unresting life which characterizes 
those to whom mystic sight and speech are as a native tongue. 
The Light does not shine uncomprehended in darkness when it 
shines in a garden. For it would seem that gardeners know the 
wisdom of Plato’s observation, that "the true order of going is to 
use the beauties of Earth as steps along which one mounts up¬ 
wards for the sake of that other Beauty.” 
Nature reveals little of her secret to those who only look and 
listen with the outward ear and eye, and the gardener, whom she 
takes into her confidence, soon learns that seeing and hearing in 
that world lie in a peculiar attitude of his whole personality, a 
self-forgetting attentiveness, a profound concentration, a self¬ 
merging which creates a real communion between the seer and the 
seen. Only under such conditions do the things of his world 
surrender their secrets, only under such does he enter into their 
lives. The true gardener, then, is a mystic. What the mystic 
calls the Real he finds in his garden where he perceives the 
Divine in Nature, where heart speaks to heart and in a tongue 
not understanded of men. 
Such is some of the true inwardness of those men and women 
we see grubbing in the dirt of their gardens these days. Blind 
are we if we perceive not the gold in the dirt upon their hands, 
if in their taciturn methods we read not the speech of other worlds, 
if in their naive words and simple pleasures we see not the light 
of mighty discovery and ineffable joy. Because the things of 
their lives are reflections of eternal things, gardening transcends 
wavering popularity. It is the expression of an ageless instinct. 
The gardener is at once a survival more ancient than the Pyra¬ 
mids and a creation as fresh as to-morrow’s light. 
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