58 
House Garden 
THE 
G O 
DS WHO WALK IN GARD 
In the Flowers that He Plants the Gardener Prepares for 
Himself a Sweet Inunortality 
E N S 
RICHARD LeGALLIENNE 
Almighty first planted a garden.” So Bacon began his 
V_T essay on gardens, and so every essay on gardens should begin, 
that we may never forget the divine origin of gardens, and remind 
ourselves that divinity abides in gardens to this day. 
In no place so much as in a garden is the old Roman exclamation 
of reverence so appropriately upon our lips: Numen I nest !—Deity 
is in this Place. And we who love gardens, who have either come 
into possession of an old garden, or, in collaboration with the ele¬ 
ments and the sidereal influences, created a new garden, know how 
real was the Greek and Roman conviction of a spiritual presence 
presiding over all the garden’s beautiful and mysterious opera¬ 
tions. “The Garden God” neither was, nor is, merely a poetical 
fancy, and, though the custom has fallen into desuetude of sym¬ 
bolising him in some marble shape, or in some mossy tree stump 
hung with votive garlands, or ministered to with the first flowers of 
spring, and the first fruits of autumn, it is a custom which we might 
well revive without affectation. Indeed, it is open to conjecture 
whether or not our familiar “scare-crows” are not the humble de¬ 
scendants of that old Priapus whom the Latin poet Tibullus speaks 
of as standing in his orchard “to frighten the birds with his men¬ 
acing sickle”. Why not restore him to his ancient dignity, and bring 
him offerings after the old fashion? 
“ I, traveler,” runs a charming poem of Catullus, “ I, fashioned by 
rustic art out of a dry poplar, watch the little field you see on the 
left, and the cottage and the little garden of the poor owner, and 
repel the thief’s rapacious hands. I am crowned in spring with a 
wreath of many colors; in the heat of summer with reddening corn, 
in autumn with sweet grapes and green shoots of the vine, and with 
the pale green olive.” The modern Manx poet, T. E. Brown, who 
wrote that lovely garden poem known to all of us, means precisely 
the same thing as Catullus, nearly two thousand years ago, when 
he exclaims: “Not God in gardens! when the,sun is cool!” 
Yes, not only Adam it was who “heard the voice of the Lord God 
walking in the garden in the cool of the day”, but all we that “hold 
up Adam’s profession” have known moments of a rare beatitude 
when we have heard it too. A garden without its god is like a body 
without its soul. 
I T would be easy, waiving symbolism, to state the mystery of the 
creation of a garden in terms of modern science, though we should 
rather lose than gain by so doing, for, in spite of all the long and 
learned words, it would still remain a mystery. Garden Gods, and 
such like spiritual agencies are but simpler and more suggestive 
ways of indicating all those solar, perhaps also lunar and stellar, as 
well as terrestrial, activities which work such magic with the seed 
and soil; the rhythmic waves that determine the shapes of flower 
and leaf and branch, the process by which the rose selects from the 
solar ray its red, and the daffodil its yellow, the garden becoming 
an animated prism distributing the colors of the spectrum here and 
there by unerring law, or the chemistry by which the jasmine, and 
“sweet William, with its homely cottage smell”, distill from the 
same earth and air their differing perfumes. 
Then, in addition t6 these processes beyond the gardener’s knowl¬ 
edge, there is a process of which he himself is the agent, to some de¬ 
gree consciously, but mostly perhaps unconsciously, and mysteri¬ 
ously like the rest, the process'by which his own soul enters into his 
garden, and gives it a character which makes it recognisably his 
garden and no one else’s. Unless the gardener has accomplished 
this, the garden is not, properly speaking, his own. Thus the gar¬ 
dens of rich men, who delegate their creation to others, unless, in¬ 
deed, as sometimes happens, they are able to exercise a presiding, 
formative, influence, belong not to them, but to tieir lead garden¬ 
ers. Thus at Fontainebleau, or Versailles, it is not the soul of Louis 
XIV we meet walking in the gardens, but the soul of his gardener, 
Andre Le Notre. 
T hose dead have done wisely who entrusted their memories 
into the keeping of a garden, for there is no form of immortality 
more attractive to posterity, who will ignore or despitefully use your 
statues, but will smell the flowers you planted with gratitude, and 
send a kindly thought back into the time of the unseen and perhaps 
otherwise forgotten gardener. It is pleasing to think that lovers may 
exchange roses from the bush you planted and pruned, and that 
elder folk weary of the way shall rest themselves beneath the leafi¬ 
ness of your vines, year by year prospering into a more friendly ex¬ 
uberance of sun-dappled shade. 
There is a garden I know into which the soul of a beautiful old 
scholar has passed. Strangers who never heard his name possess it 
now, but, if as I hope, they be gentle of spirit, they must at times be 
aware of his presence as they tread its walks on summer mornings 
and inhale the fragrance of his blooms, no sweeter than the thoughts 
which were wont to occupy him in his long silences of peaceful re¬ 
flection, as he sat and watched his growing things. Surely sometimes 
a whiff from a ghostly meerschaum must blend itself with the other 
perfumes, particularly in the neighborhood of the little lotus-pond 
which was all of his making, and over which he would so often bend, 
recalling, maybe, the ancestral poetry of that mystic flower, and 
watching the blue dragon flies shimmering over its ivory chalices, 
or the little green frogs squatting like carvings of Japanese bronze 
on its broad floating leaves. So long as that garden is green, his 
memory will be green also, and the earth keep a familiar place for 
him where he may still come to sit and dream. 
Legend from the earliest times still keeps fresh for us such 
gardens, still radiant and fed with immortal dews. Through 
the magic power of great poets we may yet walk in them as though 
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