THE SPRING AND FALL OF MAN 
Is Gardening a Mild Form of Insanity? 
Could a Constitutional Amendment Put an 
End to this Annual Corruption of Mankind? 
I is recorded that man was first tempted in a garden, and to 
J- this day the temptations of the garden are the most alluring that 
can be presented to him. Once he eats of the fruit of the tree that 
grows in that garden, his innocence is gone. Thereafter he is eternally 
conniving, figuring, laboring, indulging himself. He takes up with 
queer companions. He spends his money like a profligate. He even 
speaks a strange tongue. Would that a new Milton might arise to 
write this Spring and Fall of Man! 
T HE first evidence of the temptation comes about the beginning 
of February. It is accompanied by seedsmen’s catalogs and price 
lists of pots, watering cans and manures. If these can be kept 
out of his hands, there is a fair chance of his resistance functioning. 
Once he has opened them, however, there is little hope that it will. 
A man on our street has this catalog complex. A nice fellow; trades 
m leather. He isn’t precisely what you would call a bookish person, 
although he has a library. Two whole shelves are given over to seed 
catalogs and you know what a messy appearance catalogs make. His 
wife pleads with him to keep them out in the garage, but he is adamant. 
It \ou ask him why one catalog isn’t enough, he assumes a learned 
air and shows you. “Now Dreer lists only five varieties of aquilegia— 
that’s columbine—but Sutton shows twelve! Or take calceolaria_ 
three varieties in Dreer, sixteen in Perry! Think what I would miss!” 
Or delphiniums. “In Henderson only four. Imagine it! Turn to 
Wells of Merstham, and what do you find? Fifty-five, my boy, fifty- 
five!” ’ 
Are you going to grow all fifty-five in your garden?” you meekly 
ask. 
“Well, ah. . . .” And he dodges the question by leading off into a 
rhapsody on the flowers that Peterson carries. 
Venusburg is tame compared with this catalog temptation. Cards and 
drink and roistering and vermilion Sundays are as child’s play. There 
is no devastation like the complete corruption of a man under the spell 
of gardening catalogs. 
A man of my acquaintance (he has since gone into the Church) once 
paid $48 for a single narcissus bulb. When it came to choosing be¬ 
tween a new hat for his wife and a new dahlia for himself, he got the 
dahlia. Even when he was in debt that man would blithely hand over 
practically his last cent for some miserable packet of seeds that were 
more choice than those I could afford. 
It was strange, too, about his vocabulary—asparagus was its. terminus 
to the east and in the west he would not go beyond witloof; he knew 
nothing farther south than abronia, nothing farther north than zinnia. 
I used to respect his judgment, but my regard began to wane when I 
saw him lose his balance over the pictures in the catalogs. He actually 
believed that onions could grow as big as a hat, carrots like thighs 
and lupins as tall as a steeple. It was fortunate that he caught religion. 
He opened them boldly in front of her. Seventy packets of various 
aster seeds, lourteen of gaillardia, eight of marigold, six of Baby’s 
Breath, twenty of poppies, and a lot of other things. That’s what he 
had been doing in the daytime in France. No wonder he wanted to 
hide his head under the coverlets before ten! 
I asked him what in thunder he was going to do with all those seeds. 
Fou wouldn t believe it, but he talked precisely like some poor half-wit 
m an asylum who thinks he is endowed with omnipotence. He solemnly 
told me that he was going to give up an entire acre of his country place 
to raising those seeds, that he would make it blossom like Paradise! 
d his is a desperate case, but even in this stage there is hope for a 
man’s recovery. He may overwork and become satiated and in his 
satiety revolt against the autocracy of gardening. My friend perhaps 
never will; he has the constitution of an ox. 
T u lempiduon is to speak a strange language. His native 
tongue no longer suffices; he needs must converse in Latin. Does 
he talk about marigolds? No, he calls them calendulas. The 
good old name of candytuft, which satisfied generations, he dubbs 
iberis! Come on him unawares, and you'll hear him murmuring sensu¬ 
ously , the w r ay a small boy rolls a sour ball around in his mouth, such 
succulent word as “salpiglossis”, “scabiosa”, “sphenogyne”. In his 
exalted moments he will show what a great man he is by pronouncing 
“sisyrmchium”, “hemerocallis”, “portenschlogiana”, “escscholtzia”, and 
mesembryanthemum”. 
When he has reached the Latin stage, his family and friends may 
as well give him up. He no longer cares for fine clothes or whist oV 
social progress or making lots of money or becoming a power in the 
land, to which normal people devote themselves; from that time on he’ll 
earn his bread by the sweat of his brow—and be proud of it! He’ll 
count his capital in potatoes. He’ll rejoice in rotted manures and 
blabber about mulch. His dream will be delphiniums towering behind 
madonna lilies and three heights of snapdragons flirting in the sun. 
His ideal will be the columbine that always comes true, and his Paradise 
the garden where there is no winter. 
Mad, utterly mad! 
He makes a sorry figure. His hands are always dusty and his 
trousers bagged at the knees. He writes letters to people in distant 
parts, long communications about geums and how to treat them and 
ralor t0 d ° f01 " aStCr beetkS and Why y ° U Can>t keep phl0X fr0m losin g 
He is easily flattered, too. Tell him that his iris pumila are the 
smallest you’ve ever seen, he’ll swell with pride and talk miles over 
your head on iris. Mention rock plants to him and he’ll talk alpinii 
till you cry for help. Of discussing nymphae he has no end. The last 
state of that man is far worse than the first. He has become even more 
terrible than ruined, he has become a bore. 
T HE second temptation becomes a veritable field day, a saturnalia, 
an orgy, an hilarious bust. Let the maples begin to leaf, and he 
drops his old, steady life, his regular habits, his friends’ of long 
standing—and he disappears. 
Planting, he’ll explain. Nothing of the sort. He’s gone on a seed 
drunk, that s what he’s done. He’s bought far more seeds than he 
could afford, far more than he ever can bring to flower, and he’s sticking 
them into the ground. 
1 here s my friend, S-, the editor, who went to France last year, 
ostensibly on magazine business. The gay lights of Paris had no 
peculiar temptation for him; in fact, his wife assures me that he was 
in bed before ten almost every night. So far as she knew, he escaped 
Paris unscathed. Ah, but how he had deceived her! In December 
there arrived three mysterious parcels from a seedsman in Versailles. 
'"P HIS is a very serious condition, this spring and fall of man. 
X It is an annual insidious devastation of the manhood and woman- 
hood of America. How can it be stopped ? How can the tempta¬ 
tion be removed? 
If we reformers vote a new amendment to the Constitution forbidding 
the sale of seeds, he’ll grow them at home. If we lock him up he’ll 
raise a flower in the crack of his prison walk. 
Frankly, there is no solution for this terrible indulgence. We have 
to bow before the reality of the fact. These men are tempted more 
than they are able. And if, as the cynic says, the only way to get rid 
of a temptation is to yield to it, then the only way for normal people 
to handle these floral drunkards is to become garden slaves themselves. 
Strange, my brothers, but there’s no getting out of that Eden once 
you ve passed inside its gate. 
