March, 1918 
19 
THE SOUL of A GARDEN 
Wherein a Poet Tells of the Humbling Touch 
of Earth , the Romance of Flowers and the Joy of 
Smoking Calabash Pipes That lie Grows Ilimsell 
RICHARD Le GALLIENNE 
W E take gardens, as we take all our 
mercies nowadays, too lightly. 
Recently a friend of mine, speaking of his 
garden, said to me that it made him “very 
humble.” It was one of those remarks for 
which one grows increasingly grateful; for hu¬ 
mility, the only attitude by which it is possi¬ 
ble to know anything worth knowing, has be¬ 
come an almost extinct species of human feel¬ 
ing; and I am far from sure that I can safely 
leave my friend’s remarks entirely without 
commentary. So few feel like him, that for 
many, I fear, it will have no meaning. Of 
course, he meant that his garden continually 
brought before him, so impressively, with such 
fresh wonder, the miracle and the mystery of 
the vital, the cosmic process. 
No one yet knows how or why a flower 
grows. We have discovered radium, and em¬ 
ployed delicate and terrible natural 
forces to fearful ends; but we are as 
far from knowing that as ever. Still, 
as the present writer once had the 
honor of saying: “A grass-seed and a 
thimbleful of soil set all the sciences 
at nought.” Still Tennyson’s “flower 
in the crannied wall” baffles all the 
pundits. 
Unless you feel like that about your 
garden, you might as well have no 
garden. Indeed, you have no garden. 
You may have a dozen gardeners— 
but that is another matter. As a gen¬ 
eral rule, one may say: the more gar¬ 
deners, the less garden. For the real 
garden is born, and very little made. 
That is why public gardens give so 
little pleasure. The very term “pub¬ 
lic garden” is an anomaly. No real 
garden can be “public,” for a real gar¬ 
den is a personal matter. Horticul¬ 
tural skill, however highly paid, can¬ 
not make it. It is, so to say, a collab¬ 
oration between one individual’s love 
of his little plot of ground, and the 
mystic LTniverse. Public gardens and, 
for the most part, those pretentious 
horticultural displays called their gar¬ 
dens by the rich belong to the same 
category. In the latter case, one is 
occasionally conscious of some presid¬ 
ing and directing spirit of love, that 
perhaps of some woman of the house, 
animating certain nooks and corners; 
but, as a rule, all such gardens very 
much resemble public libraries, or the 
libraries of the nouveaux riches. The 
mathematically disposed beds and 
squares and circles, and stars and 
crescents of transplanted (not planted) 
sheets of color, give one no sense of 
real flowers or of a real garden, any 
more than the rich man’s “sets” of 
books give us the sense of a library. 
Flowers and books alike are there for show. 
No individual love or enthusiasm has entered 
into their selection or arrangement. They are 
as impersonally and unsympathetically brill¬ 
iant as a display of diamonds in a Fifth Ave¬ 
nue jeweler’s window, and we look on them 
with the same indifference. Artificial flowers 
would serve the purpose just as well; and, in 
fact, bv the loveless usage of them they have 
become nothing else. They are artificial flow¬ 
ers, as the garden in which they blaze and sim¬ 
ply tarnish is not a garden but a flower show. 
S UCH gardens always follow the fashion in 
flowers, as their owners follow the fashion 
in clothes. Flowers have their periodical 
vogue, like other things, and it is for the 
head-gardener to keep his eyes on the horti¬ 
cultural fashions, and see that certain “smart” 
flowers of the season are duly in evidence. 
The same applies to the architectural, or 
other incidental features of a garden: statuary, 
sun-dials, pergolas and so forth. For the most 
part these garden features, in themselves and 
in the right setting charming, are capriciously 
introduced without any understanding of their 
real significance or value; just as traditional 
ornament, in itself and in its own place beauti¬ 
ful, is incongruously plastered on to modem 
buildings, entirely foreign and even antagonis¬ 
tic to its original sentiment. Not one person in 
a thousand really cares about a sun-dial, but a 
few people who did set the fashion, and now 
one can buy them in any department store. 
Thus a romantic object, filled with the hush 
and reverie of vanished time, has become peril¬ 
ously vulgarized, and the pleasure one took in 
one’s own moss-grown and lichened dial—by 
which, in addition to its telling the 
time in one’s own garden, one was able 
to calculate the time at Aleppo or 
Damascus—is considerably saddened. 
When someone introduces the fash¬ 
ion of a garden-god, with a shrine in 
some leafy comer of the garden, after 
the manner of the Greeks and Ro¬ 
mans, the same thing will happen, and 
we shall be able to buy statues of 
Vertumnus and Priapus at bargain 
prices just as we can buy sun-dials or 
macaws. 
Y ET that old personifying pagan 
habit never came nearer to the 
reality of human feeling than in the 
invention of that homely rural god. 
who in return for offerings of early 
violets and the first fruits of the year 
was supposed to guard the orchard 
against marauding birds and destruc¬ 
tive insects, and generally watch over 
all green and growing things. No one 
has ever really loved a garden without 
having had at times the sense of a di¬ 
vine presence dwelling there, moving 
softly behind curtains of leaves, some 
busy, watchful kindness secretly at 
work with blade and blossom and the 
mounting sap, and falling suddenly 
silent at our first foot-fall, like a shy 
bird. A fancy, of course—and yet 
would there be anything more remark¬ 
able in the fact of certain natural 
processes being presided over by espe¬ 
cially appointed spiritual guardians, 
than there is wonder in the processes 
themselves? Though there be no in¬ 
dividual accessible divinity behind the 
blossoming of an apple orchard, the 
process itself is divine, and just as 
mysterious as if there were. 
Numen inest, said the old Roman, 
with proper reverence and a profound 
