CHILDREN'S GARDENS.* Mas. EVELYN CECIL'S book will please children of
a larger growth as much as the children for whom it is written. Indeed, in gardening we are all of us children. There is always something new to be learnt, some fresh experiment to be tried, some old error to be corrected, and even the practised gardener who is not too proud to pick up knowledge wherever he comes across it may be the wiser for the time he spends over these delightful pages. Perhaps the qualities which strike us most in the book are its sincerity and thoroughness. There is no talking down to the children for whom the author writes. They are as important in her eyes as the most learned of her gardening friends, and she takes as much pains to help them to make their gardens beautiful as she did with any garden of her own. Such writing is sure to appeal to children, who quickly see through teaching which is simply patronage.
Generally children's gardens are mere playthings given them in order to get them out of doors, and to satisfy their wish to have something " real " of their own. Having got their gardens, neither children nor parents think much more about them ; and indeed why should they, for are they not generally the most impossible bits that are given to the children,—bits of ground under trees which are full of roots and dank with shade, or tiny pieces six feet square at most, which are often in the most uncomely parts of the garden, and which no grown-up person would accept for a moment ? But Mrs. Cecil takes these trying bits of ground and shows the children that they can become delight- ful and interesting, even if they can never be dreams of beauty. She herself had a garden so early in her life that she cannot remember the time when she had none. So she knows what little children and big children can do, and want to do, and she tells them just how to do it. She wisely begins at the very beginning, and does not expect her child- readers to understand things by instinct, which is the failing of so many would-be teachers. Children are often particu- larly conscientious as to doing things " properly," as they would say. They want to dig like the gardener digs, and plant " just like him," and they take an infinite amount of pains when they think it worth while to take any. Look at the way a little child will put her dolls to bed and get them up to breakfast. There is no slurring over the tedious parts of washing, every string is tied exactly right. It is their way of taking revenge for all the tiresome routine they themselves are made to go through. So when they do care for their gardens they take real pains, and watch and water and hoe and rake until perhaps the flowers are killed by over-kindness.
It is only to the true child-lovers of a garden that Mrs. Cecil speaks. She is herself no amateur of the art, and cannot imagine that any one else will be content merely to scratch the earth and poke a bulb in wrong way up. All her advice is very thorough and very plain, and neither child nor grown-up person is left any excuse for slovenly, ignorant gardening. She would also fill her pupils with a noble ambition, for her opening chapter is all about creepers, which we think per- haps is a little beyond some children's range of ideas ; but, then, we elders gain, for there are many valuable hints to be got from these pages for all sorts of gardening. One of the gardens that Mrs. Cecil had of her own in her childhood, she tells us, was mostly such poor, sandy soil that not only had she to dig hard, but there were loads of stone and sand to carry away, which she did herself in a wheelbarrow, making mounds of these unpromising materials, and planting them all over with sea-thrift and horned poppy, which turned them into things of joy. Her weeding, too, was no mere surface work : she saved her own seed, she pricked out her own seedlings, she took her own cuttings, and succeeded in all she did. Some of us who are not quite so lucky as she was wonder if it was soil, or situation, or some cultivation which we have not ourselves hit upon that makes her say that "it is very simple to make Lilium Candidum thrive." There are people who have tried it year after year, and in many different gardens, and with every attention to its supposed likes and dislikes, and yet almost invariably it has "miffed off " about a month before flowering. Then creepers do not always approve of being trained against iron railings.
• Children's Gardens. By the Hon. Mrs. Evelyn Cecil. London: Macmillan and Co. [6s.]
Clematis treated in this way has been known year after year to yield no other result than a flowerless growth of a foot or two. Iron is burning hot in summer and icy cold in winter, and plants, like our own fingers, do not love extremes.
Perhaps the only thing we would really question in the book is her advice about roses. " The best time," she says, " to plant roses is about Michaelmas, but if the weather is open the planting can take place any time before Christmas."
Surely it is safer to move them after root action has ceased, not while it is going on. But the season for planting may differ in different parts of England. Mrs. Cecil also speaks
of " dwarfs" as those roses "growing on their own roots from the ground." Alas ! too many of us know from sad experi- ence how very few " dwarfs," even those that profess to grow on their own roots, really do so. It is the most difficult thing, in our experience, to make roses flourish on their own roots. There is an absence of robustness about them that in the end tells. But these little differences of opinion are part of the interest of gardening, and certainly do not affect children at all. Her advice, too, on cuttings and bud- ding roses is admirable. We have never seen a more lucid description of budding a rose. No one with any intelligence can fail after reading it at least to know the proper way of doing it.
We suspect that good budders are born, not made, but even the best must have practice to become perfect. And certainly the excellent diagrams given will help to make clever little fingers very capable.
But Mrs. Cecil is not content to speak of gardening alone. Her chapter on " Winter " work has a large part of it devoted to elementary teaching on botany, which is shorn in her sym- pathetic hands of all its terrors. Like the cleverest of Kinder- garten teachers, she makes the children learn difficult matters under the guise of play. Mrs. Cecil's own estimate of her instruction is modest in the extreme. But her " crumbs of knowledge " and " scraps of information " are so well set out and so clearly explained that a child will gain more real knowledge of the subject from them than from many more ambitious manuals. Altogether, the book is full of delightful instruction charmingly given. Even the kitchen-garden is not left out, and children are encouraged to grow their own fruit and dig their own potatoes. One amusing story she tells that must long remain a tradition in her own family :-
" When I was a very small child," she says, " I sowed the name of one of my sisters in mustard and cress as a surprise for her birthday. The seeds were put in about ten days before, and the salad was nice and green by the required day in September, when all the birthday party were invited to my garden to see it; but alas! it was discovered that I had misspelt the word, and there was my fault only too plainly visible in green lines en the brown earth which no sponge or indiarubber could efface. There was nothing for it but to eat the offending letter first !"
And no doubt it tasted excellent.
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