LORD ROSEBERY ON GARDENING.
T,ORD ROSEBERY'S speech at Cramond on Saturday last must have given the local magnates who heard it a feeling akin to despair. Every one nowadays may be called on to make a speech, for though toasts at wedding breakfasts have happily disappeared, the opportunities for oratory have greatly multiplied in other ways. Lord Rosebery's theories about gardening are an excellent example of the supply which this growing demand has created. If, as he was reminded that be bad once said, "it is one of the ironies of the world in which we live that public men are called upon to perform every kind of duty, even those for which they are least qualified," the world may well be thankful that he is one of its public men. Nobody talks quite so gracefully about any subject that presents itself ; no one contrives to import more of happily expressed common-sense into the generalities which 8.re all that the occasion calls for, or indeed permits. We are tempted as we read to wish that Ministers of State, who are sometimes compelled by our system of distributing official positions to intervene in a Parliamentary debate with little more knowledge of the subject than Lord Rosebery has of gardening, could always acquit themselves with the same good temper and good sense. Unfortunately impromptus on great public questions have larger capacities of mischief attaching to them.
Lord Rosebery began by touching upon the amateur in gardening, the man with whom it is a taste in the first instance, and only a pursuit in later life. He regrets that be did not make the taste his own at the opening of his career. Had he done so he would have been in possession of an amusement which, when others "leave us for want of strength and aptitude, remains an increasing enjoyment and pleasure." Lord Rosebery has no real cause for self-reproach on this score. For one thing, it is not well to adopt in youth the lowered standards of old age. It is quite true that gardening is one of the enjoy- ments "which one appreciates more and more with the advance of years."' Much the same thing may be said of the game of bowls ; but a young man who at twenty chose to play bowls rather than cricket or tennis on the ground that at sixty he will be compelled to give up the more active games would justly be held to be taking too much thought for that distant morrow. Bowls and gardening have indeed been recommended by eminent physicians on the same ground. They both exercise the abdominal muscles. But the abdominal muscles are scarcely a fit subject for the con- sideration of a healthy man at the moment when there lie before him "the vast plains of life, with their various paths leading to good or evil." Unless he takes to gardening as a profession, be had better delay the serious pursuit of it until the time for which it is so well suited comes into view. For —and this is the second reason why Lord Rosebery need not regret his wasted past—gardening is a pleasure which may be taken up at any time. As the more dignified muscles grow weak the abdominal muscles tend to become more prominent, and then is the time to give them the loving attention they need. Only the most elementary acquaintance with gardening is needed to enable a man to pull up a weed, and by the time that he is painfully reminded that man was meant to walk. erect there will be the lawn pleading to be rolled and the miler ensuring him a blissful change of attitude. This, no doubt, is the purely physical side of gardening. But then, it is on the physical side that the pursuit appeals specially to old age. There is no particular reason why the mind should not occupy itself with a hundred other things just as profit- ably as with the habits of plants. It is in the region of health and the means of maintaining it that the superiority of gardening lies, and for that purpose is still within Lord Rosebery's reach. Nor need he despair even if his ambition soars above this humble level. He is credited with having, if the Budget does not rob him of it, a fair command of money, and money is at least as useful in gardening as in other things. Nurserymen's catalogues may be as arid a form of printed matter as Lord Rosebery thinks them, but they can also in their results be a very costly form. They are the more likely, indeed, to be so in his case, because when be takes to gardening, and finds himself forced to read them in order not to be a mere puppet in the hands of his head-gardener, the only relief will be to give large orders for the next planting season. We wish that we could share Lord Rosebery's universal admiration for gardening literature outside catalogues. It is quite true that there is no literature more delightful when at its best, but its best is not very often forthcoming. Lancashire and Gloucestershire, Yorkshire and Sussex, have given us rare examples of what can be done in this way, but the gifts of their writers have not always been banded on to their contemporaries or their successors. The rule for the production of gardening-books seems largely to be: Read what has been said well about gardening, and say it over again, less well but with coloured illustrations. It is apparently assumed that all shortcomings in the letterpress will be forgiven if there are enough reds and blues on the opposite pages.
Possibly national pride had a share in Lord Rosebery's praise of gardeners by profession, for a very large proportion of those who practise it successfully happen to be Scotsinen. But he claims no more than its due for the occupation when be says that those who follow it should be "physically, intellectually, and morally the best of our rural population." It may be too much to say that they are "always" in the open air—Lord Rosebery forgets the part that "glass" plays in a gardener's life—but they can be there a great deal. The kind of knowledge that gardening demands can only be gained by very close attention to the operations of Nature, and this is itself an education of a high order. Every gardener may hope that he will one day be fortunate enough to make some seemingly trifling discovery which may help to establish or modify the theories of Darwin or Weisma.nu.. There can be few better mental disciplines than to watch the behaviour of plants in different conditions and under different treatments. So far, therefore, the multiplica- tion of gardens which has been so conspicuous in recent years is a welcome change. As more and more people live in the neighbourhood of great cities rather than in them, the demand for gardeners grows, and we may fairly hope that their qualifications rise in proportion. On the other hand, there is reason to fear that the gain in this direction is balanced by the loss in another. Villa gardens, using the term in a very wide and general sense, grow and multiply among us, but can the same thing be said of cottage gardens We greatly fear that they tend to become fewer. The village cottage is being gradually displaced in favour of the cottage within a tram ride of London or other great cities, and as building space becomes more valuable the area of the suburban cottage is more and more contracted. Yet it is to these rather than to the country cottage that Lord Rosebery's praises apply. An agricultural labourer may and does find his garden valuable. It may keep his table supplied with vegetables for a large part of the year, and if his wife knows how to cook them they are a very agreeable as well as a very wholesome addition to his dietary. But for the Workman employed in a town the cottage garden is a far more important element in his life.. The agricultural labourer is always employed in work closely analogous to gardening, and left to himself he is not likely to spend his evening in simply repeating the labour of the day. That is not a reason for carelessness on the part of landlords or employers in the
country as regards the provision of garden space to every cottage they build. The produce of the ground so appropriated is an appreciable addition to the health and comfort of the inmates. But in the case of the suburban cottage another consideration comes in. To the man employed all day in a mill or a factory a garden is a most valuable change of occupation and interest. From the early morning he has been working in hot rooms, amid the incessant whirl of machinery or thud of hammers, and with his hands perhaps engaged in perpetually repeating the same motions. There can be no greater relief than to put this man to the constantly varying occupations of a garden. So true is this that even where the garden consisted of nothing more extensive than a few pots, or an apology for a frame, the workmen of certain towns have before now become famous for their success in the cultivation of special kinds of flowers. If gardens were more regularly attached to the cottages that spring up so rapidly, and, we are forced to add, so carelessly, on every vacant piece of land near a town, this reputation might be recovered and increased with solid advantage to the community.
We are faced, unfortunately, at this point by a practical difficulty. The value of the land on which a cottage stands is an important element in the rent. If the landlord has to add to the area he buys in order to provide a garden, that additional cost will find its counterpart in the weekly rent. If work- men were always wise, they would show by their preference for cottages which have gardens how much they appreciate the provision of occupation and interest for their summer evenings. As they have not this monopoly of intelligence, they have to be educated into thinking the possession of a garden worth an extra shilling or two on the rent, and this is a process sur- rounded with many difficulties. No one road towards making the owners of this kind of property provide a garden for every cottage they build can be suggested; but there are various methods by which we may hope to come a little nearer to our ideal. One is that rich men should more often spend their money in this way. We are not asking them to give it as charity. On the contrary, that they should ask a reasonable rent should be an invariable element in the transaction. But in these days of declining investments a rich man might well be content with a percentage of profit which he would have despised a generation back, while some of them might be willing, and even glad, to forgo a larger return on the capital sunk in order to promote a really valuable social reform. The same rule might well be applied to public bodies. The rating authority may fairly be asked to forgo something for the public benefit. Local authorities are not forbidden to make the good of a large class in the community one of their motives in managing their affairs. Some provision for exempting gardens attached to cottages from the rates would seem worthy of consideration. In districts where the ground available for cottages is already filled up with them. the expedient of allotments must be more resorted to. An allotment is a very inferior thing to a cottage garden, but an inadequate substitute may still be worth having. It at least keeps the gardening tradition alive in circumstances in which without this aid it would become extinct.
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