WOOD AND GARDEN.*
OF the three great virtues inculcated by the Apostle Paul, two at least are absolutely essential to the gardener. He must dig with Faith. and Hope must hold the watering-pot. In after days he must call on Patience to help him to endure, and Courage to support him under his inevitable disappoint- ments. For gardening is a field for the exercise of all Christian virtue; and if we hold with Bacon that " God Almighty planted a garden," we may be very certain that He intended us to follow His example. It is impossible to read Miss Jekyll's book without admiring the courage and the perseverance which are evident on every page. Miss Jekyll is essentially a working forewoman in her garden. Hers is the head which directs, but hers also are the hands that execute. And herein perhaps lies in part the secret of the unending patience of the real gardening enthusiast. While waiting for his large effects to mature and come into being he (the pronoun here must be taken impersonally) fills his mind and time with a host of minor details, and when the long-delayed time of fruition comes he turns from his busy work elsewhere, and cries " Already ! " For patience is of two kinds. The Oriental patience of folded hands and passive waiting, and the Occidental patience, which consists largely of a change of occupation. Miss Jekyll possesses an enormous share of this active patience. Whilst waiting for the shrubs to grow which are to furnish the bold groups in her "garden-picture," no pains are too tiresome to be spent even on the transient details of hardy annuals. The real kernel and gist of her book is to be found in a little paragraph in the chapter on the flower-border. Here, after giving most minute directions as to the planting of a mixed border, she says :—" The whole thing sounds much more elaborate than it really is; the trained eye sees what is wanted, and the trained hand does it, both by an acquired instinct. It is painting a picture with living plants." The italics in this quotation are ours. The truth is that it is only training which gives the eye the power of prophesying exactly which little seedling plant will fill a given gap in a border. It is not easy to paint a picture from a palette set with nothing but bushy little seedlings, which give scant promise of either the form or the colour to come.
Delightful and instructive as this book is to all garden
• Wood and Garden. By Gertrude Jekyll. London Lougmans and 110s. 6(1.1
lovers, it must not be bought as the only garden text-book. No owner of a garden should be without it, but unless the working gardener be an unusually intelligent man, the book will be of little use to him. Miss Jekyll concerns herself more with broad outlines and with the philosophy of garden- ing than with the minute details of the habits of growth of separate plants. Perhaps the quality among so many admir- able qualities which strikes one most in her writing is her minute power of observation. Take this description of the " colour" of March :—
urn the end of March, or at any time during the month when the wind is in the east or north-east, all increase and develop- ment of vegetation appears to cease. As things are, so they remain. Plants that are in flower retain their bloom, but, as it were, under protest. A kind of sullen dullness pervades all plant life. Sweet-scented shrubs do not give off their fragrance ; even the woodland moss and earth and dead leaves withhold their sweet, nutty scent. The surface of the earth has an arid, infertile look ; a slight haze of an ugly grey takes the colour out of objects in middle distance, and seems to rob the flowers of theirs, or to put them out of harmony with all things around. But a day comes, or, perhaps, a warmer night, when the wind, now breathing gently from the south-west, puts new life into all growing things. A marvellous change is wrought in a few hours. A little warm rain has fallen, and plants, invisible before, and doubtless still underground, spring into glad life."
How accurate is the naming of the peculiar dull colour of early spring as "a slight haze of an ugly grey." The colour of the earth is deep and full as usual, bat the eye cannot pierce the fog of ugliness which the east wind spreads in its train. Again, in the chapter on the "Colours of Flowers," Miss Jekyll proves that the gardener has almost as delicate a sense of the value of colour as the painter. The whole chapter seems to cry for quotation in proof of this, but one paragraph must suffice:— "What a wonderful range of colouring there is in black alone to a trained colour-eye ! There is the dull brown-black of soot, and the velvety brown-black of the bean•flower's blotch ; to my own eye, I have never found anything so entirely black in a natural product as the patch on the lower petals of Iris *erica. ls it not Ruskin who says of Velasquez, that there is more colour in his black than in many another painter's whole palette ? The blotch of the bean-flower appears black at first, till you look at it close in the sunlight, and then you see its rich velvety texture, so nearly like some of the brown-velvet markings on butterflies' wings. And the same kind of rich colour and texture occurs again on some of the tough flat half-round funguses, marked with shaded rings, that grow out of old posts, and that I always enjoy as lessons of lovely colour-harmony of grey and brown and black."
To the true lover of flowers the chapter on " The Worship of False Gods" is particularly grateful. No flower-lover can contemplate with patience the training of plants to some hideous and unnatural colour and shape, because "they think it makes a nice variety at shows." Variety and change are certainly the salt and spice of existence, but for pity's sake let the development of flowers be carried on on natural lines. The account of the treatment of a pansy at a show makes the true gardener "grill in his blood " :—
" Then the poor Pansies have single blooms laid flat on white papers, and are only approved if they will lie quite flat and show an outline of a perfect circle. All that is most beautiful in a Pansy, the wing-like curves, the waved or slightly fluted radia- tions, the scarcely perceptible undulation of surface that dis- plays to perfection the admirable delicacy of velvety texture ; all the little tender tricks and ways that make the Pansy one of the best-loved of garden flowers ; all this is overlooked, and not only passively overlooked, but overtly contemned. The show-pansy judge appears to have no eye, or brain, or heart, but to have in their place a pair of compasses with which to describe a circle ! All idea of garden delight seems to be ex- cluded, as this kind of judging appeals to no recognition of beauty for beauty's sake, but to hard systems of measurement and rigid arrangement and computation that one would think more applicable to astronomy or geometry than to any matter relating to horticulture."
It is impossible to read Miss Jekyll's book without having one's gardening tastes both enlarged and refined. And the book gives a wholesome feeling of despair to the ordinary person who " takes an interest in his garden." That person may be very sure that his garden will never be the least like Mies Jekyll's,—for to own a garden like hers is a profession in itself. This brief notice of a delightful book cannot be more fitly ended than by quoting a sentence applied by Miss Jekyll to the flower-show, but which might with advantage be laid to heart by every owner of a garden :—" I do most strongly urge that beauty of the highest class should be the aim, and not anything of the nature of. fashion or • fancy,'
and that every effort should be made towards the raising rather than the lowering of the standard of taste."
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