CHILDREN'S GARDENS.
TO plant a garden is a natural impulse with children. It is the form which their first impulse takes to do their duty on earth, and an unconscious rehearsal of their future work as ministers and interpreters of Nature. It is almost the first work which children ever do, and they take to it voluntarily, and with enthusiasm, and pursue it with infinite variety and exquisite satisfaction. Almost every one when a child has made a garden, and we need not cite the boyhood of Jean Jacques Rousseau, or the irrigation works made by his toy canal, to show that whatever the pursuits of the man, the child is a landscape gardener born, and a serious propagator of fruits and ferns and flowers.
English children are florists first, and add the kitchen garden later. But in their earliest years these little Britons have the national instinct for annexation, or at least for securing rights to those improvements which they make in the soil they cultivate. It may be that the same thought crosses the minds of the children of other races. In ours it is unfailing. It matters not whether the grounds are on the road- side grass or in a private garden. They pass an Enclosure Act at once, and surround the future garden with a wall of stones, or with some border which marks it off as an area separate and singular. This at once becomes a posses- sion, sometimes held by partners, more often by each child separately, with a title registered in schoolroom traditions; and where mistakes might be made, as in sand gardens by the Bea, the actual name of the proprietor, Tom, or Lucy, or Kate, is inlaid in stones, or embossed in seaweed. The grand obstacle to success in children's gardening is the tiresome adage that "Nature will not be hurried." Time seems dreadfully long to them when they are in a hurry to see fruit and flowers adorning their parterres, and many and ingenious are the means taken to quicken this incurable lethargy of plants. Some are not the least joy of the art, as they practise it. Watering, when there is a hose and plenty of small watering pots, does wonders, and keeps them hopeful and busy. Moreover the boys, being mechanical, can mike fountains and irrigation works, which add both beauty and luxuriance. They have been known to use hot w tter when sunshine is lacking ; and there is always moss to fall back on for covering up bare patches. The beauty of moss is that it looks pretty though it does not flower, and you can pull it up and plant it anywhere "ready made." But for flowers there is nothing like "transplanting." It is a gardener's word, and a very useful plan, especially with spring flowers and bulbs. All the patches of snowdrops, or narcissus, or daffodil, or stray tulips in secondary borders and shrubberies are carefully noted from the time they peep out of the ground until the flower-buds are beginning to appear. That is the moment for "transplanting." You dig up the plants by the roots, or rather the bulbs, which is very hard work when they happen to grow in a shrubbery, and carefully separate them till you find the bulb which "belongs" to the flower-bud, with which it is connected by a long bleached stalk. Then you dig a hole in your own garden, and there it is, "transplanted," and will probably come out in a day or so. Much can be done in this way, and the results are very satisfactory. Merely picking flowers ready made, and sticking them in till they die, is recognised as an imposture, or as due to ignorance, by all children gardeners, who scorn it, except when employed in competitions for cottage flower-shows, where there is a "class" for this kind of floral ornament, in which most of the entries are made by village children. But quite tiny children always make their gardens of plucked blossoms,
usually set in moss, or sometimes on a velvet chair, which does almost as well. In any garden where small children play, or come as visitors, their presence may always be detected by the remains of these little trial beds, the earliest signs of this "propensity prior to experience " which we may call the gardening instinct.
Children of nearly all nations make gardens, just as they all possess dolls. The exceptions are those of the migratory races, such as the waggon-living Boer hunters or the Samoyeds in the Arctic Circle. Little Boer boys drive imaginary teams of oxen instead. made of dead birds shot for the family dinner, fastened in pairs with strings ; and the young Samoyeds, though devoted to dolls, which they dress and undress as English children do, have no gardens, because such a thing as a flower-garden, or even a kailyard, is not within the range of possibilities of the tundra, or practicable for people who have to move as their reindeer feed. Italian children make rock-gardens, as might be expected, and plant them with olive stones. Mr. Kipling's pathetic story of the little Hindoo boy who begged a polo-ball and made it the centre of his garden, which he afterwards destroyed because he feared that the Sahib did not approve of it, is evidence that the native Indian child shares the taste of the dominant race. In well-to-do Turkish families, while the little ones are still in the harem, the young Turk, though proverbially un- disciplined, varies his game of Plevna, in which Russian and Turkish soldiers man miniature redoubts, with gardening, in regular Oriental style. Cucumbers, small gourds, and little fig-trees are the ideal plants of the Osmanli nursery. Turkish boys are severely practical in their play, and imagination does not claim a great part in their horticulture. But neither is there much room for the play of fancy in the "culinary plants" cultivated by little English boys and girls. Their choice is strictly limited to mustard, cress, and radishes. _Digging up new potatoes and making sides to see who gets most from a single root does not, strictly speaking, rank as gardening, though if a seedling potato comes up spontaneously in their allotment it is welcomed with enthusiasm, watered with hope, and after a series of attentions more nearly approaching to tree-worship than a mere potato could hope to receive, is nearly always dug up prematurely in the hopes of finding a dish of young potatoes ready for boiling in the tin saucepan that was purchased for that event when the potato-leaves first poked their heads out of the earth. But with mustard - and - cress and radishes matters are different. They are the ideal crops 'of childhood. One leads on to the other, and both can be ,eaten at tea without being spoiled by cooking. They grow almost as fast as the anxious little souls which own them -could desire. The mustard comes almost too soon, for the cress is never quite ready when the mustard is ; and the radishes, well watered, come on just as the excitement of the second cutting of cress is over. Turnip-radishes are generally considered a more creditable and important crop than the long, red sorts, probably because they look like real turnips, -and are, therefore, lilliput representatives of something which is "real," and grown on a great scale. Then both these crops are grown early in spring, at which time the impulse always seizes children as regularly as they see the spring flowers peeping from the earth. Building flower-grottoes with bits of 'brick, stones, and mossy wood is a great joy to inventive children, who plant in them tiny ferns and any little bright 'flowers they can dig up elsewhere. Rock-gardens are an ideal often attempted but seldom attained. To them they transplant house-leeks and stone-crop, plants which bear something of mystery in children's minds, because they grow, as they think, without earth or water.
The most enterprising new departure which the writer ramembers to have seen attempted, was a little girl's effort to ,grow watercress. She made a pool, and transplanted bits of ,cress from the nursery tea. The same child tried to bud garden roses on wild stems in a hedge, to be a" surprise" to the others when they blossomed. Little trees are another source of joy and anticipation to the little landscape gardeners of the future. It may be doubted whether they ever project such an important idea as planting a wood. But the thought of getting, not a plant, but a tree, from an acorn, a pip, or a chestnut is one -of the often realised dreams of childhood. 'Young minds, so quick in fancy, and distinguishing with effortless pre- cision between the obvious processes of production and the natural magic of creation, seem to recognise in the change from the acorn to the oak something which strikes them as the immediate work of a personal Creator. To be the means of originating this wonderful change, themselves to pick up and plant the berry, and themselves to see rise from the ground in due course the little tree, not half formed or with the leaves of transition, like the garden herb, but with its first leaf as perfect as the last, is to them not only a pleasure, but a kind of intellectual satisfaction, as any one who watches them at each times can clearly apprehend.
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