Harry Roberts

“ To most people, and more particularly to most women, one of the chief uses or functions of a garden is to provide flowers to be cut for the decoration of rooms. But I hold that a flower cut from its plant and placed in a vase is as a scalp on the walls of a wigwam—a trophy showing how one more beautiful plant has been defeated and victimised by its powerful and tasteless owner. ”

“ In housewifery there can be but little pretence, for no ignorance may remain hid. Bluff and a ready tongue or pen go a long way towards creating many a “brilliant reputation” in the “artistic” and vapid world which lives at clubs and restaurants, and runs societies for improving other people. But no bluff will ever avail in the presence of the food or drink in the preparation of which our skill has been employed. The products of housewifery speak for themselves; they are no empty expressions of sentiments which may be false or true. ”

“ I thought of Ruskin's statement that "the path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers, but they rise behind her steps, not before them," when one day I sat on a quaint old seat under a pear tree in this little flowerful garden; for it is literally behind his steps, not before them, that all the beauty of my friend's garden has sprung up. Each beautiful leaf and stem and flower are products of his labour and care almost as much as of sun and rain. Yet to a stranger the garden shows no sign of human fingers, human muscles, or human interference. ”

“ A garden is not a place merely for the exhibition of floral wonders, but a place wherein to rest, to talk, to read or to dream. With the blazing sun of July beating on one's unshaded head, dreaming, resting, and reading are equally uncomfortable and unprofitable.
A shade-giving tree is worth all the flowers of midsummer, though fortunately one is not called upon to sacrifice either. Trees and shrubs yield welcome shade, but, quite apart from this, they help to throw up, and provide suitable backgrounds for, the dwarfer plants which make up the majority of our garden contents. ”

“ The chipping away of the gross and unessential, with the consequent liberation of the true and fine, is as noble a process in cookery as in sculpture. Yet how different is the attitude of even the humblest artist in words or marble or paint towards his material and his work from that of the average housewife towards the flavours and fragrances which she is privileged to elucidate and to blend. ”

“ Not everyone can grow the Gentians, but certainly everyone can grow—though not all of us can exterminate—those beautiful Veronicas, the Germander Speedwell and the Field Speedwell, with their brightest of blue flowers. Merely to name the dandelion, daisy, plantain, convolvulus, dock, pheasant's eye, and even the groundsel, is to remind ourselves of the great beauty which our garden weeds possess, and of the essential place which they occupy in the mental picture of a homely garden. ”

“ The object of the little book was first to emphasize the sound doctrines that no nation ever was or ever will be permanently great if it consists to any large extent of wretched and miserable families; that a family to be happy must usually be well supplied with food and raiment; and that it is to blaspheme God to suppose that He created men to be miserable, to hunger, to thirst, and to perish with cold in the midst of that abundance which is the fruit of their own labour. ”

“ July is the month of climax for the gardener who grows only annual flowers raised afresh each year from seed. A very fine show he may have, too, during his somewhat brief season. To the grower of herbaceous plants who aims, and wisely aims, at having flowers all the year through, July is but one month out of twelve. Spring means for him not a season for sowing, so much as a very flowery season, full of Crocuses and Anemones, of Primroses and of Hepaticas; for him even winter itself is not flowerless, since he has his Hellebores and winter Aconites and fragrant Coltsfoot. ”

“ For, after all, it is housewifery to which nearly all the arts and sciences bring their secrets. Home and comfort, food and drink—it will be a long time before we can get quite away from the need of these things. To introduce science and order into the domestic [5]
[6] kingdom is a task worthy of the finest intellect; and that woman who by the use of brains organizes and systematizes her household work is she who can best front with a smiling face the difficulty of obtaining servants—which appears to be the great omnipresent trouble of Englishwomen. ”

“ Soil is to plants not a source of food alone, but is a suit of clothes, a blanket and coverlet, a cooking-range and a drawing-room fire. It is a pied-à-terre in its most literal sense, and it is a cellar and tankard combined. To all the great and beautiful world of flowers, the soil is indeed mother earth, giving them warmth and nourishment in their infancy, affording them a root-hold throughout their life, and offering them sanctuary for their bodies when their earthly life is done.
He who would grow beautiful flowers must therefore first study the soil from which he would raise them. ”

“ A private latch-key is no doubt part of the universal birthright, but it does not in itself afford a sufficient aim in life. To be able to discourse cleverly of Browning and Wagner is an accomplishment easily acquired, and affords pleasure to no one. To acquire a reputation for the excellence of our home-made gooseberry wine, of our home-baked bread, or of our home-brewed beer is much more difficult and much more worthy. ”

“ So many people desire the gaudy, or the unique, or the curious, that we are apt to look upon gardens merely as appliances for the production of quaint or monstrous flowers.
The analysis of beauty has ever a dissecting-room-feel about it; still, as he who would become a skilful surgeon must be first a practical anatomist, and as he who would be a painter must first study his materials and the "dodges" of his craft, so must the would-be artist in gardening dissect the beauty of perfect gardens, and study such apparently dull materials as earth and manure, and practical garden books. ”

“ THE GARDEN IN WINTER When the last of the Michaelmas daisies and of the out-door chrysanthemums have cast their blooms, many gardeners are apt to think that the interest and beauty of the garden are over, and that for three months there is nothing to be done but to dig and enrich the soil, and to wait patiently for the onset of spring. ”

“ Just to name a few of the plants whose scent fill the rooms, what glories are thereby called up:—Honeysuckle and Jasmine, Lily of the Valley, Lilac and Narcissus, Carnation, Syringa and Heliotrope, Thyme, Bergamot, and Aloysia! These, and a hundred other fragrances mingled together in infinitely varying combinations, give sensuous joys which even the most jaded can but appreciate. For there is probably no pleasure so democratic as that which is yielded by the fragrance of flowers and leaves. ”

“ The last bees have reached their hives, laden with the sweet product of their hard labour. The honeyed flowers, which look to their visits and to the visits of other sun-loving insects for aid in fertilisation, have, so far as possible, covered their tempting cups to avoid the damping or loss of the precious pollen within. Snails and slugs crawl from hidden caves, prepared to work in darkness the evil which fear of feathered warders hinders by day. Except for these workers of ill, these foes of beauty, the garden is apparently going to sleep. ”

“ Many a man with a garden looks upon winter as a season to be got through as soon as possible, as a season when nothing short of necessity shall drag him into the garden. I am sure that even in the very heart of December, one should find in the garden more of real beauty than ninety-nine gardens out of a hundred contain in June. I recall in particular one little heather path bordered by large bushes of blue-grey Lavender and green-grey Rosemary, in the bays being great Mullein plants and clumps of Pink and Alyssum. ”

“ One of the greatest gifts of a perfect garden is the gift of solitude, and that is generally beyond the power of the little cottage plot to offer; but, as a source of infinite pleasure to its owner, as a source of pleasure to all those who pass by, as a cheering feature of English landscape, and as a great force tending towards contentment and peace, the cottage garden is beyond price. ”

“ One must have read much before one is able to appreciate the style of a Ruskin or a Pater, a Maeterlinck or a Le Gallienne; one must have studied many pictures before being able to realise the beauty of the works of the great artists; and in like manner one must needs have loved and watched plants long and steadfastly before the beauty of winter twig and summer leaf comes home to him. ”

“ But I think that most people, when they think of cottage gardens, picture to themselves those little wayside plots attached to the homes of working folks which cheer the passer-by nearly as much as they cheer their owners. One thinks of Rose and Clematis climbing over the doorway, of Sweet-Williams, Pæonies, Hollyhocks, Sunflowers and Pansies flowering in bed or border. Old-fashioned herbaceous plants are those which one associates with these cottage gardens, and nearly the year through one expects to find something of interest and of beauty. ”

“ It is the absence of bare earth—for scarcely one inch of soil lies undraped by plants—which partly gives the garden that feeling of settled-down-ness. A half-dressed person, a half-papered wall, a half-filled bookcase, a half-finished house—all these things hinder the feeling of repose. So it is that nearly all gardens, looking, as they do, to be in a state of preparation and incompleteness, make restfulness out of the question. But in this garden repose seems the natural emotion, and to sit there beneath a tree and read or chat is always the appropriate thing. ”

“ It is merely a bit of enclosed and humanised natural beauty, a place where one may quietly enjoy delightful flowers and delightful fragrance without the jarring condition of viewing behind the scenes all the time that the performance is being enacted. Every flower in the garden was originally planted by my friend, and has been regularly watched over and tended by him ever since, yet not one but looks as though it had been planted [19] at the creation of the world and had been subject only to the forces of Nature all its life. ”

“ This is a narrow and an ill-informed view, for, though through the months of winter we cannot hope to see many or gaudy flowers, we may yet have our gardens bright and interesting with evergrey and evergreen shrubs and herbs, with the delightfully-coloured barks of willows, dog-woods and other trees, and, not less interesting, with the often beautiful stems of the last season's growth of herbaceous plants, usually sacrificed to the tidying spirit of those who would tidy the floor of heaven itself. ”

“ I am sure that gardeners who study the native flora of England derive much more pleasure from their flowers than those who focus all their attention on the cultivated species and hybrids which are grown in gardens. The hedges and woodlands are full of examples and full of suggestions, for they show us the habit and manner of life of the English relatives of our exotic plants. By studying the wild species with their wonderful grace and simple beauty, indicative of adaptation of means to ends, we are less liable to become the slaves of the florists. ”