Mrs. Paynter

“ Now it is usual to grow each colour by itself, and every year we seem to get better colours and bigger flowers. The fanciers of the ‘Sweet-pea world’ have taken Sweet-peas in hand, and by careful cultivation and selection have given us many new and beautiful varieties. At first novelties are dear, because the stock of seed is small, but for a few pence you can have a hedge that would have rejoiced Keats; and if you are a wise child, you will certainly grow those that have become plentiful. ”

“ All gardeners ask each other ‘Why do we see great healthy clumps of this lovely Lily in poor little neglected cottage gardens, while in our highly-fed and carefully-tended ones it gets the now well-known Lily disease?’ We hope your Madonna Lilies will not get it, because it is rather heart-breaking to watch its ravages. In the spring you see fine, healthy leaves, and you look forward to the tall stems that will arise from them and bear great scented, shining white flowers. But one day you notice that the leaves look rather brown. A stem has shot up, but the leaves on it look brown, too. ”

“ We must warn you that some people will be very angry with us for advising you to grow anything in lines. Lines are out of fashion, and they certainly have been made to give hideous effects by the ignorant gardener. But we make bold to think that a child who wants a blaze of colour all the summer in its small patch will get what he wants if he grows his garden as contrary Mary did, ‘all in a row.’ We will tell you now about a charming little garden belonging to two children in a London suburb. ”

“ In a cold district you may be glad of things that would overrun you in a warm one. Near a town people grow whatever will best endure the soot and close air. When you are older you will have to find out which plants want lime and which granite, which peat and which sand; but we will only tell you of plants now that will grow in any ordinary good garden soil mixed with a little leaf-mould and some small stones, and we will only give you the names of plants that can be got at any good nursery garden. ”

“ Some of the bulbs you have planted in autumn will be flowering; others will be pushing their way up towards the light; and your herbaceous plants—those that died down in the autumn—will be coming up again, and making delicious young green leaves. The part of your garden that you have saved for annuals must be carefully hoed and raked now, so that all the weeds are destroyed, and the soil made fine and powdery for your seedlings. Their little roots could not strike down and get any hold in hard, big lumps of earth, and it would be a waste of money and time to sow seed there. ”

“ Roughly speaking, soils may be divided into heavy and light—those that hold wet and those that do not. The heavy kinds are mostly clay, though pure peat retains a great deal of moisture. The light soils are gravel, limestone, and sand. If you are used to a heavy clay soil, you will envy the people who have a light sandy one; and then some day when you come to work a hungry, sandy garden, you will wish for some of the sticky soil that is not easy to handle, but which many plants love. ”

“ Frost soon kills plants that have not had time to take a firm hold of the soil.
Autumn brings much labour in the garden in the shape of tidying, weeding, and preparing for next year. Annuals that have become shabby may be pulled up and thrown away. They will leave a bare place that you must dig over well. [228] Before you replant it you must consider whether what you are going to plant would like a little manure beneath its roots, or as a blanket on the top. A greedy annual has probably impoverished the soil. ”

“ So if you made a hedge of poppies all along one side of your border, you would use seven seeds out of two thousand. All gardeners sow more seeds than they mean to use, because they must allow for accidents and insects, and they expect to do some thinning. But the ignorant gardener invariably sows his seed too thick, and leaves his seedlings too close together; so he gets a crowd of starved, stunted plants that do not flower well, and are soon over for the year. You should begin by leaving three inches between your seedlings, and end by giving most of them a foot apiece. ”

“ If you have more than you can keep tidy, the grown-ups will be sorry they let you have a [3] garden at all, and some day they will say that the gardener wants your bit of sunny border for his winter lettuces, and that you had better take yourself and your weeds and your mess away to that no-man’s-land in the shrubbery, where nothing much will grow, and where it is always sad and chilly. So we will imagine that your garden is twelve feet long and seven feet wide, and that the sun shines on it whenever it is fine. ”

“ In or near London you generally get abominable soil in your garden, because the builders have dug out the good stuff and replaced [6] it with any kind of rubbish. Everyone knows the London mixture of black, sticky clay, broken bricks and bottles, and the roots of grimy trees and shrubs. Many things will no more thrive in such a medium than a baby would on lobster salad. If you have to begin your gardening career with a builder’s rubbish-heap, you must be content to grow some of the strongest things, such as Starworts, Foxgloves, Nasturtiums, and some bulbs, and to renew them every year. ”

“ A handsome, clear yellow flower, growing six feet high, and blooming for many weeks, but one of those that never know when and where they are not wanted. You know the true gardening rhyme, don’t you?—that ‘One year’s seeding makes seven years’ weeding.’ We believe that when once the Evening Primrose has had a chance in a garden, its seeds will come up there till the crack of doom. However, they have tap-roots, and are easily pulled up. If you have none and want them, you should sow in June where the plants are to stand, and thin out severely, leaving two feet between the plants. ”

“ At the beginning of the month you can still put out bedding plants, half-hardy annuals, and biennials. A plant may be put into the open ground out of a pot at almost any time of the year. It is the safest way of transplanting in hot weather, but you must distinguish between plants that have been honestly grown in pots and those that a nurseryman has potted from boxes a day or two ago. When the soil falls away and leaves the root and stem quite bare, your plant will want care and shade as much as if you had just pulled it out of a box yourself. ”

“ In some parts of England you may have a garden that is rock with a sprinkling of soil on it, and the difficulty will be to find or make places for vegetables and deep-rooted shrubs and flowers. In a garden of this kind the children are quite likely to have a patch where the rocks are showing through the soil, and where it is difficult to find pockets of earth deep enough even for Daffodils or Tulips. But there are many beautiful shallow-rooted plants you can grow in such places as these, for they will not be like the silly heap of loose stones or bricks described in the magazine article. ”

“ Your Snapdragons are either hideously splotchy or crudely magenta; your pink Canterbury Bells are blue and white; your Wallflowers are spindly and colourless. A few experiences of this kind will soon drive you to buy your own seed from one of the best firms, and for a few pence and some happy hours of gardening to get more plants of the best colour and quality than you can possibly use. Then you will have the pleasure the true gardener always finds in giving some of his plants away, or you can exchange your surplus stock for plants you do not possess yet. ”