The Garden: Symbolic Of Life Itself

The most beautiful gardens you have ever seen, gardens of great country estates where paid gardeners tend the plants, bring comparatively little pleasure to their owners. If the owner of a garden feels that his garden is perfect he will not be a gardener long. Dallas Lore Sharp once wrote an essay on seed catalogs. The modern seed catalog is itself a thing of wonder and beauty; but, oh, the marvels that it promises; oh, the dreams of appetite and art that it inspires. It would be a mistake, however, to hold forth the catalog season as more than the veriest hors d'oeuvre preceding the banquet. It may be that claims and hopes will be later shattered before the onslaught of disappointment, weeds and worms. It may be that realization, like roast beef, will obliterate the taste of imaginary stuffed pheasant, but prove nonetheless substantial and satisfying.

The second course of the garden banquet is epitomized in the arrival of the seeds and their actual planting. How smooth and neat are the straight rows or carefully raked beds! Be sure, however, to examine the seeds themselves. Here are hard round peas, wrinkled and unpromising; here is a handful of brown dust soon to become succulent spinach. But the flower seeds offer still further variation. Could you tell any of them apart without the envelopes? Delphiniums and columbine will look very different later on, but see how alike the seeds appear. If you had these flowers last year, you know how similar are their ripe brown seed pods are, even the arrangement of the seeds inside.

Then here are some curious long seeds like bits of cotton lint. They do no really look like seeds at all, but they will become gaillardias or coreopsi or some similar flower, which form no true pot merely loosening, the petals to turn the central mass into a factory for winged aviators. Snapdragons again have tiny round seeds so small that it is difficult to sow them properly and the gardener will have to do a lot of thinning or transplanting. Iris and dahlias both produce seed, although the amateur gardener generally buys the rapidly multiplying tubers roots for quicker results. The growing of iris from seed is a proposition that requires timely experience and care.

Let no mere man despise gardening as women's and child's play. It is a game played with Nature which men like the late Luther Burbank and Frede Law Olmstead have attained the highest professional rank. A rockery of wild flowers and ferns, a border English Primroses, a shady corner made to bloom—the garden offers a multitude of possible plans, a long line of obstacles to conquer, and a never-ending source of pleasure. A garden is a bit of Nature itself, pliable to hands, restful to our minds, and symbolical of Life itself.

By: davidbunch

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