A GARDEN DIARY
A GARDEN DIARY
SEPTEMBER 1899—SEPTEMBER 1900
BY
EMILY LAWLESS
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
1901
And the Gardener’s Friend
A few leaves from this Diary (or something very similar),
have already appeared in The Garden and The Pilot.
A GARDEN DIARY
September 1, 1899
“A WANDERER is man from his birth,” and some of us who have donecomparatively little wandering in our own persons, have done our fullshare of those less palpable divagations which may be performed within avery small compass of the earth’s surface, nay even within the radius ofa single garden chair.
The gipsy dies hard in many people, and the dreams which have flutteredround our youthful fancy flutter round it still, though youth may havebecome a memory, and the chances of any serious explorations be reducedto a scarce perceptible minimum. To be a traveller in the real andheroic sense is a very great and a very stirring ambition. To have thehope of wandering far and fruitfully; of bringing home the results ofthose wanderings; such a hope and such an aspiration is one of thebiggest things that can be set before a youthful ambition. With adisregard of probabilities, which, looking back, I can only characteriseas magnificent, such{2} an ambition had I, in early days, set beforemyself. To be a traveller on the great scale; a visitor of remotesolitudes, and practically untrodden shores; a discoverer of undescribedforms; a rifler of Nature’s still unrifled treasure-houses—such was thehope, and such the happy dream. The words “Unknown to science” floatedin those days before my youthful fancy, and were to it a shibboleth, asother and more obviously stimulating words have been to other youthfulbrains. Fate has not willed that any such resounding lot should be mine,nor was it, to tell the truth, particularly likely that it should sowill it. To few of our race has it been given to add, by even a little,to the knowledge of that race, and I am not aware that any portion of myown equipment had particularly marked me out for this rôle that I had soconfidently assigned to myself.
Luckily we learn to grow down gracefully, as the sedums and thepennyworts do. A lot that at ten years old seems unendurably pitiful inits narrowness, at five times that mature age comes to be regarded asquite a becoming lot, leaving room for plenty of easy self-respect, andeven for a spurt or two of the purest and most invigorating vanity. Asthat down-growing process advances we assure ourselves, more and moreconfidently, that all the really important, the vital part of suchexplorations belongs to us, at{3} least as much as to the explorersthemselves. If we have not thridded Amazonian forests in our own personswith Mr. Bates, or Nicaraguan jungles with Mr. Belt, we know all thatthose indefatigable travellers have seen, done, discovered, experienced,and only need to take down their books from the shelf to be in the thickof those experiences once more.
So too, with the rest—the botanists, zoologists,paleontologists—greater, as well as less gre