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One day a remedy flashed through my mind: that happy thought which became the essence or principle of my gardening, and makes this account thereof worth attention perhaps. Why not raise to a comfortable level all parts of the area over which I had need to bend? Though no horticulturist, perhaps, ever had such a thought before, expense was the sole objection visible.
Sir Godfrey Kneller lived for a time in the Upper Mall; and Bowack tells us that "Queen Katherine, when Queen-Dowager, kept her palace in the summer time" by the river. This was Catherine of Braganza, consort of Charles II. She came here after his death, and remained until 1692. She took great interest in gardening, and the elms by the riverside are supposed to have been of her planting.
He grew ardent, too, in gardening. This he took up at first to please his wife, having no natural inclination; but he had no sooner set his hand to it, than, like everything else he touched, it became with him a passion.
"Gardening!" said Zell contemptuously. "You couldn't plow as well as that snuffy old fellow who scratched your garden about as deeply as a hen would have done it. A woman can't dig and hoe in the hot sun, that is, an American girl can't, and I don't think she ought." "Nor I either," said Mrs. Allen, with some returning vitality. "The very idea is horrid."
For a boy scout with badges on his sleeve for "stalking" and "path-finding," not to boast of others for "gardening" and "cooking," can outwit any spy. Even had, General Baden-Powell remained in Mafeking and not invented the boy scout, Jimmie Sniffen would have been one. Because, by birth he was a boy, and by inheritance, a scout. In Westchester County the Sniffens are one of the county families.
A sensation of strong-dislike to the still unknown new tenant of The Trellis House welled up in his secretive little heart, and instead of going on round the village, he turned back and made his way straight home. As he walked along the short avenue which led to the front door of Old Place he saw his mother kneeling on her gardening mat.
It is very easy to think of the plants, beds and paths of a garden as things which, being once placed, must stay where they are; but it is shortsighted and it is fatal to effective gardening. We should look upon the arrangement of things in our garden very much as a housekeeper looks on the arrangement of the furniture in her house.
Furthermore, how could he on any day, let alone a day of returning from a cemetery, look into her haggard countenance and pass judgment on her as unloving? If shopping, meticulous housekeeping, gardening, and commentary on nature were her only subjects of concern and her only crimes, it seemed to him that they were rather innocuous ones.
She was half teasing now, but teasing through the visor, not over the wall. "And if I sought victory I saw that I was being beaten while I made a profession of you, not of gardening! Yes, of you! I could confess it to all the world and its ridicule!" "Jack, you are dramatic!" If she would only once look at him! If he could only speak into her eyes! If her breaths did not come and go so regularly!
With this explanation the fullest harmony was restored; and my father sat down whilst Mr. Andrewes and I finished our luncheon and Rubens had his. I gave an account of the garden in terms glowing enough to satisfy the pride of the warmest horticulturist, and my father promised a new rake, and drank a glass of sherry to the success of my "gardening without a gardener."
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