There are many ways of regarding a garden of flowers; from the utilitarian view it is a reasonable method of utilising a space of ground for horticultural purposes, but I prefer to take the Olympian view and quote from “The Poet’s Geography,” to the effect that a garden of flowers is—“A collection of dreams surrounded by clouds.”

At first sight the somewhat expansive imagery of this definition might appear over-vague and unsatisfactory where a very definite question, like a garden of flowers, is concerned. But, come to see it in a lofty light, and at once its truth stands clear. A garden is the proper adjunct of a house, and a house, fully said, is a dream come true, yet still surrounded by the clouds of infinite possibilities. It is always growing, is a true home. Like a flower it expands to every sweet whisper of the wind. Like a flower it shuts at night, or opens to accept the dew. It is something so elusive that only the garlands of love hold it together.

The garden, to the real house, is, like the dwelling, a place of the most subtle fancies. Every flower there, every tree and each blade of grass holds mystery and imagination. The Gods walk there.

The flower beds (accepting the Olympian idea) are not mere collections of flowering herbage, but are volumes of poetry growing in the sun. Take your hedge of Sweet Peas, for example, and tell me what they are—no—tell me who they are. There is a dream there if you like; and while you look at them, and sniff them delicately, is not the fussy world shut off from you by clouds. Sweet Peas are like a bevy of winsome girls all in their everyday frocks, scented by an odour of virginity, something indescribably refined after the manner of the flesh, and something lofty in their removal from the earth after the way of the spirit. I wonder how many people feel this.

Take it more broadly in the true Olympian spirit. Take it that a house and garden is an Olympus to each man and woman who is happy, and you will see that your heaven for all its head in the clouds has its feet upon the earth. Then what do the flowers mean? Lilies with pale faces like a procession of nuns. Roses all queens of regal beauty. Violets to whom the thrushes sing, deny it if you dare. Majestic Peonies. The plants of soft and courtly wisdom, Thyme, Rosemary, Myrtle. Lavender, the House-dame, prim, neat, beloved of bees and butterflies, Quakerishly dressed in grey with a touch of unsectarian colour, yet vaguely an ecclesiastical purple; rather slim, with full skirts, with the suggestion that Cowslips are her bunches of keys, and the Dandelion her clock.

One could go on for ever.

And then the gardener, like those half-immortals who worked for the gods, or some like a god of old, even, with god-like grumbles, and god-like simplicity.

They are a strange race, these gardeners, given to unexpected meals, and sudden appearances.

“Walter!”

And after that, from some fragrant bush, or waving forest of Asparagus, a bronzed man stands erect, as if he had sprung from the bowels of the earth, where he had been contemplating the mysteries of human weakness.

And how amazed they are with us and our foibles and follies. We remonstrate—a question of weeds, perhaps,—and are listened to with incredulous wonder.

“Weeds!” says the being, “weeds!”

He emerges more completely from the bush, showing a hand occupied with a lot of little twigs, and a knife rather like himself to look at—not too sharp.

As if a voice from the unknown had wafted over the desert, he stands in wonder, looking reproachfully at those who have interrupted his toil.

“The weather makes them grow.” Of course it does. We knew that. We did not come here to call Walter to ask him what made weeds grow, but to know why he had not weeded, at our special request, the Carnation border.

From a cavernous pocket in a much-mended pair of trousers of a shape never designed by mortal hands, he produces a quantity of felt strips, and some wall nails.

We repeat our original suggestion, that the Carnation border is choked with weeds.

“So it be!”

Then, after the great being has taken observations of the sky, causing him to screw up one eye and wag his head sagely as if he had communication with the unseen powers, he admits that he has been watering the greenhouse.

“The Vines take a deal o’time about now.”

It would be useless to remark to this calm person that we found, only yesterday, a dozen plants dying in the greenhouse, and all for want of water. But, from a sort of foolhardy courage, we do say as much.

“Yes,” says the immortal, “they need a power of water. A good drop is no good.”

We venture to remonstrate with him, saying, in a few well chosen words, that it would be useful of him, then, to give them “a good watering while he was about it.”

He agrees at once. “It would do them a power of good.”

Realising that we are drifting from the main grievance, we return hot to the bed of Carnations. We admit to having but just this moment come from weeding them ourselves, and in so saying we hope to make appeal to his better nature. Nothing of the kind.

“I noticed,” he says, “you sp’iled some of the layers where you’d a-been treading.”

When we have turned away defeated, he sinks again to his mysterious task, and it seems that the ground swallows him.

Then again, in the early morning, he seems to have had overnight talks with Mercury, or Apollo, or whoever it is who arranges the weather, as he invariably greets us with some curt sentence.

“Rain afore noon,” or “Wind’ll be in the nor’west afore night.” Thereby giving us to understand that he has been given a glass of nectar in some lower servants’ hall in Olympus, and has picked up the gossip of what Jupiter has decreed for the day. We feel, as he intends us to feel, vastly inferior. In fact we have given way to a habit of asking his advice on certain points, which has proved fatal.

He doles out our fruit to us just as he likes, and we feel quite guilty when we pick one of our own peaches from our own walls.

“I see you pick a peach last night,” he says. “’Tisn’t for me to say anything, but I was countin’ on giving you a nice dish NEXT week.”

What is there to do but hang one’s head, and plead guilty?

Boys are his pet aversion. Whether boys have in some way a fellowship with the gods (which I suspect), or whether they are victoriously antagonistic, it matters not. They are to the gardener so many creatures whom he classes along with snails, bullfinches, rabbits and wasps as “varmints.”

One can hear him sometimes invoking a god of the name of Gum. “By Gum! them young varmints a-been ’ere again. By Gum!”

He then makes an offering to this god in the shape of a bonfire, the smell of which is more than most scents for wonder.

It is when Walter makes a bonfire that he is more god-like than ever. He stands, a thick figure, deep in the chest, broad in the shoulder, by the pile of dead leaves, twigs, and garden rubbish, the smoke enveloping him in misty wreaths, and the sun flashing on his fork as he pitches fresh fuel on the smouldering fire. A tongue of flame, greedily licking up leaves and dry sticks, lights on his impassive face, and a quivering orange streak along the muscles of his arms. We are fascinated by his arms. They contain, I believe, the history of his mortal life and ambitions, and are a key to his hidden emotions.

On one arm is a ship under full sail, done in blue and red tattoo. Below the ship is the word “Jane”; below that is a twist of rope. On the other arm is a heart, the initials S.M., and an anchor.

When we were young these two arms of Walter’s were an entire literature to us. We read him first, I think, a pirate, very grim and horrible, and we translated “S.M.” as Spanish Main. A little later we dropped the idea of the pirate, and took to the notion that Walter had been (if he was not still) a smuggler who landed cargoes of rum from the good ship “Jane,” and deposited them with the landlord of the “Saucy Mariner.” It is noticeable that we left out the heart in all these romances. Then, at some impressionable moment, Walter became a seaman who had given his heart to Sarah Mainwaring, which name we got from a man who had given us a dog, and in spite of that we accepted it as fact. I think we once descended so low as to think that the whole thing had no nautical significance, and was a secret sign of some terrible society who met for purposes of revenge. This, of course, was the result of contemporary reading.

Then came the great day upon which Walter was definitely asked what the signs and pictures on his arms did mean.

“Mind out,” was all the answer we got, and Walter retired with the wheelbarrow to his citadel—the potting shed.

It was tried again a little later, and this time met with a little better response, because, I suppose, we had done more than half his day’s work for him.

“I had them done at a fair.”

“And,” we asked breathlessly, “what was the ship?”

“Two shillin’s,” he replied, “and I never regretted it. Money well spent.”

“Was she your ship?”

“Mine?” said the god.

“Was she the ship you were in when you were a sailor?”

“Me?” said Walter. “I aint never been a sailor.”

The blow was crushing. We retired hurt, amazed, incredulous.

One day we tried the remaining arm, the one with S.M., the heart, and the anchor emblazoned on it.

“What does S.M. mean?”

It was a moment of terrific suspense. We had drawn a mental picture of some wonderful creature, half Princess, half like a schoolgirl, we sighed after. The god was tying Carnations to wire spirals, and his expression was limited, since he had a knife in his mouth.

“S.M. on me arm,” he said, removing the knife.

We nodded mysteriously, full of breathless expectation.

Walter began to smile. He stood up and surveyed us with his face alight with the memory of some great day. To us he looked an heroic figure, even despite the pieces of old drawing-room carpet tied to his knees with string, and his very unkempt beard.

“You won’t exactly understand,” he said, mopping his forehead. “But I tell ’ee if you’ve got to mind some-at after a day at a fair, you’d be fair mazed. I give my word to my mother as I’d a-put sixpence in a raffle for to try to win her a sewing machine, and so when the fellow was making they images on my arm, I sed to un, I sed, put me S.M., I sed, so’s I’ll mind to put in the sewing machine raffle, I sed, or else if so be as I don’t I shall get a slice of tongue pie when I do get home along.”

Our faces fell. Our hearts, full of romance, now became like lead. In despair we put the last question, a forlorn hope in the storming of his heart’s citadel.

“And the other thing on your arms, Walter? The heart.”

“Cooriosity killed a monkey,” said he. “Mind out, I’m going round the corners.”

So was our romance killed. “Going round the corners,” was Walter’s sign that all conversation was closed.

If one followed him “round the corners,” talk as one might, Walter directed all his conversation to the flowers. To hear him address the plants in the green-house was to think him indeed a god, who by some magic spell turned the water in the can into a life-saving potion. To-day we think that much of the soliloquy was done for our especial benefit.

“Just a wee drop, my pretty,” he would say to some flower. “Just a drink with lunch. That’s right. Perk up now. By Gum, you do want your drop regular, you ’ardened teetotaler. Hello, hello, what’s up with you? Looks to me as if a snail had bided along o’ you too frequent.”

His great hand, covered with ancient scars, would lift the leaves tenderly, and search beneath for the offending snail which, when found, would be held up to view.

“Five-and-twenty tailors!” he would exclaim.

He would be instantly corrected. “Four-and-twenty.”

“You got your history wrong,” he used to say.

We repeated

“Come the twenty-fifth,” Walter added. “That be I. So here goes, Master Snail.”

With that the snail was sharply crushed underfoot, and the soliloquy continued. He is with us still, older in years, younger than ever in heart, with the same immortal personality, the same atmosphere of friendship with the gods about him. He listens to orders with a smile of amusement, just as if he had been laughing about our ways only an hour before with some inhabitant of an unseen world. He carried his own peculiar atmosphere with him of indulgent superiority and warm-heartedness combined, just as the tortoise carries his house on his back. If that story is unknown by any chance, here it is.

Jupiter’s Wedding

When the toy had once taken Jupiter in the head to enter into a state of matrimony, he resolved for the honour of his Celestial Lady, that the whole world should keep a Festival upon the day of his marriage, and so invited all living creatures, Tag-Rag and Bob-Tail, to the solemnity of his wedding. They all came in very good time, saving only the Tortoise. Jupiter told him ’twas ill done to make the Company stay, and asked him, “Why so late?” “Why truly,” says the Tortoise, “I was at home, at my own House, my dearly beloved House,” and House is Home, let it be never so Homely. Jupiter took it very ill at his hands, that he should think himself better in a Ditch than in a Palace, and so he passed this Judgment upon him: that since he would not be persuaded to come out of his House upon that occasion, he should never stir abroad again from that Day forward without his House upon his head.

This, as may be seen at once, is the Olympian aspect not only of the house, but of the garden as well. We mortals do carry our Homes with us, breathing a closer, less free air than the air of Olympus, when the reigning monarch has merely to take a toy in the head to enter into a state of matrimony. We, tortoise-like, are bound and tied by a thousand pleasant associations to our plot of earth and our patch of stars. Sooner than attend the ceremonies of the greatest, we linger by our house and in our garden, so that though we may not boast with the great world and say that we know “Dear old Jove,” or “that charming wife of his, Juno,” still we know that we live on the slopes of Olympus, and have a number of charming flowers for society.