It is Winter, and when it is winter the earth is very secret, but it lies like pie-crust promises waiting to be broken. A little graveyard of the tombs of seeds and bulbs spreads before one’s eyes. Each tomb has a nice headstone of white with the name of the buried life below written upon it. The virtues of the buried are not written in so many words, but their names suffice for that. In my imagination I see my graveyard like this:

That I see most clearly written over the spot where I tucked the hundred and one beautiful sisters in their bed of rich brown earth, and I am looking for the time when the graveyard shall begin to be green with the shafts of their first leaves. Besides these, there are the headsticks to the Carnations, but this patch of the graveyard is different since the tufts of Carnation grass make long grey lines against the brown earth. Somewhere, in each of these grey tufts, is hidden the beautiful germ of life that is growing, growing all the time, and the wonderful chemical process is at work there (for all the plants look so silent and quiet), that is mixing colours and rejecting colours, and is secreting wax, and preparing perfume. Of all moments in a garden this is to me the most wonderful. No glory of colour or variety of shape; no pageant of ripe Summer, or tender early day of Spring appeals to me quite in the way this silent time does, when a thousand unseen forces are at work. I have often wondered (being quite ignorant of the chemical side of this) what happens to that drop of fresh colour the bee brings like a careless artist flicking a brush. Sometimes in a Carnation of pure white, one flower, or two, will show a crimson streak—a sport, one calls it. But more curious still is the fringe edge of the Picotee. How, I have often asked myself, does the colour edge find its way to its proper place? How does the plant manage to produce just enough of that one colour to go round each of its flowers? I have stood by a row of these plants that I have just planted in some new bed, and wondered at the amazing industry going on within them. They are fighting disease, supplying themselves with proper nourishment, mixing colours, and building buds and stems. It is a regular dockyard of a place except that there is no sound. I imagine (quite wrongly, but merely because an instinct causes me to do so) a lot of orderly forces like little drilled men hard at work in green-grey suits. Those who work underground are not in green but are in white, but should they go above the surface they would change colour owing to contact with the light, and this is due to the presence of a matter called chlorophyll in the cells which gives plants their green colour.

The underground workers are hard at it always, getting water from the ground, and in this water are gases and minerals dissolved. The workmen send this up to those in the leaves. Those who work in the leaves are taking in supplies of carbonic acid gas from the air, and the leaves themselves are so formed as to get as much light as possible on one surface. When the light meets with the carbonic acid gas in the leaves starch is formed. This is distributed through the plant to the actual builders.

You stand over the row of Carnations all silent, all still, and yet here is this tremendous activity going on, building, distributing, selecting, rejecting. A thousand workmen making a flower.

The two sets of workers, in the roots and leaves, the one sending up water and nitrogenous matter, the other making starch, are manufacturing albumenoids for more building material. And it is more easy to think of such creatures at work since a plant, unlike an animal, has no stomach, or heart, or bloodvessels, and its food is liquid and gaseous.

Now of these marvels the greatest is that of the existence of life in the plant on exactly the same initial principles as the existence of life in man. That is the substance known as the protoplasm. It is too amazing for me, and too great a thing to be dealt with here, but, as I look at my silent dockyard, there are these protoplasms, in the cells of these plants, dividing into halves and, so to speak, nestling with fresh cells in walls of cellulose.

Think of the work actually going on beneath our eyes in the one matter of the starch factory in the plant, where the chlorophyll (the green colouring matter) separates the carbon from the carbonic acid, returns the oxygen to the air, and mingles the carbon and the oxygen and the hydrogen in the water and so makes this starch.

All this goes on when we open our windows of a morning and look out over the garden and see just a grey line of Carnations we planted over-night. The workers at the roots who are so busily engaged in sending up water, are also sending with it all those things the plant needs that they can get from the earth. Thus the water may contain iron, nitrogen, sulphur, and potash. All that goes from the roots to the leaves is called sap. This, when it comes to the leaves and all parts of the plant exposed to the light, transpires, and so keeps the plant cool.

The stem, on which the supreme work, the flower, will be born, is, in the case of our Carnations, divided into nodes and internodes, the nodes being those solid elbows one sees. It is towards the supreme work that our eyes are turned. It is part, if not chief part, of the pleasure of our vigil to look forward to the day when the first faint colour shows in the bursting bud. It is for this moment that we wait and wear out the chill of Winter. It is towards the idea of a resurrection that our thoughts, perhaps unconsciously, are fixed, to the knowledge that our garden is to be born again, fresh and new in colour, in warmth and sunshine. The very secret workings going on before our eyes, all that Heavenly workshop where none are ’prentices and all are master-hands, where the bee, and the ant, and the unseen insect in the air, go about their exact duties, give one, as Autumn declines into Winter and Winter rouses into Spring, some vague conjecture of the mighty magic of the growing world, where no particle of energy is ever wasted.

Life in the Winter takes on this aspect of waiting wonderment. While the rivers are in flood, and the fields are ruled with silver lines where the ditches are full, and the Sun uses them for a mirror; while the gulls are driven inland and follow the plough, and the starlings congregate in the open fields, we prepare our pageant of flowers against those days when the slumber of the earth is over, and the now purple hedgerows are alive with tender green. St. Francis of Assisi impressed the very sentiment on his friars, in bidding them make scented gardens of flower-bearing herbs to remind them of Him who is called “The Lily of the Valley,” and “The Flower of the World.”

So goes my workshop through the winter days, while a few pale ghosts of late Roses linger on the trees, sighing doubtless to themselves, like old gentlemen—“Ah, I remember this place before Autumn pulled down all the green leaves, and long before all that ground was laid out for seed plots.” And all the while my Roses are growing and, could one see into the colour chambers of the trees, into those wonderful studios hidden in the tiny cells, one would see these artists at work rivalling the blush of morning, the flames of fire, the white soul of innocence, the crimson of king’s robes, and the orange flush of sunset. There are men, I suppose, who know to a certain extent how the secretion of these wonderful colours is arranged; why this or that colour runs to flush a petal to the edge, or stays to dye only the flower’s heart. But it will ever be a marvel to me to see how these veins flow crimson, those hold orange, and those again hold a rich yellow. The work that creates the colour of a Pansy, that gives to the Sweet Peas those soft tints, that shapes and colours the trumpet flower of the Convolvulus, and builds the long horn of the sweet-scented Eglantine, gives one a joy to which few joys are equal, and a feeling of security with the great unknown things by which life is encompassed.

Looking again at the garden of promises, and thinking of it still as a graveyard with headstones, I see one which is, to me, particularly pleasant. It is by an old bush of lavender, the mother bush of my long hedge; I read it to be written like this:

There stands the bush all neatly tied, its venerable head at the moment covered with a powdering of fine snow, and round it the first sharp spears of Crocus leaves show, and the fat buds of Snowdrops, and the ready bud of the yellow Aconite. All the garden is waiting, the Pea-sticks are prepared, the paths have been cleaned, and I am waiting and watching the little things. The trees even now are whispering that it will soon be Spring, for all they look from a distance like a collection of dried and pressed roots sticking up in the air, how they are drawn in purple ink against the sky; but one day my eyes will see a faint haze over them as if a little mist hung about them and was caught in the branches, and then they will change so quietly that it is impossible to tell quite when they began to look like very delicate green feathers, and then they will change so suddenly that it is a shock to one’s eyes to find them in a full flush of sticky bud and leaf, and one says in accents of delighted surprise, “Why, the trees are out!”

Not every one takes pleasure in a garden during the Winter time, many regarding it as a chill and a desolate place in itself, and taking only an interest in the green-houses and the Violet frames; and few would find a pleasure in washing flower-pots by the dozen on a rainy day, and in putting fresh ashes on the paths, and in banking up Celery. But to the keen gardener every inch of work in his garden is full of interest, he realises the daily value of each thing he does, he knows of that great silent work that is going on so near him, and so enjoys even the burnishing of a spade, the rolling of lawns, and loves, as I think every one does, the surgical work of pruning the fruit trees.

Then, when the promise is fulfilled, and the world is full of green and colour, the wondrous alchemy of the Winter months shows its result in the glorious painting of the flowers of Spring and Summer.