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                            A GARDEN DIARY




                            A GARDEN DIARY
                    SEPTEMBER 1899--SEPTEMBER 1900

                                  BY
                             EMILY LAWLESS

                             METHUEN & CO.
                         36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
                                LONDON
                                 1901

                        TO THE GARDEN’S CHIEF OWNER,
                        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 done
comparatively little wandering in our own persons, have done our full
share of those less palpable divagations which may be performed within a
very small compass of the earth’s surface, nay even within the radius of
a single garden chair.

The gipsy dies hard in many people, and the dreams which have fluttered
round our youthful fancy flutter round it still, though youth may have
become a memory, and the chances of any serious explorations be reduced
to a scarce perceptible minimum. To be a traveller in the real and
heroic sense is a very great and a very stirring ambition. To have the
hope of wandering far and fruitfully; of bringing home the results of
those wanderings; such a hope and such an aspiration is one of the
biggest things that can be set before a youthful ambition. With a
disregard of probabilities, which, looking back, I can only characterise
as magnificent, such an ambition had I, in early days, set before
myself. To be a traveller on the great scale; a visitor of remote
solitudes, and practically untrodden shores; a discoverer of undescribed
forms; a rifler of Nature’s still unrifled treasure-houses--such was the
hope, and such the happy dream. The words “Unknown to science” floated
in those days before my youthful fancy, and were to it a shibboleth, as
other and more obviously stimulating words have been to other youthful
brains. Fate has not willed that any such resounding lot should be mine,
nor was it, to tell the truth, particularly likely that it should so
will 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 my
own equipment had particularly marked me out for this rôle that I had so
confidently assigned to myself.

Luckily we learn to grow down gracefully, as the sedums and the
pennyworts do. A lot that at ten years old seems unendurably pitiful in
its narrowness, at five times that mature age comes to be regarded as
quite a becoming lot, leaving room for plenty of easy self-respect, and
even for a spurt or two of the purest and most invigorating vanity. As
that down-growing process advances we assure ourselves, more and more
confidently, that all the really important, the vital part of such
explorations belongs to us, at least as much as to the explorers
themselves. If we have not thridded Amazonian forests in our own persons
with Mr. Bates, or Nicaraguan jungles with Mr. Belt, we know all that
those indefatigable travellers have seen, done, discovered, experienced,
and only need to take down their books from the shelf to be in the thick
of those experiences once more.

So too, with the rest--the botanists, zoologists,
paleontologists--greater, as well as less great. With the prince of them
all one starts once more upon that immortal _Voyage of the Beagle_,
which, besides circumnavigating the world, enables one to accumulate
those prodigious stores of observation, destined by-and-by to make one’s
own name famous to the world’s end, and to endow that world itself with
one or two practically new departments. With Professor Wallace, one
spends years in the Malay Archipelago, till the geography of even the
obscurer members of that bewildering group becomes rather more familiar
than that of the next parish. With Collingwood one pores over the
rock-pools of Chinese seas, which never before reflected human face, or
at most that of some shore-haunting Mongolian, uninterested in zoology