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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-h