My Summer in a Garden | Page 8

always kill
them, unless you take them into the house (which is inconvenient if you
have a family of small children), it is very difficult to induce the plant
to flower and fruit. This is the greatest objection there is to this sort of
raspberry. I think of keeping these for discipline, and setting out some
others, more hardy sorts, for fruit.

SECOND WEEK
Next to deciding when to start your garden, the most important matter
is, what to put in it. It is difficult to decide what to order for dinner on a
given day: how much more oppressive is it to order in a lump an
endless vista of dinners, so to speak! For, unless your garden is a
boundless prairie (and mine seems to me to be that when I hoe it on hot
days), you must make a selection, from the great variety of vegetables,
of those you will raise in it; and you feel rather bound to supply your
own table from your own garden, and to eat only as you have sown.
I hold that no man has a right (whatever his sex, of course) to have a
garden to his own selfish uses. He ought not to please himself, but
every man to please his neighbor. I tried to have a garden that would
give general moral satisfaction. It seemed to me that nobody could
object to potatoes (a most useful vegetable); and I began to plant them
freely. But there was a chorus of protest against them. "You don't want
to take up your ground with potatoes," the neighbors said; "you can buy
potatoes" (the very thing I wanted to avoid doing is buying things).
"What you want is the perishable things that you cannot get fresh in the
market."--"But what kind of perishable things?" A horticulturist of
eminence wanted me to sow lines of straw-berries and raspberries right
over where I had put my potatoes in drills. I had about five hundred
strawberry-plants in another part of my garden; but this fruit-fanatic
wanted me to turn my whole patch into vines and runners. I suppose I
could raise strawberries enough for all my neighbors; and perhaps I

ought to do it. I had a little space prepared for
melons,--muskmelons,--which I showed to an experienced friend.
"You are not going to waste your ground on muskmelons?" he asked.
"They rarely ripen in this climate thoroughly, before frost." He had
tried for years without luck. I resolved to not go into such a foolish
experiment. But, the next day, another neighbor happened in. "Ah! I
see you are going to have melons. My family would rather give up
anything else in the garden than musk-melons,--of the nutmeg variety.
They are the most grateful things we have on the table." So there it was.
There was no compromise: it was melons, or no melons, and somebody
offended in any case. I half resolved to plant them a little late, so that
they would, and they would n't. But I had the same difficulty about
string-beans (which I detest), and squash (which I tolerate), and
parsnips, and the whole round of green things.
I have pretty much come to the conclusion that you have got to put
your foot down in gardening. If I had actually taken counsel of my
friends, I should not have had a thing growing in the garden to-day but
weeds. And besides, while you are waiting, Nature does not wait. Her
mind is made up. She knows just what she will raise; and she has an
infinite variety of early and late. The most humiliating thing to me
about a garden is the lesson it teaches of the inferiority of man. Nature
is prompt, decided, inexhaustible. She thrusts up her plants with a vigor
and freedom that I admire; and the more worthless the plant, the more
rapid and splendid its growth. She is at it early and late, and all night;
never tiring, nor showing the least sign of exhaustion.
"Eternal gardening is the price of liberty," is a motto that I should put
over the gateway of my garden, if I had a gate. And yet it is not wholly
true; for there is no liberty in gardening. The man who undertakes a
garden is relentlessly pursued. He felicitates himself that, when he gets
it once planted, he will have a season of rest and of enjoyment in the
sprouting and growing of his seeds. It is a green anticipation. He has
planted a seed that will keep him awake nights; drive rest from his
bones, and sleep from his pillow. Hardly is the garden planted, when he
must begin to hoe it. The weeds have sprung up all over it in a night.
They shine and wave