My Summer in a Garden | Page 9

in redundant life. The docks have almost gone to
seed; and their roots go deeper than conscience. Talk about the London
Docks!--the roots of these are like the sources of the Aryan race. And

the weeds are not all. I awake in the morning (and a thriving garden
will wake a person up two hours before he ought to be out of bed) and
think of the tomato-plants,--the leaves like fine lace-work, owing to
black bugs that skip around, and can't be caught. Somebody ought to
get up before the dew is off (why don't the dew stay on till after a
reasonable breakfast?) and sprinkle soot on the leaves. I wonder if it is I.
Soot is so much blacker than the bugs, that they are disgusted, and go
away. You can't get up too early, if you have a garden. You must be
early due yourself, if you get ahead of the bugs. I think, that, on the
whole, it would be best to sit up all night, and sleep daytimes. Things
appear to go on in the night in the garden uncommonly. It would be
less trouble to stay up than it is to get up so early.
I have been setting out some new raspberries, two sorts,--a silver and a
gold color. How fine they will look on the table next year in a cut-glass
dish, the cream being in a ditto pitcher! I set them four and five feet
apart. I set my strawberries pretty well apart also. The reason is, to give
room for the cows to run through when they break into the garden,--as
they do sometimes. A cow needs a broader track than a locomotive; and
she generally makes one. I am sometimes astonished, to see how big a
space in, a flower-bed her foot will cover. The raspberries are called
Doolittle and Golden Cap. I don't like the name of the first variety, and,
if they do much, shall change it to Silver Top. You never can tell what
a thing named Doolittle will do. The one in the Senate changed color,
and got sour. They ripen badly,--either mildew, or rot on the bush.
They are apt to Johnsonize,--rot on the stem. I shall watch the
Doolittles.

THIRD WEEK
I believe that I have found, if not original sin, at least vegetable total
depravity in my garden; and it was there before I went into it. It is the
bunch, or joint, or snakegrass,--whatever it is called. As I do not know
the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his
garden,--name things as I find them. This grass has a slender, beautiful
stalk: and when you cut it down, or pull up a long root of it, you fancy
it is got rid of; but in a day or two it will come up in the same spot in
half a dozen vigorous blades. Cutting down and pulling up is what it
thrives on. Extermination rather helps it. If you follow a slender white

root, it will be found to run under the ground until it meets another
slender white root; and you will soon unearth a network of them, with a
knot somewhere, sending out dozens of sharp-pointed, healthy shoots,
every joint prepared to be an independent life and plant. The only way
to deal with it is to take one part hoe and two parts fingers, and
carefully dig it out, not leaving a joint anywhere. It will take a little
time, say all summer, to dig out thoroughly a small patch; but if you
once dig it out, and keep it out, you will have no further trouble.
I have said it was total depravity. Here it is. If you attempt to pull up
and root out any sin in you, which shows on the surface,--if it does not
show, you do not care for it,--you may have noticed how it runs into an
interior network of sins, and an ever-sprouting branch of them roots
somewhere; and that you cannot pull out one without making a general
internal disturbance, and rooting up your whole being. I suppose it is
less trouble to quietly cut them off at the top--say once a week, on
Sunday, when you put on your religious clothes and face so that no one
will see them, and not try to eradicate the network within.
Remark.--This moral vegetable figure is at the service of any
clergyman who will have the manliness to come forward and help me
at a day's hoeing on my potatoes. None but the orthodox need apply.
I, however, believe in the intellectual, if not the moral, qualities of
vegetables, and especially weeds. There was a worthless vine that (or
who) started up about