CHAPTER VI: THE JOB GARDENER
After all I had suffered at the hands of Elizabeth Tique’s gardener I determined not to keep one at all. That is the kind of resolution one makes, judging a whole class from a single specimen, and then buying experience. But it seemed to me that just as a cook is too pervasive in a small house, so a gardener occupies too much space in a small garden. I remembered the mowing machine, and the manure, and one thing and another, and thought how much enjoyment I should get from doing the garden myself, with the help of an occasional man. I did not know that in our neighbourhood that particular breed of garden pest is called a Saturday scratcher. If I had heard the term sooner I might have guessed what he would be like, but I engaged one in my innocence, and bought experience like other people. I engaged him on the recommendationof an enemy, and he tramped over the flower-beds to my door early one morning. He was just the sort of working man who gets caricatured on the music-hall stage: infinitely ugly and full of inane conversation. His opening remark annoyed me.
“Pretty little bit o’ garden you’ve got ’ere mum.”
“That’s a liar,” I thought, considering the weeds and the seedy laurel bushes, but I resolved not to give way to prejudice.
“There is a good deal to be done, Mr. Mullins,” I said vaguely. The fact was, I knew what I wanted the garden to look like when it was done, but my ideas began and ended there. I was as ignorant as Mullins himself; the difference between us was that I was not nearly so stupid. That is why we could not get on; if his wits had been equal to mine we should have devised something between us in spite of our ignorance—I was going to say, with the help of our ignorance—because we should have done something entirely original. Being unhampered byforegone conclusions born of knowledge, we should not have had our inspirations blighted, as so many people have who understand the possibilities of an art. And we might have revolutionised the laws of Nature; one never knows! But Mullins was a fool; he did not understand when I said that I wanted the garden to look as if the things grew there by themselves.
“You’ll want some nice beddin’-out plants, mum, if that’s so,” he observed.
“But, Mullins,” I said feverishly, “surely—do pull yourself together—isn’t bedding out that horrid thing you do with a plumb-line?”
“No, mum, no,” he replied, “pardon me, I don’t think you quite understand. Beddin’ out is nice young ’ardy plants that comes to their prime durin’ the summer months; gives far more effect they do than anything else.”
I remained doubtful, but weakened; he smiled in such a kindly, authoritative way.
“I used to be gardener with your ’usband’s pa, mum,” he ventured, just at the criticalmoment. “What a nice gentleman ’e was! and what a fine garden they always ’ad! We used to commence beddin’ out just about now, mum.”
I fell headlong into the gin. Mullins was utterly stupid and never took a point, but he made them sometimes and scored.
“He must know,” I thought, “why James’s father had acres and acres of hot-houses!” Then I remembered something; I clutched at a memory of my mother walking round the gardens at home. “The herbaceous border is getting rather thin, Ptarmigan,” I seemed to hear her say; “there won’t be enough flowers for the house. I can’t bear your stiff hot-house things.”
“Ah, yes, Mullins,” I said, upon this dim vision, “but I must have a good herbaceous border, or else we shall not have enough flowers for the house.”
“Make you a nice ’erbaceous border along that ’ere wall, mum,” he replied obligingly.
So we set to work. I bought catalogues and books of instructions; I also took in theAmateur Gardener. But this is the kind of way one gets let in. The book says:
“Pyrox gypsomanica (poor man’s rose). A very free flowering perennial; deep bright purple, standard growth; May to October; suits any soil.”
“Mopincosa juicyflorum. (English hibiscus); orange, scarlet, and blue; very prolific; suitable for damp waste places where soil occurs rarely; flowers all the year round.”
All this is just the cookery-book trick in another form. The people who write these books evidently form a ring, like oil magnates and deceivers of that sort; they monopolise the cooking and gardening that is done, and then they send out misleading literature telling us how simple it all is and getting us to buy their wares. I bought what the seedsmen’s lists called “strong hardy plants” of all sorts of beautiful things that were guaranteed to flower freely in damp waste places. Mullins and I planted them, and that was the last we heard of them. The places we chose were quitedamp enough; I am sure about that. Of course Mullins made it a point of honour to disapprove of everything I planted—one must expect that of any gardener—but in fact his were not any more successful than mine, and they cost more to buy. My private opinion is that on the night after I sowed any seeds Mullins came out with a small lantern, collected the soil, sifted it, and made Quaker oats for his breakfast next morning out of my godetia and poppy. I have read that mandragora or poppy is a powerful drug, and I suspect that is partly what is the matter with Mullins.
We put in bulbs, too, which no doubt he stuffs with some savoury compound and finds an excellent substitute for onions, and more digestible; either that, or else the entire gardening trade is riddled with the direct descendants of Ananias, and that seems almost too sweeping a statement to be credible. I prefer the Mullins’ meals hypothesis.
At present I have quite a bright little garden, and this is the plan on which Ihave achieved it. I have a border of stuffed cats down one side; they are of various sizes, and their glass eyes make a bright spot of colour amongst the misty duns and greys of their outer coatings; they are perennial, and not easily dashed by rain. Down the other side I have spread a wide border of coarse red flannel, and on this I contrive to raise quite a number of little evergreens. In the round beds (where the efficient female tells me there is nothing to prevent my having a capital show of roses) I have planted a nice lot of aspidistras. James has a friend who owned an aspidistra which he sent to a cold-storage place with a van-load of furniture when he went abroad for five years. The aspidistra was not valuable, and he did not much care if he never saw it again. But it was all right when he came back, and had put out a number of green shoots.
My third contrivance in the greenhouse where I have some plants is to put up wire netting to keep off Mullins. He used to goin there two or three times a day “just to give a look round,” as he called it, and after his visits it was impossible to keep anything alive except large families of green fly, which he seemed to bring with him. I had quite a promising collection there one week—some geraniums, a fuchsia or two, a hardy palm, and the remains of a good rose: it was nothing like dead when I left it that morning at ten o’clock. At twelve Mullins humped up the iron stair which leads to the greenhouse, spat once on the floor, exclaimed “Hum! ha! ho!” in a loud voice, and sent a message by Clara asking me for four-and-sixpence. By the afternoon there was not a living plant in the place, and the air was thick with green fly.
I once counted the number of pests (exclusive of Mullins) which I collected from the greenhouse and garden. I used to scrape balls of animated grey fluff off the staging and bottle different specimens of the attenuated orange and black works of the Almighty which I caught skating in and outof the soil, either on their stomachs, or with a pianola-like flexibility of touch on an unnecessary number of legs. I sent all these specimens to a friend at the University, and some of them turned out to be very rare and quite unusually destructive. There were forms of fungus, too, in the greenhouse that were quite pretty but very infectious, and were really animals—at least I think that was what he said—and I am absolutely certain that they were all brought by Mullins. He still comes, and I still pay him four-and-sixpence a week, because he keeps out other Mullinses. And I have learned now, as I said, to stop him from doing any active harm; I let him trundle the mowing machine when I am out, and talk to the cook, and at Christmas-time he dirties the house with large bunches of sooty holly, but it all makes for what the servants call “nice feeling.”