The Battle of the Flowers.

Many people commit gardening and many of those who don't, have troubles, too. The chief drawback of a garden is that it is always wrongly situated. If it has a southern aspect it gets no sun in the winter; if it faces north it gets too much in the summer. If it tilts to the east the plants die of exhaustion through being wakened too early in the morning; if turned towards the west the domestic flora get to bed too late and succumb to deadly nightshade.

The only alternative is to have your garden situated in a biscuit tin so that you can keep it down in the basement or up in the loft or under the gas stove until such time as you strike a day which seems completely propitious to the propagation of floral growth—or words to this effect.

Of course, there are successful gardeners. You meet them on trains and trams and buses, descanting on their success with double-edged speckled spinozas and perennial palliases. In this respect gardening and fishing are somewhat akin; you hear much and see little. I do not suggest that all gardeners are liars. In fact, I once knew one who actually grew things; but he was a passive, spineless sort of creature—wholly devoid of that grand primitive sense of struggle for supremacy—who was content merely to plant things, care for them, and let Nature take her course unchallenged; unlike the average he-man horticulturists who love to pit their cunning against ruthless Nature by planting sun-flowers in the cellar, water lilies on the ash heap and ice-plants in the conservatory.

But the real fact is that the best way to rear a garden is to refrain from rearing it. The “rose that grows in No-man's Land” and the “Snowdrop On the River's Brink” both throve simply because there was nobody to blight them with blight mixtures and fix them with fertilizers.

On the other hand, you spray your pet rose with black lead against white butterfly, with red lead against green fly, with whiting against black-leaf; you inoculate it against prickly itch, you vaccinate it against cauliflower ear and you wrap a piece of sacking round its chest. What happens? It dies on you, of course. But, ignore it during the period a rose is supposed to need a mother's care and, when it is about to bloom, hop out and dot it one on the stamen with a mallet! What happens? You get blooms which even your wife will put in her vases. But such is gardening—and life in general!

And the bulbs you heave into the darkest corner of the garden as unworthy to fraternise with your prize

“Who loves to pit his cunning against ruthless Nature.”

“ham and eggers”! What do they do but spend the dark days of winter digging themselves in so that, in the spring, they present you with blooms as big as the average fourpenny cabbage, while your prize “ham and eggers” are a disgrace to any frying pan.

The fact of the matter is that Nature is continually at war with man and misleads him to expect certain things to happen among the spraxias and snapdragons, which never do. Thus, the experienced tactician, after making himself conversant with the accepted laws and canons of the horticultural hotbeds, takes the opposite course. If the experts advise sulphide of semolina or chloride of hydrophobia for the variegated aspirates, the wise gardener administers a dose of prussic or an injection of brimstone and treacle and sits back until the blooms arrive. Otherwise he will discover that his rambling roses are too feeble even to page 51 stroll, that his climbing clamberers get dizzy before they have clambered six inches, that the dahlias have a rooted objection to appearing in public, and the begonias are bed-ridden.