DROUGHT IN THE GARDEN

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 288, 31 August 1929, Page 29

DROUGHT IN THE GARDEN

BY

A GARDENER

A year ago at this date I was writing of the joy attendant on the ritual watering of a garden after a hot summer day. How much deeper would be the joy now could I take the idle hose from the tool shed and watch the first glad leap of the water and the drops glittering on the grateful leaves. We have been accustomed, in the district in which I live, to be a little patronis-

ing to those who suffered from a shortage of water; with us it was almost an article of faith that our water supply never failed. Had not our water company helped other less-favoured districts iu the great drought of 1921?

Now the unexpected has happened, and we have been told not only that we must not use a hose in our gardens this summer, but that years may pass before the slow working of Parliament and the consequent operations make it possible to use a hose freely again. “We must hold ourselves ready for anything,” writes Mr. Nevinson, of our climate, in his “The English.” “and the readiness is all”; but it is not very easy to be ready for a drought in such a case as ours, nor to face the fact with a proper equanimity. Certainly sentiment may degenerate very easily into sentimentality; a man is not entitled to betray humanity. I may say with truth, for instance, that my* flowers are beautiful, and that my neighbour is not, but that does not entitle me to use water for my flowers to the possible detriment of my neighbour in time of drought. I may believe that my garden is an asset, and my neighbour’s child a liability, but the health of my neighbour’s child must come before the saving of my flowers. Yet a drought does provoke an un-Christian spirit. Everyone suspects everyone else. Sarcastic things are said about the number of baths taken bv members of Brown’s family every day, and it is whispered that Smith’s proud exhibition of the soapiness of the water with which he sprinkles (it is no more) bis garden is not proof as good as it seems that the water has been used already for

domestic purposes. There are ways — Even Robinson’s boast that he has discovered a well brings no more than fiercely ironical compliments on Robinson’s misplaced ingenuity : it: is whispered that it is Company’s water that supplies the well from which Robinson draws with so much pride and apparent exertion. All this is bad. and I am afraid it is rather petty also; for all these little subterfuges" of baths and washing-up water and the like have very little effect in a real summer. Tfie most, that anyone can do by these methods is to water occasionally some of the more shallow-rooted plants. To the gardener, not entirely without imagination (and every true gardener has a good deal of imagination, or he would give up gardening, and live in a town) a drought is a painful thing in more wavs than one. “It is a beautiful day,” says someone. “Yes,” replies the gardener, with a feeling of one who makes a handsome concession, “blit we do need rain.” Then comes .the grave rebuke. “Oh. but think of the holiday folk.” This admonition tills me (I confess) with rage. It is utterly irrational and illogical, and yet it has the effect, for the moment, of making one feel that one has grudged their enjoyment to the

toiling, but temporarily holiday-making millions. Actually, we do want rain if we do want rain, and the holiday folk have nothing to do with the matter either way. Anyhow, we are not demanding a downpour of the kind which made the clergyman recant on a deluge, his pulpit plea for rain with “We thank Thee, O Lord, for hearing our prayer, but this is preposterous.”

Holiday folk should not be so bankrupt of ideas as to be unable to find something to do during a few hours of rain. For it is when one is smarting a little from such a rebuke that one goes into the garden with nerves a little raw, and receives the silent petition of the flowers. To the shy man there is no ordeal more terrible than that of stepping into an assembly and feeling all eyes fixed upon him. So, at such a time as this, is the feeling of the gardener entering, when the sun is travelling low into the west, his garden. At once it seems that every sound is hushed, and that every eye is turned upon the insignificant mortal who represents Providence to the flowers. Every flower has turned its head to watch him : through the silence there' seems to come a whisper, struck by the breeze from the plants themselves—i “Surely to-night—he must be bringing water to-night.” Flowers vary like people: the delphiniums hold high their heads, and the proud lychnis shakes its scarlet crown and glories in the sunshine; but the pyrethrums are wilting, the shorn lupin plants have all their foliage awry, the pansies droop, the foliage of the poppies is brown and withered, and the gay Esehscholtzia and overladen clarkia seem to have outgrown their strength, but not their beauty. In this unaccustomed summer flowers have been forced before their time, so that never was the garden so full of colour, though it is the colour sometimes of the patient in fever. And between the borders the grass plots sicken almost to death, brown and still browner with each succeeding day. How thev would drink the water that one longs to give! How pitiful that miserable sprinkling which is all poor honesty can give!

Still, there is the. miracle of the flowers’ fight for life. Our denial of the water they need brings from them nothing more than that silent appeal, unless we are to think that their very beauty and squandering of colour is in itself a rebuke to ns for a neglect they cannot understand. It is with them, I suspect, as with us, though it is not always with us as with them. We, too, live under a dispensation we may not understand. We, too. as it seems to us, languish under neglect undeserved; weeds seem to us to flourish in our own world just as they flourish even in a garden in time of drought; Providence, we think, could bring us relief just as easily as we. for all the flowers know, could bring out the hose on torrid evenings. Only there is this difference. We often sulk: flowers never. We often give up the game without any long struggle; the flowers tight every inch of the ground. This morning I came upon a plant which the drought had killed, but even in dying it had contrived to put forth one pitiful little flower. If morals were not out of date there might be something there for remembrance and for thought.—ll. T. Kemball Cook, in the “Manchester Guardian.”