GARDENING.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19390, 27 July 1926, Page 14

GARDENING.

A RECREATION AND AN ART.

BX BEV. JAMES MILNE, M.A

Every man needs recreation, although every man is not an artist. Art makes a universal appeal through its message, although the artist may understand it best. This is why gardening, as a. hobby, is attractive. It is healthily recreative. In the open air, it calls into gentle exercise most of the muscles of tho body. It is an art also. One of the oldest, yet ever new, it continually suggests to its devotee truth which may enlighten, console or inspire. It is utilitarian, both in the homely and high sense. Let a man in his cottage garden grow vegetables, snd he is in the way of enriching his household in a salutary way j let him not forget the roses and the violets, and he is all the less liable to overlook the great things of life. Where the lilies blossom, thpir silonce speaks a lesson. Then, does it sound like a platitude to mention that a fine thing for a broken heart is to bury it in a garden ; for this is very true, as many a brave suffering gardener has in patience proved. That there is inspiration in a garden goes without proving. Who can look upon a well-kept garden without pleasure, unmoved ! If it is so to view it, what must it be to make it ? Tho answer is best found through experience of its making. Delving. To make a garden one must delve, or if this should mean too heavy a task for the gardener, he must have the work done for him; and this is to lose part of the ultimate glory, for there can be no beautiful garden apart from the first necessity of the turning over of its soil. The truo gardener must be at least a bit of an artist. He must have enough artistic perception to see tho garden as a whole, to feel its unity; to see its ending in its beginning, its start in its finish. If this is true, how he must grieve ta surrender the delving; for every artist, although he is must first and foremost be a workman. So, the gardener with spade in hand is seen advancing to the plot of ground he is to change into a garden. Lightly clad he is, as befits the work he has in hand; the breeze plays with his open shirt-collar, fanning his cheek neath his broad brimmed hat. With foot on the top of his spade blade, he bends to his task, thrusting its cutting edge deep down into tho soil; then wrenching back the spade handle, he bends low to lift from its cold, dark bed the brown, humid soil, turning it to the light and the sun. Spadeful follows spadeful, from side to fide of tho plot to bo cultivated. A long, straight trench is left behind the upturned earth, which is straightway filled leaving another and similar, as the gardener moves slowly yet steadily from side to side. It seems an endless job, the delving of the plot. The distance across seenis not so long, but how far and vast, the way to be delved to its end, and how slow the progress! So one watching him may surmise; but not so, the gardener. He has no eyes to the back of his head, he sees the end only from the. beginning. Slowly but surely, the brown band of earth broadens before his eyes. He needs not to reflect that the end in time is sure; and with tho artist time is nothing to his work. So, he may toil as workman at his task; but with this secret, he cannot find the toil irksome. Allocation. But there are other necessities to the making of a garden besides delving. There is the partitioning or dividing up of the area to be used as a garden. There is the laying down of sanded, asphalted or cement walks; and here the gardener through sheer ignorance of technical knowledge required for such work may find it necessary to call in extraneous aid; but the allocating of space for say, vegetables, lawns, flowers and shrubs is part of the pleasure and responsibility which the gardener cannot afford to miss. Here comes a clear call to whatever of the artist may be about him, as also an appeal to his workman instincts; for while the artist may allocate, the workman must divide, seeing to ways and means unto attainment of the artist's plans. Is there space for a potato patch, can he grow leeks, onions, carrots, cabbage, peas, beans and lettuce ? These are the questions, with others such like, which considerably trouble the spirit of the gardener as he reflects that he must have a rose garden and a violet bed. Then, what of the lawn; will it just suffice for a game of croquet, or shall it be spacious and ample for tennis ? He ruefully admits to himself that his garden is too small for anything. Yet there comes to him the after-thought that tennis lawns in all their roomy expanse of verdure require frequent mowing. He reflects almost with a sense of comfort that after all he is but an amateur gardener; he is in ' gardening, out for a hobby not for a toil; and he readily solaces himself by reckoning how many herbaceous plants, how many flowering shrubs with even a few fruit trees may grow where the tennis lawn might have been. With such questions and their answering reflections does the gardener frame his allocations in laying cut his garden, at once an art and task revealing to him his limitations in space, binding him down to what is possible, encouraging him to sweet content. Thus, even into the making of a garden come theprivilego and responsibility of choice, which when exercised with wisdom does much to make men. Not in a day is such allocation made, but each such choice takes place in its season. Such seasons in temperate climes go round the year, so that in any or every month something may be done in a garden. One of the great attractions about a garden is that it is never made, there is ever something to be done in a garden.

When to Garden. Are spring and summer the special seasons for gardening ? Then what of the autumn and winter ? Spring comes over with an inspiration for gardening. Its commission and cry is to sow and to plant. Seed in faith and in a kind of seeming wantonness is cast into soil prepared for it and covered. As the summer comes stealing in, seedlings are bedded out and there is constant weeding to be done. As the sun rises high to its zenith and sinks again as the season advances, each tree and shrub and plant and flower seem in one. voice to shout for water; and that every day, save, as it seems, when welcome summer sh6wers counsel silence. When autumn comes with shortening days and colder showers, when the nights are clear, and there is the suggestion of cold at early morn; then the onions are uprooted, dried, and, with the potatoes, stored. As the .autumn runs on, the glory of the chrysanthemum, dahlia and other flowers of the season is seen. As it heralds its close in writing of crimson and purple and gold upon the trees and hedgerows,- the gardener, unearthing bulbs, places them in winter quarters. Then Boreas blows and the leaves fall in fluttering showers. They lie piled up against fences, and thickly spread over the lawns, which border the plot where the fruit trees grow. Showers are now frequent with at times rough, tempestuous winds; winter has come, and what can be done in the garden? There is never a time when the gardener feels free of his garden. As a mother her child, so he watches it. Even in the winter of its sleep, it Is his care; and calls in its restlessness for his attention. When the trees are bare, and the seem-, ingly endless job of gathering their leaves is well over, there are gutters to be cleared of debris, there are ditches to be dug; it may be even a drain to be laid down or deepened, that the blessing of moisture may not be allowed to run unto soakage. The garden must be well drained, for in the winter there are occasional late rosesj snowdrops- in southern climes with association of northern latitudes in their naming, and other brave flowers which withstand its rigour. This is not to mention certain homely, vet hardy, vegetables, which fight the tertide and so also should be encouraged by tending Pioneers they all are of the spring; bearing their testimony under hardship that the time to garden is