For the same reason that your town man keeps a pot of Geraniums on his window-sill, and a caged bird in his house, your countryman plants bright-coloured flowers by his door, and regales his children with news of the first cuckoo. They pull as much of Heaven down as will accommodate itself to their plot of earth.

Any man standing in the centre of however small a space of his personal ownership—a piece of drugget in a garret, a patch of garden—makes it the hub of the universe round which the stars spin, on which his world revolves. Within a hand-stretch of him lie all he is, his intimate possessions, his scraps of comfort scratched out of the hard earth: books, pictures, photographs showing the faces of his small world of friends and his tiny travels—how little difference there is between a walk through Piccadilly and a journey across Asia: your great traveller has little more to say than the man who has found Heaven in a penny bunch of Violets, or heard the stars whisper over St. James’s Park—within his reach are the things he has paid the price of life for, and they are the cloak with which he covers his nakedness of soul against the all-seeing eye he calls his Destiny.

With all this, commenced perhaps in cowardice—for the earth’s brown crust is too like a grave, the garret floor too like a shell of wood—your man, town or country, grown to know love of little things, nurses a seedling as if it were his conscience, patches his drugget as if it were a verse he’d like to polish. Out of the vast dreary waste of faces who pass by unheeding, and the unseeing world that does not care whether he lives or dies, he makes his small hoard of treasures, as a child hides marbles, thinking them precious stones—as, indeed, they are to those who have eyes to see—and, be they books, or pictures, pots of plants, or curious conceits in china, they all answer for flowers, for the bright-coloured spots of comfort in a life of doubt.

No man thinks this out carefully, and sets about to plan his garden in this spirit: he feels a need, and meets it as he can. In this manner we are all cottage gardeners.

In days gone by—days of serfdom, oppression, battle, slavery, poverty—the countryman passed his day waiting for the next blow, living between pestilences, and praying in the dark for small sparks of comfort. The monks kept the land sweet by growing herbs in sheltered places; the countryman looked dully at Periwinkles and Roses and Columbines, thought them pretty, and passed by. Even the meanest flower, Shepherd’s-eye or Celandine, was too high for him to reach. (The poet who keeps Jove’s Thunder on his mantelpiece would understand that.) Roses were common enough even in the dark ages; the English hedgerow threw out its fingers of Wild Rose and scented the air—but where was the man with a nose for fragrance when a mailed hand was on his shoulder. Those Roses on the Field of Tewkesbury—think of them stained with blood and flowering over rotting corpses.

Little did the dull ploughman think of Roses in the hedge, or Violets in the bank, he’d little care except for a dish of Pulse. Yet, all the time, curious men were studying botany, dredging the earth for secrets, as the astronomer swept the sky. The Arviells, Gilbert and Hernicus, were, one in Europe, the other in Asia, collecting good plants and herbs to replenish the Jardins de Santé the monks kept—that in the thirteenth century, too, with war clouds everywhere, and steel-clad knights wooing maidens in castles by the secondhand means of luting troubadours.

The Arts of Rome were dead, buried, and cut up by the plough. (How many ploughmen, such as Chaucer knew, turned long brown furrows over Roman vineyards, and black crows, following, pecked at bright coins, brought by the plough to light.)

All at once, it must have seemed, the culture of flowers, was in the air: Carnations became the rage; then men spent heaven knows what on a Tulip bulb; built orangeries; sent Emissaries abroad to cull flowers in the East. The great men’s gardeners, great men themselves, kept flowers in the plot of ground about their cottages; gave out a seed or so here and there; talked garden gossip at the village ale-house. (Tradescant steals Apricots from Morocco into England. A Carew imports Oranges. The Cherry orchards at Sittingbourne are planted by one of Henry the Eighth’s gardeners. Peiresc brings all manner of flowers to bloom under our grey skies: great numbers of Jessamines, the clay-coloured Jessamine from China; the crimson American kind; the Violet-coloured Persian.)

The grass piece by the cottage door begins to find itself cut into beds; uncared for flowers, wild Gilly-flowers, Thyme, Violets and the like, give colour to the cottage garden that has only just become a garden. With that comes competition: one man outdoes another, begs plants and seeds of all his friends; buds a Rose on to a Briar standard, and boasts the scent of his new Clove Pinks, And so it grew that times were not so strenuous: Queen Victoria comes to the throne, and with prosperity come the pretty frillings of life, and cottage gardens ape their masters’ Rose walks, and collections of this and that. To-day Africa and Asia nod together in a sunny cottage border, and Lettuces from the Island of Cos show their green faces next to Sir Walter Raleigh’s great gift to the poor man, the Potato. Poplars from Lombardy grow beside the garden gate; the Currant bush from Zante drips its jewel-like fruit tassels under a Cherry tree given to us, indirectly, by Lucullus, lost by us in our slumbering Saxon times, and here again, with Henry the Eighth’s gardener, from Flanders. In some quite humble gardens the Cretan Quince and Persian Peach grow; so that history, poetry, and romance peer over Giles’s rustic hedge; and the wind blows scents of all the world through the small latticed window.

Ploughman Giles, sitting by his cottage door, smoking an American weed in his pipe while his wife shells the Peas of ancient Rome into a basin, does not realise that his little garden, gay with Indian Pinks and African Geraniums, and all its small crowd of joyous-coloured flowers, is an open book of the history of his native land spread at his feet. Here’s the conquest of America, and the discovery of the Cape, and all the gold of Greece for his bees to play with. Here’s his child making a chain of Chaucer’s Daisies; and there’s a Chinese mandarin nodding at him from the Chrysanthemums; and there’s a ghost in his cabbage patch of Sir Anthony Ashley of Wimbourne St. Giles in Dorsetshire.

Ploughman Giles is a fortunate man, and we, too, bless his enterprise and his love of striking colours and good perfumes when we lean over the gate of his cottage garden to give him good-day.

I showed him once a photograph of a picture by Holbein—the Merchant of the Steel Yard—and pointed out the vase of flowers on the table and the very same flowers growing side by side in his garden, Carnations, the old single kind, and single Gilly-flower. He looked at the picture with his glasses cocked at the proper angle on his nose—he’s an oldish man and short-sighted—and said in his husky voice, “Well, zur, I be surprised to zee un.” And he called out his wife to look—which didn’t please her much as she was cooking—but, when she saw the flowers, “In that there queer gentleman’s room, and as true as life, so they do be,” she became enthusiastic, wiped her hands many times on her apron, and looked from the picture to the actual flowers growing in her garden with a kind of awe and wonder. It was of far more interest to them to know that they were hand in glove with the history of their own country than it would have been to learn that chemists made a wonderful drug called digitalis out of the Foxgloves by the fence. I gave them the photograph and it hangs in a proud position next to a stuffed and bloated perch in a glass-case; and, what is more, they have an added sense of dignity from the dim, far away time the picture represents to them.

“He might a plucked they flowers in this very garden,” she says; and indeed, he might if he had happened that way. But the older flowers, though they don’t realise it, are the people themselves. Ploughman Giles and his wife, have been on the very spot far, far longer than the Pinks and Gilly-flowers, blooming into ripe age, rearing countless families back and back and back, until one can almost see a Giles sacrificing to Thor and Odin at the stone on the hill behind the cottage. The Norman Church throws its shadow over the graves of countless Gileses, and over the graves, pleasant-eyed English Daisies shine on the grass.

After all, when we see a cottage standing in its glowing garden, with a neat hedge cutting it off from its fellows; with children playing eternal games with dolls (Mr. Mould’s children following the ledger to its long home in the safe—shall I ever forget that?), we see the whole world, cares, joys, birth, death and marriage; the wealth of nations scattered carelessly in flowers, spoils from every continent, surrounded by a hedge, its own birds to sing, its hundred forms of life, feeding, breeding, dying round the cottage door; and, at night, its little patch of stars overhead.

It was a fanciful child, perhaps, but children are full of quaint ideas, who caught the moon in a bright tin spoon, and put it in a bottle, and drew the cork at night to let the moon out to sail in the sky. The child found the tin spoon, dropped by a passing tinware pedlar, in the road, waited till night came, with his head full of a fairy story he had heard, and when it was dark, except for the moon, he stepped into the garden, held the bowl of the spoon to catch the moon’s reflection, and when she showed her yellow face distorted in the bright spoon, he poured the reflection, very solemnly, into a bottle and corked it fast and tight. Then, with a whispered fairy spell, some nurse’s gibberish, he took the precious bottle and hid it in a cupboard along with other mysterious tokens. That’s a symbol of all our lives, bottling up moons and letting them out at nights. Isn’t a garden just such a dream-treat to some of us? There are golden Marigolds for the sun we live by, and silver Daisies for the stars, and blue Forget-me-nots for summer skies. Heaven at our feet, and angels singing from birds’ throats among the trees.

Sometimes we see one cottage garden, next to a Paradise of colour, flaunting Geraniums, and all the summer garland, and in it a poor tree or so, a few ill-kept weedy flowers, overgrown Stocks, a patch of drunken-looking Poppies, a grass-grown waste of choked Pinks: the whole place with a sullen air. What is the matter with the people living there? A decent word will beg a plant or two, seeds and cuttings can be had for the asking. Is it a poor or a proud spirit who refuses to join the other displays of colour? Knock at the door, and your answer comes quick-footed; it is the poor spirit answers you. Of course, there are men who can coax blood out of a stone, and find big strawberries in the bottom of the basket; and others who cannot grow anything, try as they may. It is common enough to hear this or that will not grow for so-and-so, or that man makes such a plant flourish where mine all die. There’s something between man and his flowers, some sympathy, that makes a Rose bloom its best for one, and Carnations wither under his touch, or Asters show their magic purples for one, and give a weak display for another. No one knows what speaks in the man to the Roses that bloom for him, or what distaste Carnations feel for all his ministrations, but the fact remains—any gardener will tell you that. So with your man of greenhouses, so with your humble cottage gardener, and, looking along a village street, the first glance will show you not who loves the flowers but whom flowers love.

This, of course, is not the reason of the weedy garden of the poor spirit, the reason for that is obvious: the poor spirit never rejoices, and to grow and care for flowers is a great way of rejoicing. There’s many a man sows poems in the spring who never wrote a line of verse: his flowers are his contribution to the world’s voice; united in expressions of joy, the writer, the painter, the singer, the flower-grower are all part of one great poem.

The average person who passes a cottage garden is more moved by the senses than the imagination; he or she drinks deep draughts of perfume, takes long comfort to the eyes from the fragrant and coloured rood of land. They do not cast this way and that for curious imaginings; it might add to their pleasure if they did so. There are men who find the whole of Heaven in a grain of mustard seed; and there are those who, in all the pomp and circumstance of a hedge of Roses, find but a passing pleasure to the eye.

We, who take our pleasure in the Garden of England, who feast our eyes on such rich schemes of colours she affords, have reason to be more than grateful to those who encourage the cottage gardener in his work. It is from the vicarage, rectory, or parsonage gardens that most encouragement springs; it is the country clergyman and his wife who, in a large measure, are responsible for the good cottage gardening we see nearly everywhere. These, and the numberless societies, combine to keep up the interest in gardening and bee-keeping, to which we owe one of our chiefest English pleasures. The good garden is the purple and fine linen of the poor man’s life; poets, philosophers, and kings have praised and sung the simple flowers that he grows. Wordsworth for instance, sings of a flower one finds in nearly every cottage garden:

Then again, Mrs. Browning, who loved Nature and England, and spoke her love in such delicate fancies, writes of flowers in “Our Gardened England,” in a poem called,