A walk round the rectory garden is usually like this. Miss Bretherton always picks up a pair of gardening scissors and a basket mechanically as she steps out.
“What a wonderful glow of colour!” I exclaim, as I bury my nose in a magnificent Gloire de Dijon.
“But it is such a wretched thing for sending up suckers,” Miss Bretherton replies. “I’m always digging them up. Why, I declare there is one a foot high,” giving it a drastic prod with the scissors. “I thought I’d cut them all away yesterday”; more prods till the sucker is finally unearthed.
“Not nearly so fine as they would have been if that red-spotty blight hadn’t attacked them. Just look at these leaves!”
Snip, snip, snip! Off came a dozen or so.
I stop to admire the fairy flowers in the Virginia stock, rosy carmine, lemon and mauve, just opening in the sun.
“I don’t think there is anything sweeter for a border,” I remark.
“The trouble with Virginia stock is that it so soon looks untidy,” Miss Bretherton says dispiritedly. “Do what I will, I can’t keep the edges tidy once that goes off bloom. I pull it all out at last, and then that leaves a bare rough-dried looking space with nothing in it.”
I praise the white lilies—such a stately row of spotless beauty.
“I wish I could do something to hide that raggedness at the bottom of the stems. They do look so shabby. Excuse me, I see that Canterbury bell has withered off—that’s the worst of them. They all go at once so suddenly, and look such a withered mass. I must cut off those dead blooms, it may send up a second crop. But there, if it does, they will only be small bells!”
I’m not sure whether the handy man’s method is temperamental, but I know it is very conversational, if you can call it a conversation when he insists on doing the whole of it himself. He is an elderly bachelor; and Mrs. Widow once explained the situation to me:
“You see, he ain’t never had no wife to talk his head off for him, so he talks it off for hisself.”
I give him copious instructions whenever I leave, which he promises to carry out; but no matter what I may have asked him to do—whether it was to nail up the yellow roses over the front door, or to set lavender cuttings—it all works out to the same thing in the end: it is only the vegetables that are deemed worthy of mention. The flowers are just tolerated because—well, because I keep on putting them in the ground, and you can’t expect practical common-sense from a woman anyhow! But after all, it isn’t reasonable to expect an untrained cottager to make a garden different from those he sees around.