I will begin by telling you that I was brought up for the most part in the country, in a beautiful, wild, old-fashioned garden. This garden, through circumstances, had remained in the hands of an old gardener for more than thirty years, which carries us back nearly a century. Like so many young people I see about me now, I cared only for the flowers growing, that I might have the pleasure of picking them. Mr. Ruskin says that it is luxurious and pleasure-loving people who like them gathered. Gardening is, I think, essentially the amusement of the middle-aged and old. The lives of the young, as a rule, are too full to give the time and attention required.

Almost all that has remained in my mind of my young days in this garden is how wonderfully the old man kept the place. He succeeded in flowering many things year after year with no one to help him, and with the frost in the valley to contend against in spring. It was difficult, too, for him to get seeds or plants, since the place was held by joint owners, whom he did not like to ask for them. The spot was very sheltered, and that is one of the greatest of all secrets for plant cultivation. An ever-flowing mill-stream ran all round the garden; and the hedges of China-roses, Sweetbriar, Honeysuckle, and white Hawthorn tucked their toes into the soft mud, and throve year after year. The old man was a philosopher in his way, and when on a cold March morning my sisters and I used to rush out after lessons and ask him what the weather was going to be, he would stop his digging, look up at the sky, and say: 'Well, miss, it may be fine and it may be wet; and if the sun comes out, it will be warmer.' After this solemn announcement he would wipe his brow and resume his work, and we went off, quite satisfied, to our well-known haunts in the Hertfordshire woods, to gather Violets and Primroses for our mother, who loved them. All this, you will see, laid a very small foundation for any knowledge of gardening; and yet, owing to the vivid character of the impressions of youth, it left a memory that was very useful to me when I took up gardening later in life. To this day I can smell the tall white double Rockets that throve so well in the damp garden, and scented the evening air. They grew by the side of glorious bunches of Oriental Poppies and the on-coming spikes of the feathery Spiraea aruncus. This garden had peculiar charms for us, because, though we hardly realised it, such gardens were already beginning to grow out of fashion, sacrificed to the new bedding-out system, which altered the whole gardening of Europe. I shall allude to this again. I can never think of this old home without my thoughts recurring to Hood's poem 'I remember! I remember!' too well known perhaps, even by the young, to justify my quoting it here. Equally graven on my memory is a much less familiar little poem my widowed mother used to say to me as we walked together up and down the gravel paths, with the primrose sky behind the tall Beeches of the neighbouring park. For years I never knew where it came from, nor where she learnt it in her own sentimental youth. Not long ago I found it in a book of selections. It was written by John Hamilton Reynolds, that warm friend of poor Keats, who, as Mr. Sidney Colvin tells us in his charming Life of the poet, never rose to any great eminence in either literature or law, and died in 1852, as clerk of the county, at Newport, Isle of Wight. As Mr. Colvin remarks, it is only in his association with Keats that his name will live. Yet my mother loved the poem, which is full of the sentiment of our little home:

Go where the water glideth gently ever,

Glideth through meadows that the greenest be; Go, listen to our own beloved river,

And think of me.

Wander in forests where the small flower layeth

Its fairy gem beneath the giant tree; Listen to the dim brook pining while it playeth,

And think of me.

Watch when the sky is silver pale at even,

And the wind grieveth in the lonely tree; Go out beneath the solitary heaven,

And think of me.

And when the moon riseth as she were dreaming,

And treadeth with white feet the lulled sea, Go, silent as a star beneath her beaming,

And think of me.

But enough of these old woman's recollections, and back to the present, for the sentiment of one generation is very apt to appear as worthless sentimentality to the next.

The garden I have now is a small piece of flat ground surrounding an ordinary suburban house. Kitchen-garden, flower-garden, house and drive can scarcely cover more than two acres. The garden is surrounded by large forest trees, Spanish Chestnuts and Oaks, whose wicked roots walk into all the beds almost as fast as we cut them off. The soil is dry, light and sandy, and ill-adapted to garden purposes. We are only sixteen miles from London, and on unfavourable days, when the wind is in the blighting south-east, the afternoons are darkened by the smoke of the huge city. This is an immense disadvantage to all plant life and very injurious to Roses and many other things. For five or six months in the winter I live away in London. People often envy me this, and say: 'What could you do in the garden in the winter?' But no true gardener would make this remark, as there is much to be done at all times and seasons. Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. You are always living three, or indeed six, months hence. I believe that people entirely devoid of imagination never can be really good gardeners. To be content with the present, and not striving about the future, is fatal.

Living in London in the winter necessitates crowding the little greenhouse to overflowing with plants and flowers adapted for sending to London-chosen because they will bear the journey well, and live some time in water on their arrival.