The Garden is asleep at last. Keen frosts at the end of November blackened the last of the flowers. We are hoping for a few Christmas Roses in a nook we know of, but they depend on the weather. December here! Why, it seems only a few weeks since we began the Garden Year, and now we are at the end of it. Not at the end of a year, in the gardening sense, but at the end of the year. As a matter of fact, we are already well on with our work for another season. That is how gardening leads you on. Season merges into season. Years overlap each other. Calendarial divisions are obliterated, and life passes under other rules of chronology. It is not March or April, but Daffodil time; not June, but Rose time; and so on.

December is a kind of cleaning-up month. All the leaves are down, so that grass and borders can be swept for the last time. We give a final mowing and rolling to the lawn, and so leave it neat. We convey all leaves to an obscure corner, there to rot down for mould. We wheel rubbish to the yard, and soon the odour of the garden fire spreads in the keen air. All refuse from the kitchen garden goes to the fire and is disposed of. The ash we keep for our composts. We shorten the long shoots of overgrown Roses in order to prevent winter wind sway (mark, this is not pruning; it is shortening). When the ground is hard with frost we wheel manure.

In open spells we push on with our alterations, our plantings, our trenchings. By Christmas, with the weather's good favour, all rough work shall be completed, and we can enjoy the festive season with tranquil minds.

Besides, fresh enterprises are looming up. The Smith-Wilkinsons, Eunice informs the author in firm tones one day, have a vinery. Apparently that is the end of it. She merely gives the information, as she might have told him that the Jones-Robinsons have an air-car. But the author knows Eunice, and groans as he thinks of his depleted banking account. Three days pass, and then Eunice asks the author how he likes the Smith-Wilkinsons, and if he knows that they have a vinery. The author likes the Smith-Wilkinsons very well indeed, and is proceeding to reflect upon the matter of the vinery, when he suddenly remembers an urgent appointment, and disappears. But he already knows that the day is lost. He makes a last effort at the third time of asking. He bursts into a short, hard laugh, and asks Eunice if she would not like a range of Peach houses as well. No one is quicker to perceive irony than Eunice at times, no one is more obtuse at others. She delightedly cries that the author is the dearest old thing alive, and accepts the Peach houses too!

Well, well, it is nice to make people happy, even if you have to save the subscription to one of your favourite clubs (which you visit twice a year), and smoke cheap cigars. The news about the fruit is sweet to Wilkins too. He immerses himself in specifications for houses, estimates are got, and so the die is cast. We are to have the choicest varieties - Wilkins will see to that - and already we picture on the table golden and purple clusters of luscious Grapes, and great, ruddy, melting Peaches and Nectarines. Strawberries will be forced, too, so that we may get them earlier.

A trouble comes to Wilkins one day at mid-December: the old squire is dead. Wilkins tells the author of the many, many years he served his former master, and never a sharp word or an angry look, but always gentleness, kindness, and perfect courtesy. Four days after Wilkins comes again, in his Sunday black, fresh from the funeral. His face has a singular look, half scared, half delighted. His hands tremble. "I was told to stop, sir, and when they all came out after the reading of the will, the butler rushed into the servants' hall, and said the squire had left me five hundred pounds. It's a fact, sir. I saw the lawyer-gentleman when he was driving off - five hundred pounds. I'm almost afraid to tell Eliza; she's been that down on the squire ever since I had notice, and now she'll feel such a fool."

So the author goes down to the cottage with Wilkins, and himself breaks the news, with Wilkins awkwardly fingering his stiff collar, and looking very hard away from his sharp-featured, bright-eyed little wife. Eliza's face flushes, she mutters something, then softens to tears. They are close on sixty, and they hadn't a halfpenny in the world beyond the week's earnings. Silence follows. Wilkins pretends to be at ease, and even starts to whistle, but is stopped instantly by a look from Eliza, and is much abashed. The author saves the situation by begging for a cup of tea. Eliza rattles cups, Wilkins rams wood into the fire as though stoking a battleship, and soon a very happy party sits down.

It is Christmas Eve, and we stand in the conservatory gathering flowers for the morrow. There are a few Lilies of the Valley on a shelf, Van Thol Tulips, Roman Hyacinths in abundance, Christmas Roses, Winter Cherries, Zonal Geraniums, Azaleas, Freesias, a pot or two of white Primulas, and Chrysanthemums. The pile of Holly on the floor is supposed to have come from our own trees, but we have a shrewd suspicion that Wilkins has gone farther afield for it - even, perhaps, to the old gardens where he reigned so long, and the thought of which is now tinged with no more bitterness for him.

The long years that we lived in London seem very far away, as we stand here with the soft, warm light stealing in from the cosy room. How foolish seem the doubts that assailed us when we first talked of going "farther out"! The great town had got its shackles on us, and they were not easily broken. It is almost with a shudder that we now think of the grim streets, the fetid air, the clamour, the circumscribed lives. It is a change from slavery to freedom; for the first time our lives are our own.

Our own, and not our own. In former days a jobbing gardener came, who jobbed, but not gardened, a day or two a week, and lived none knew where. We were as much out of his life, and he out of ours, as beings in different planets. But Wilkins could not be kept out, even if we wanted to exclude him. Wilkins the egotistical, the garrulous, the devoted, the faithful, flows in on us, and with Wilkins flows the little, keen-visaged, sharp-eyed Eliza. There are others, too, down in the village, whose lives have got linked with ours somehow. This is one of the things that we once spoke of with dread, but which now help us in our outlook on life and humanity.

Does the author sigh as he jingles a not over-filled pocket? No, because he has "gone into things," and lo! the Rose garden and the herbaceous borders, the frames and the conservatory, have been paid for out of savings on theatres and doctor's bills. Things balance, after all.

And Eunice's hands are full of flowers, her lips of laughter, her heart of love. For her, as for he whose life has sweetened under her influence, the Garden Year is the first of a new life.