ficed to a fit of laziness. The shilling that buys six
sweet-williams provides pleasure for many weeks. The sweet-william is, I
believe, a two-year thing, or as the sacred jargon of the gardener puts
it, a biennial. You start it one year and it flowers the next. It may be
a mean and cowardly thing to do to let the florist do the first year's
work on it, and buy it when it is ready to flower that season, but I do
it, and I shall continue to do it. I shall continue to do everything
that I can think of that will save me trouble in my garden without
injuring the garden. But the Iceland poppies are from seed that I myself
sowed. I have sown blood-red wallflowers and Canterbury bells to flower
next year. One can be lazy without being wholly bad.

Things which looked hopeless at first sight proved better on further
consideration. There was the lawn, for instance. The jobbing gardener
turned up his nose at the lawn. It slopes. It slopes in several
different directions simultaneously.

"There's only one thing to be done with that," said the jobber, "and the
sooner you make up your mind to it the better. That all wants to be
taken up, levelled, and relaid. It'll cost a bit of money, but it'll
never be satisfactory till it's done."

He produced figures and they frightened me. The lawn still slopes
deviously, and every day that I see it I am thankful for it. Nobody can
possibly play lawn-tennis on it. I hate white rectilineal lines on grass
almost more than I hate underdone mutton or "The Lost Chord". Therefore
it is a perpetual joy to me that my lawn slopes.

I asked the jobbing gardener what the roses were, planted in odd corners
of the lawn.

"Roses!" he said scornfully. "They ain't roses. It's just some common
sort of brier. What anybody put it there for, I don't know. It has never
flowered for the last three years, and never will flower, and if it did,
you wouldn't like it."

Those despised briers are all covered with flower at the present moment,
and I like them very much. They are not gardeners' roses, but they are
nicer to look at than the Putney bus.

Are there any plantains in my lawn? There are. There is also more grass
than there used to be. You can do a lot of things with plantains. If you
turn guinea-pigs loose on your lawn, so one newspaper informs me, they
will eat the plantains and leave the grass. But I have not got any
guinea-pigs, and I am not going to provide a manly but barbarous sport
for the cats of