possibly do
that--jobbing gardeners will do anything. Any man who does that is not
fit to have a garden. He is only fit to collect house refuse in an open
cart during hot weather.

My own method is simple and refined. I have a large jar filled with a
strong solution of salt and water. I have, moreover, a large pair of
surgical forceps serrated on the inner edge, price one shilling at the
shop in the Strand. With the forceps I lift up the slug and I place him
in the salt water; he dies incontinently and very neatly. My best time
so far is a hundred and one in a quarter of an hour. I have found out
the thing which the green fly absolutely cannot stand, and I give the
green fly plenty of that thing with the syringe. I destroy earwigs. I
destroy caterpillars. I have not yet reached the fine Tennysonian
sensibility of the gentleman "whose eyes were tender over drowning
flies." I kill some things that other things may live. They cannot all
have it their own way in my garden, and I must settle which side is to
prevail. All the same, I do sometimes try to look at it from the slug's
point of view. What does the slug think about it? Let us hope and
believe that the slug does not think about it.

With what brutality, too, does the gardener fight against the prolific
impulses of nature. The dead flowers must be picked off from the sweet
peas; otherwise they give up work early. If you cut down the lupine
spikes as soon as the beans have formed, you will get more spikes. (I am
told that this will not weaken the plant if it is well fed, but I never
do it myself.) And what does it all mean, when one comes to think of it?
These poor beautiful things live and struggle only for the perpetuation
of their kind. When that is done, their warfare is accomplished. We make
lovely gardens by thwarting and baffling this natural instinct.

Even among the plants that I tend there is civil war. My garden is
surrounded by tall trees, so that at any hour of the day I can get
shade. I would not have it otherwise. I would not lose one of the trees.
But they are all unprincipled robbers. Their roots spread far underneath
the ground. The fight goes on, and they steal the sustenance that one
has given to the roses.

I knew a man who admired in his neighbour's garden the golden stars of
the stone-crop. He put a little piece in an envelope and planted it in
his own garden. A few years later he turned out of his garden three
cartloads of stone-crop; that,