the perennials we had sown in the
autumn into their permanent places, and all through April he went about
with a long piece of string making parallel lines down the borders of
beautiful exactitude and arranging the poor plants like soldiers at a
review. Two long borders were done during my absence one day, and when I
explained that I should like the third to have plants in groups and
not in lines, and that what I wanted was a natural effect with no bare
spaces of earth to be seen, he looked even more gloomily hopeless than
usual; and on my going out later on to see the result, I found he had
planted two long borders down the sides of a straight walk with little
lines of five plants in a row--first five pinks, and next to them five
rockets, and behind the rockets five pinks, and behind the pinks five
rockets, and so on with different plants of every sort and size down to
the end. When I protested, he said he had only carried out my orders
and had known it would not look well; so I gave in, and the remaining
borders were done after the pattern of the first two, and I will have
patience and see how they look this summer, before digging them up
again; for it becomes beginners to be humble.

If I could only dig and plant myself! How much easier, besides being so
fascinating, to make your own holes exactly where you want them and put
in your plants exactly as you choose instead of giving orders that can
only be half understood from the moment you depart from the lines laid
down by that long piece of string! In the first ecstasy of having a
garden all my own, and in my burning impatience to make the waste places
blossom like a rose, I did one warm Sunday in last year's April during
the servants' dinner hour, doubly secure from the gardener by the day
and the dinner, slink out with a spade and a rake and feverishly dig a
little piece of ground and break it up and sow surreptitious ipomaea,
and run back very hot and guilty into the house, and get into a chair
and behind a book and look languid just in time to save my reputation.
And why not? It is not graceful, and it makes one hot; but it is a
blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in Paradise and known
what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad business of the
apple.

What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies,
birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town
acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and buryin