One rainy day last spring, two ladies visited me at Breeze Hill. One of them came from Harrisburg, and the other from Syracuse.
They were equipped with large umbrellas and galoshes, and so shielded from the rain, they accompanied me, similarly protected, around the garden.
They were in no hurry, and neither was I; we looked closely there and stopped here. They asked questions and made comments; I answered them and volunteered additional information. Altogether, we had a highly interesting and mutually profitable time.
The visit of these two ladies set me thinking about what gardening meant to them and other visitors like them and others very much unlike them. There were two real gardeners, true lovers of plants and flowers.
The steady rain did not check their enthusiasm; if anything, I think it served to intensify it.
They were honestly interested in the things they saw, not merely in a casual, superficial way but in an earnest, vital way. Gardening meant something to them.
But not all visitors, I recollected, have been like these two ladies. For that matter, the advancement of gardening in America being at the point it is today, I would doubtless be correct in saying that the visitors who have not been like these ladies have been in the majority.
But don’t misunderstand me, please! I do not mean that most visitors to Breeze Hill are uninterested in gardening.
But in the gamut of people, from those to whom gardening seems you moan almost everything to those to whom it means practically nothing, the two ladies mentioned would naturally come quite close to the top. So, the majority would have to be placed below them.
I would say that the majority of our visitors stand somewhere around the midpoint between the two extremes.
Unchanging Fundamentals
Time was when I walked about their garden with folks regularly and listened to many things about many plants.
But Anno Domini and General Arthritis have combined to make such trips less and less frequent, though I can still appreciate what people say and can still feel that I know what they are thinking. This has often made me say soundlessly of many of my visitors.
“They are only casually interested in gardening or “gardening means very little to them,” or “They don’t want a garden.”
Many of these folks have followed a mild and not very effective curiosity because they have heard of certain plants or flowers here that are esteemed to be rare or unusual.
Their attitude toward the garden is much as it might have been if they had been told that we had ten dogs with two tails each.
These are the folks who are attracted to oddities, any oddities, and for whom plants and flowers mean no more than a thousand and one other thing that periodically catches their fancy.
A Force Beyond Understanding
Then there are those visitors who insist on knowing just when the roses, tulips, or chrysanthemums will be at their very best, with the seeming implication that they’ll wait until then to show their full interest in the garden.
Some even want to know when the garden will be at its best, leaving me to infer that they’re sure it can’t be at its best.
The excuse I often make for this sort of attitude on the part of some visitors is that perhaps they are used to visiting gardens where only one or two “specialties” are grown and where, of course, the time of one’s visit may mean the difference between seeing a great deal and seeing nothing at all!
Satisfying Hunger For Spiritual Beauty
Still, another type of visitor is exemplified by the person who gushes enthusiastically about something he or she has seen in the garden and wants to know all about it but who hasn’t taken the trouble to read its name on the label and who can’t describe it beyond saying “it’s something like a daisy, except that it’s different”!
Now I’m fully aware, of course, that some of the conclusions I have drawn regarding visitors are based on appearances only and that possibly a person’s true feeling toward gardening is not accurately reflected by what he says and does when he visits me. I am, therefore, always willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
More often than I like to recall, however, I have been convinced, beyond any doubt whatever, that this or that visitor has not come here because he wanted to see a garden or because he was interested in plants and flowers but rather because he wanted to see a show, a spectacle, or was looking for oddities or even freaks, or else because he felt that visiting gardens was “the thing to do.”
Finding Faith and Well-Being in The Garden
In the foregoing paragraphs, I have had more to say about those of my visitors for whom gardening means little than about those for whom it means much. Perhaps that is only natural, human nature being what it is.
But in any case, since all this criticism is intended to be good-natured and merely to point out the errors of some folk’s attitudes towards gardening, it is sincerely hoped that I will not be accused of maliciously paying more attention to people’s faults than to their virtues.
Spreading the Gospel of Gardening
One thing these thoughts have made me realize, however, is that those of us who are engaged in spreading the gospel of gardening still have a very great field of work before us.
I have no doubt that we are making progress, but we still have a long way to go, and there is no time to relax the force of our drive.
Our concern is and always must be for those in this world for whom gardening still means so little but for whom it could and should mean so much.
44659 by J. Horace Mcfarland