Saki

The Occasional Garden

"Don't talk to me about town gardens," said Elinor Rapsley; "which means, of cou
rse, that I want you to listen to me for an hour or so while I talk about nothin
g else. 'What a nice-sized garden you've got,' people said to us when we first m
oved here. What I suppose they meant to say was what a nice-sized site for a gar
den we'd got. As a matter of fact, the size is all against it; it's too large to
be ignored altogether and treated as a yard, and it's too small to keep giraffe
s in. You see, if we could keep giraffes or reindeer or some other species of br
owsing animal there we could explain the general absence of vegetation by a refe
rence to the fauna of the garden: 'You can't have wapiti and Darwin tulips, you
know, so we didn't put down any bulbs last year.' As it is, we haven't got the w
apiti, and the Darwin tulips haven't survived the fact that most of the cats of
the neighbourhood hold a parliament in the centre of the tulip bed; that rather
forlorn looking strip that we intended to be a border of alternating geranium an
d spiraea has been utilised by the cat-parliament as a division lobby. Snap divi
sions seem to have been rather frequent of late, far more frequent than the gera
nium blooms are likely to be. I shouldn't object so much to ordinary cats, but I
do complain of having a congress of vegetarian cats in my garden; they must be
vegetarians, my dear, because, whatever ravages they may commit among the sweet
pea seedlings, they never seem to touch the sparrows; there are always just as m
any adult sparrows in the garden on Saturday as there were on Monday, not to men
tion newly-fledged additions. There seems to have been an irreconcilable differe
nce of opinion between sparrows and Providence since the beginning of time as to
whether a crocus looks best standing upright with its roots in the earth or in
a recumbent posture with its stem neatly severed; the sparrows always have the l
ast word in the matter, at least in our garden they do. I fancy that Providence
must have originally intended to bring in an amending Act, or whatever it's call
ed, providing either for a less destructive sparrow or a more indestructible cro
cus. The one consoling point about our garden is that it's not visible from the
drawing-room or the smoking-room, so unless people are dinning or lunching with
us they can't spy out the nakedness of the land. That is why I am so furious wit
h Gwenda Pottingdon, who has practically forced herself on me for lunch on Wedne
sday next; she heard me offer the Paulcote girl lunch if she was up shopping on
that day, and, of course, she asked if she might come too. She is only coming to
gloat over my bedraggled and flowerless borders and to sing the praises of her
own detestably over-cultivated garden. I'm sick of being told that it's the envy
of the neighbourhood; it's like everything else that belongs to her -- her car,
her dinner-parties, even her headaches, they are all superlative; no one else e
ver had anything like them. When her eldest child was confirmed it was such a se
nsational event, according to her account of it, that one almost expected questi
ons to be asked about it in the House of Commons, and now she's coming on purpos
e to stare at my few miserable pansies and the gaps in my sweet-pea border, and
to give me a glowing, fulllength description of the rare and sumptuous blooms in
her rose-garden."