Sometimes we do not
mind being repetitious. "In gardening" we say--as if we had never said
it before--"almost the only thing which costs unduly--in money or in
mortification--is for one to try to give himself somebody else's
garden!" Often we say this twice to the same person.
One of the reasons we give against it is that it leads to toy gardening,
and toy gardening is of all sorts the most pitiful and ridiculous. "No
true art," we say, "can tolerate any make-believe which is not in some
way finer than the reality it simulates. In other words, imitation
should always be in the nature of an amiable condescension. Whatever
falseness, pretension or even mere frailty or smallness, suggests to the
eye the ineffectuality of a toy is out of place in any sort of
gardening." We do not actually speak all this, but we imply it, and we
often find that the mere utterance of the one word, "toy gardening," has
a magical effect to suggest all the rest and to overwhelm with
contrition the bad taste and frivolity of many a misguided attempt at
adornment. At that word of exorcism joints of cerulean sewer-pipe
crested with scarlet geraniums, rows of whited cobbles along the walk or
drive like a cannibal's skulls around his hut, purple paint-kegs of
petunias on the scanty door-steps, crimson wash-kettles of verbenas,
ant-hill rockeries, and well-sweeps and curbs where no wells are, steal
modestly and forever into oblivion.
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