Disagreeable People I Have Known Who Have Loved Plants

NOTHING abut that awful inductive habit would ever have led me to furnish such a title as this. The inductive process is not natural to me, and I always feel a little mean after using it. I would much prefer to go on the rest of my days in my early, easy-going, and naïve theory that all who love plants must be lovely, and to say of each exception to the rule that it did not count. But of late the exceptions have become so turbulent and numerous that they must be reckoned with and brought into some sort of order. Having for some time been applying a process of induction, severe induction, to my earlier creed, I now venture forth my growing doubts, in the hope — probably entertained by most skeptics — that some one will prove them unfounded.

I own up that, though I have gone on assuming the loveliness of plant-lovers, I have always stood a little in awe of people who were specially successful with plants. Perhaps I ought to say, rather, that I always supposed it to be awe, for of late I have come to feel it rather a subtle instinct of self-preservation which warned me off their borders. I set down also the fact that of the half-dozen plant experts who immediately occur to my mind there is not one in whose presence I could ever become what you would call rollicking, though I do not know that I ever put it to myself in just that way before. For years my first and conventional mental reaction on seeing a window full of geraniums in our village would be that some choice soul dwelt behind them. Yet there was a strange joylessness about the discovery, which I now realize to have been due mainly to a subconscious association of the best geranium windows with the largest amount of gossip. To this day, a window of geraniums will give me an unpleasant feeling of being watched.

My facts are not all in yet, but from such as come to me I form the conclusion that those who get on best with plants find it, as a rule, rather difficult to keep on good terms with the highest forms of organic matter. You can snip geraniums and they will not protest, but human beings on the whole, while confessing many useless elements in themselves, prefer to part with them in a manner less peremptory than would satisfy your flower expert. Is it just possible that some folks take to plants as the only living thing that never seems to answer back ?

Something of tartness certainly flavors the communion of the average horticulturist with his kind. A boy falls enraptured of all kinds of people, — hostlers, sailors, carpenters, or tramps, — but I recall only one instance of a boy forming an intimacy with a gardener, while even that instance now lies so dimly in my mind that I cannot vouch for it. I recall that in my boyhood the citizens of our neighborhood who had gardens, and worked in them evenings, were always connected in my mind with something acrid and suspicious. In all this I am not unmindful of Professor Child and his roses, and I still celebrate in my soul the memory of one plant-lover in our village, whose gift to our household was always that of heliotrope and cream, a gift the remembrance of which softens all my reflections of plant experts, making me still hopeful of them no matter how much I may suffer from them. But these are exceptions.

If I were to put in a general law the result of my experiences, I could not do so better than by imitating Charles Kingsley’s famous summing up of John Henry Newman’s attitude toward truth, and saying “ that amiability is not and on the whole ought not to be a prime requisite of people who are devoted to flowers.”

Of all people, I should have looked to garden folks as those from whom a genial and encouraging humanity was most to be expected. But all this belongs back in my deductive days. Now I might approach the office of a capitalist with reasonable expectations of a natural and human half-hour, or the sanctum of a scholar or high ecclesiastic without undue awe, or even the neighborhood of a statesman and yet feel calmly about it, as if he were nothing but a human being raised to a slightly higher power ; but I should keep an appointment with one who had had success with small fruits or hardy plants (and written a book about it) with most of my natural emotions in full retreat inward. Not even the scientific expert would produce in me the same dread. True, he knows enough to overwhelm me ; but there is usually something so delightfully dunderheaded about the scientific expert! I feel as a rule so sorry for him to think that, with so much greater materials at hand than I ever have, be can draw such limited conclusions from it all! Though he would love to make a great broadchested affirmation he never quite does it, and thus he appeals to my sympathy. I sort of love him and like to be with him.

Perhaps these doubts are corroding my moral nature in thus making me skeptical toward the goodness which once I was so willing to take on trust. Once you get started with distrust, it reaches out into regions where you never dreamed it would go, for here am I after years of familiarity with the Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister, — in which it never occurred to me to feel anything but disgust at that brute of a monk who went about snipping the blooms from Brother Lawrence’s plants,— here am I trying to find excuses for the irate brother, and asking myself whether it was not just possible that plants were only Brother Lawrence’s way of being disagreeable in the cloister.

Let no one suppose that I hate plants. I am trying my best to dare to love them. What I rebel against is the hopeless feeling of inferiority begotten in me by these minor nature-lovers in connection with the very things which I hoped would make me feel equal and open and genial. A little crabbed by nature, I had looked toward gardens and garden books as a freeing influence, perhaps the last one left to me, and I am disappointed. I do not carry a chip on my shoulder in this world, but have been willing to be inferior in a hundred different ways. The capitalist does but represent to me the doctrine of election in a way to which I am accustomed, and I never complain of unequal wealth. The four hundred rather interest me than otherwise. But when any one tries to make me feel inferior by means of mignonette and roses and lilacs, I rise up in indignation. There’s Elizabeth, to wit, and her German Garden. When have I ever felt so much like a worm and no man, so scornfully rejected as unfit for the fellowship of flowers, —and pretty nearly everything else, — as after reading that ? I could readily believe that part of her story in which her gardener himself appeared one day on the scene, gone stark mad, and I thought of what a well-known historical scholar had told me of the French Revolution, that it was not so much poverty and taxes as it was scorn which brought on the final disaster. A thousand minor French Revolutions burned in my breast. Supposing, in a general way, that I had some affinity for flowers, here was my right called in question by the One Only Lover of Plants and Gardens. Between the temptation to assert my rights and the inclination to turn a floral anarchist, and never again to believe in any one who loved plants, my being was divided against itself. For sheer superciliousness, the kind that brought on the French Revolution, commend me not to the plutocrat, nor the critic, nor the four hundred, but to the lover of plants.

Much of this ardor for flowers seems

to me of the sort spoken of by Amiel when, describing some delight, he says, “when once the taste for it is set up the mind takes a special and keen delight in it, for one finds in it

Son bien premièrement, puis le dédain d’autrui,

and it is pleasant to one’s vanity not to be of the same opinion as the common herd.”

But my earlier assumption comes back to me. The lovers of gardens ought to be lovely, and perhaps there is a way, after all. In spite of the fact that on those evenings when we as a family feel particularly superior to the rest of the world we always select for reading aloud one of the recent volumes on gardens, I say to myself that the soul of man — and woman — has a long time to run, and may yet grow so accustomed to the glory of the plant as to dare to become more agreeable about it. Then, with a new tenderness running through my soul I say also, “ Who knows what has driven these people to horticulture ? If we knew all we might forgive all.” Mr. Birrell has told us how despair of ever settling such difficult matters as Apostolical Succession and the influence of Newman have driven some men to collecting butterflies and beetles. If we but knew what unkindlier and more difficult issues they had fled from we might forgive all to these caustic brothers and sisters who own gardens and have had success with small fruits. Let us lift up our heads, then, all of us who have for the past five years felt so inferior just because we could boast of nothing but an old-fashioned, easy-going love for plants, or could say nothing of Wild Animals Who Have Helped Us. Let us be grateful that life has been so normal with us that we have never been driven to such devices as these.