Another Year

‘ANOTHER year,’ he said, ‘I mean to get at it a little earlier in the spring so as to get the weeds out of it.’

We were standing looking at the autumn wreck which he called his garden. It was a little angle of ground about so far this way and so far that — you know how big. A quarter of an acre? I guess so; or no, not that much — well, just a garden. The hedges and trees about it must, I suppose, in the summer have made it look like a bower. But now the leaves were mostly fallen, or thin and yellow. The wind whistled through it. Running across it were some ragged stalks of corn still standing, the leaves — or whatever you call them — a faded brown with streaks of mildew. It all seemed pretty empty and forlorn.

‘A snug spot, is n’t it?’ said my gardener friend. Lord knows he did n’t seem to see the desolation of it. To him it was the same little embowered enchantment where he had worked on his hands and knees in the long June twilight, his wife holding the trowel for him while he planted — what was it? — oh yes, the Dutch bulbs for a border, the ones that grow six feet high. No, they did n’t come up. He thinks he planted them too deep.

‘Another year,’ he said, ‘I’ll set them just almost on the surface.’

‘Another year’ — that’s always the tenor of his and other gardeners’ talk. ‘Another year.’ And each year they try again, and the garden ends in weeds, and frost and wind and little clumps of half-size beetroots under a mist of fox grass, and a thick patch of long grass that to their fond eye is still the strawberry bed; and still they say, ‘Another year.’ Our human kind, so we read in the Scripture, began in a Garden. So we never want to leave it. I have no doubt that Adam said to Eve, ‘Another year I’ll try pruning the apple trees earlier.’

‘These strawberries,’ said my friend, pointing to what I saw as a patch of grass and what he saw as a bed of strawberry plants, with invisible weeds, ‘would have done better if we had kept the grass down. I really meant to cut the runners off and make a new bed, but I did n’t get time. Another year I certainly will.’

‘Did you have any strawberries this year?’ I asked.

‘Oh my, yes! Or well, at any rate, once or twice my wife and I had a great bowl of them — all we could eat.’

I know just how much a loving wife can eat, or fail to eat, under those circumstances. She reaches repletion at a cost, if they bought the strawberries, of about two cents. But there’s no use applying cost accounting to amateur gardening. It won’t stand it.

‘These beets — ’ began my friend.

‘Which beets?’ I asked.

‘Here, you see them — just along past your feet in a row. They go right across the garden.’

Then I saw them, the half-withered tops above the fox grass, and the roots, or bodies, or bottoms, — or whatever you call them, — just lifting out of the ground. ‘The beets,’ continued the gardener, ‘are a failure.’ It is characteristic of amateur gardeners that they like at times to admit failure in an offhand way. It seems to indicate huge success elsewhere.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘I gave them too heavy a dose of nitrate.’

‘Nitrate’ is the name of a white powder that my friend keeps in his ‘garden house’ (a little shed, four by three, at the corner of the lot). I have noticed him often in the spring when the gardening is at its height, and green bursting out everywhere, crawling along on his hands and knees, and dusting on nitrate. If nothing else will kill the stuff, that will.

But it seems that you don’t need, in such a garden, to take steps to kill everything. The birds, it appears, will look after a lot of it.

‘These were the peas,’ he said. ‘The birds got them.’

He pointed to a sort of trelliswork of lath sticks with fragments of dried yellow vines, or leaves, clinging to them, or even tied to them. It must have taken hours and hours to make that trellis. But it has the effect, I believe, of holding the peas down from growing. All amateur gardeners use it.

‘Did n’t you have any?’ I asked.

‘Oh, goodness, yes, we had one elegant feed of them — all we could eat — and then a flock of birds cleaned them out. Another year I’m going to put a sort of cover over them, a kind of movable net that I’ve invented.’

I have long since observed that my gardening friends live on invention. They never make the things. They just invent them, mostly in wintertime — all sorts of ingenious contrivances for automatic watering, for bleaching celery and spraying with nicotine where nitrate could n’t reach.

‘These beans,’ said my friend, ‘were fine.’ This time I did n’t ask which beans. I knew there must be beans in the grass somewhere.

‘The only trouble with beans,’ he added, ‘is that they get old so soon.’

It is a common trouble in life. But I have often noticed its application in the gardens of my gardening friends. One day the beans are too young to pick, and a day passes and they are too old to eat. There is something about it, or like it, in the Epistle to the Corinthians. I think I ’ve heard it at funerals.

A cold wind rustled through the little garden, shaking the leaves.

‘Another year,’ said my friend, ‘I think I’ll put in a cedar hedge. It will keep the garden warmer — either that or a sort of movable fence in sections that I invented one day on the way to work.’

The wind blew again, colder, and with a fleck of rain in it. The branches shook as if in denial of the fence or hedge. ‘Come into the house,’ he said; ‘it’s a little cold here.’ A little! I had been half frozen ever since we looked at the first empty hotbed. ‘Come into the house,’ he said, ‘and I’ll give you a Scotch and soda.’

We went into the house. There was a flaming fire of crisp autumn sticks burning in the grate. It was warm and bright. Glasses and a decanter glittered on a tray. The light shot back in amber streaks from the whiskey in the decanter.

‘Now then,’ said my friend, ‘a Scotch, eh?’ as he moved to pour it out.

‘Do you grow your own whiskey?’ I asked.

‘Good heavens, no,’ he laughed. ‘What an idea!’

STEPHEN LEACOCK