. No flowers, by request. The sheep shall nibble to the very
threshold. I don't forget that there is a fox-earth in the spinney
attached. I saw a vixen and her cubs there one morning as clearly as
I see this paper. She barked at me once or twice, sitting high on her
haunches, but the children played on without a glance at me. They were
playing at catch-as-catch-can--with a full-grown hare. Sheer fun. No
after-thoughts. I watched them for twenty minutes.

If I grow anything there at all I shall confine my part of the
business to planting, and let Nature do the rest. It may be
absolutely necessary to keep the sheep off for a year or two, and the
rabbits--but that is all. And what I do plant shall be deciduous, so
that I may have the yearly miracle to expect. It is a mighty eater of
time--and there won't be much of that left probably; yet a joy which
no man who has ever begotten anything, baby or poem, can deny himself.

If anybody wants to see what Nature can do in the way of a season's
growth, I can tell him how to go to work. Let him plant on the bank
of a running water a root of _Gunnera manicata_. Let him then wait ten
years, observing these directions faithfully. Every fall, after the
first frost--that frost which blackens his dahlias--let him cover
the crown of his _Gunnera_ with one of its own leaves. Pile some
stable-stuff over that, and then heap upon all the leaf-sweepings of
that part of the garden. Growth starts in mid-April and proceeds by
feet a week. Mine, which is about ten years old now, is thirty-five
feet in circumference, nearly twelve feet high, has flowers
two-feet-six in length, and in a hot summer has grown leaves seven
feet across. You can go under one of them in a shower of rain and be
as dry as in church. And all that done in five months. The plant is
a rhubarb of sorts and comes from Chili. I should like to see it over
there on the marge of some monstrous great river. In another order,
the _Ipomoea_ (Morning Glory), which comes from East Africa, runs it
close. I had one seed in Sussex which completely overflowed a garden
wall, smothering everything upon it. A kind of Jack's beanstalk, and
every morning starred with turquoise blue trumpet mouths of ravishing
beauty, which were dead at noon. The poor thing was constrained to be
a hierodule, gave no seed. Nature is the prodigal's foster-mother.

I have a plant whose seed is much more beautiful than its flower.
By the way, I have two, for the Spi