The Heart of a Garden

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IM FRHLINGSGARTEN The winter is over and gone, and so are the crocuses; the Hooligan sparrows have wreaked their last wanton ravages, for this year at least, upon every budding blossom my garden grows. They are sated with destruction now, and there is nothing but their own brazen bickerings between...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IM FRHLINGSGARTEN The winter is over and gone, and so are the crocuses; the Hooligan sparrows have wreaked their last wanton ravages, for this year at least, upon every budding blossom my garden grows. They are sated with destruction now, and there is nothing but their own brazen bickerings between themselves to distract them from their assiduous domesticities. When sparrows build, sings the poet; but, indeed, the question I would fain have set at rest is, When do they not? Even in the heyday of their early havoc, when all the earth is chilly and discomfortable, when no grass grows, and the very trees would seem to disclaim austerely any possible cognizance of leafage past or to come?even then, while cold pathway and black border are besprent with shredded gold of aconite and crocus and pale primrose buds ruthlessly slain at birth, the sparrows are busy a-building. And still they build. The high, dishevelled araucaria?uncomeliest of trees?is swarming with the sloven nests that, for once, are in harmony with their environment; while all around, from the eaves, from the clustered ivy on the walls, the thick hawthorns, everywhere, sounds the creaking confusion of their shrill bird-Billingsgate?the antithesis, one might have it, of the nightingale's divine, high-piping Pehlevi. And the air-gun is as yet unbought, and, for all our brave words and futile shaking of fists, seems likely to remain in the region of fruitless menace?that same debateable land, close neighbouring upon themarches of Never, where still linger the demand that the gardener should send in his portfolio forthwith, the visionary cat-trap, the sacrifice of the dahlia-eating rabbits, and much of the like stuff as dreams are made on. Once, to be sure, Amadis, with heart momentarily made adamant by the rend...