Musing on the strangeness of life, and on the invariable ultimate triumph of the insignificant and small over the important and vast, illustrated in this instance by the easy substitution in the arbour of slugs for grandfathers, I went slowly round the next bend of the path, and came to the broad walk along the south side of the high wall dividing the flower garden from the
kitchen garden, in which sheltered position my father had had his choicest flowers.
She returned just in time to join the others as they quitted the house, on an excursion through its more immediate premises; and the rest of the morning was easily whiled away, in lounging round the
kitchen garden, examining the bloom upon its walls, and listening to the gardener's lamentations upon blights, in dawdling through the green-house, where the loss of her favourite plants, unwarily exposed, and nipped by the lingering frost, raised the laughter of Charlotte,--and in visiting her poultry-yard, where, in the disappointed hopes of her dairy-maid, by hens forsaking their nests, or being stolen by a fox, or in the rapid decrease of a promising young brood, she found fresh sources of merriment.
Last time I was there I used to notice every day a very old man making a pretence of working in a
kitchen garden attached to a little white mission-house - a Basle Society depot.
Hard by the
kitchen garden were graves, tagged and numbered.
Doctor, dear, will make it rain before the week is out, and save our
kitchen garden from entire ruination, that is the party Susan will vote for.
Despite his mystic praise of slumber, Father Brown was up earlier than anyone else except the silent gardener; and was found smoking a big pipe and watching that expert at his speechless labours in the
kitchen garden. Towards daybreak the rocking storm had ended in roaring rains, and the day came with a curious freshness.
He led her to the
kitchen garden where no one was likely to come, and this time Miss Wilkinson did not think of earwigs.
Now, if he had made up his mind for a large country estate, a houseful of angels, and a cattle-show, he might have lived to possess his
kitchen garden and one head of live-stock, and even possibly have come across that rara-avis --a really amiable woman.
When he had ridden about two miles and had passed the last of the Russian troops, he saw, near a
kitchen garden with a ditch round it, two men on horseback facing the ditch.
An hour's walk brought the travellers to a little road-side public-house, with two elm-trees, a horse trough, and a signpost, in front; one or two deformed hay-ricks behind, a
kitchen garden at the side, and rotten sheds and mouldering outhouses jumbled in strange confusion all about it.
It is true that Shuraev would have liked to let out the
kitchen gardens he had undertaken in small lots to the peasants.
A large amount of change in our cultivated plants, thus slowly and unconsciously accumulated, explains, as I believe, the well-known fact, that in a vast number of cases we cannot recognise, and therefore do not know, the wild parent-stocks of the plants which have been longest cultivated in our flower and
kitchen gardens. If it has taken centuries or thousands of years to improve or modify most of our plants up to their present standard of usefulness to man, we can understand how it is that neither Australia, the Cape of Good Hope, nor any other region inhabited by quite uncivilised man, has afforded us a single plant worth culture.
kitchen garden - a small garden where vegetables are grown