You see, if
we could keep giraffes or reindeer or some other species of browsing
animal there we could explain the general absence of vegetation by a
reference to the fauna of the garden: 'You can't have wapiti _and_ Darwin
tulips, you know, so we didn't put down any bulbs last year.' As it is,
we haven't got the wapiti, and the Darwin tulips haven't survived the
fact that most of the cats of the neighbourhood hold a parliament in the
centre of the tulip bed; that rather forlorn looking strip that we
intended to be a border of alternating geranium and spiraea has been
utilised by the cat-parliament as a division lobby. Snap divisions seem
to have been rather frequent of late, far more frequent than the geranium
blooms are likely to be. I shouldn't object so much to ordinary cats,
but I do complain of having a congress of vegetarian cats in my garden;
they must be vegetarians, my dear, because, whatever ravages they may
commit among the sweet pea seedlings, they never seem to touch the
sparrows; there are always just as many adult sparrows in the garden on
Saturday as there were on Monday, not to mention newly-fledged additions.
There seems to have been an irreconcilable difference of opinion between
sparrows and Providence since the beginning of time as to whether a
crocus looks best standing upright with its roots in the earth or in a
recumbent posture with its stem neatly severed; the sparrows always have
the last word in the matter, at least in our garden they do.
Pages:
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219