Our England is a Garden
There is plenty of work in the garden of England for everyone, whether he has a green thumb or not.
1911
King George V 1910-1936
West Green House, Hartley Wintney, Hampshire, from the Lawns.
Introduction
A School History of England (1911) was a collaboration between C. R. L. Fletcher, an Oxford historian, and Rudyard Kipling, who wrote this closing poem as a call to citizenship. The citizen he admired wasn’t the one who shouted noisily for the flag or paraded in some highly-paid profession, but the one who was quietly busy keeping the garden of England beautiful.
Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the
eye.
For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,
You’ll find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all,
The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dungpits and the tanks,
The rollers, carts and drain pipes, with the barrows and the planks.
And there you’ll see the gardeners, the men and ’prentice boys
Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise;*
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.
And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows;
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,
For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.
* Kipling does not say who gives the orders, but judging by his remarks to the Royal Society of St George a few years later, it isn’t the Government of the day: see Thus Was the Empire Born. The Biblical atmosphere of the poem, with Kipling’s careful use of old-fashioned language and his reference to the Garden of Eden, is perhaps a clue.
