of my first happy struggles and failures.

All through April he was putting the perennials we had sown in the autumn
into their permanent places, and all through April he went about with a
long piece of string making parallel lines down the borders of beautiful
exactitude and arranging the poor plants like soldiers at a review.
Two long borders were done during my absence one day, and when I
explained that I should like the third to have plants in groups and not
in lines, and that what I wanted was a natural effect with no bare spaces
of earth to be seen, he looked even more gloomily hopeless than usual;
and on my going out later on to see the result, I found he had planted
two long borders down the sides of a straight walk with little lines
of five plants in a row--first five pinks, and next to them five rockets,
and behind the rockets five pinks, and behind the pinks five rockets,
and so on with different plants of every sort and size down to the end.
When I protested, he said he had only carried out my orders and had
known it would not look well; so I gave in, and the remaining borders
were done after the pattern of the first two, and I will have patience
and see how they look this summer, before digging them up again;
for it becomes beginners to be humble.

If I could only dig and plant myself! How much easier,
besides being so fascinating, to make your own holes exactly where
you want them and put in your plants exactly as you choose instead
of giving orders that can only be half understood from the moment
you depart from the lines laid down by that long piece of string!
In the first ecstasy of having a garden all my own, and in my
burning impatience to make the waste places blossom like a rose,
I did one warm Sunday in last year's April during the servants'
dinner hour, doubly secure from the gardener by the day and the dinner,