Here, then, he threw himself into gardening with characteristic ardour.  He described his position as a kind of mean between the science of the botanist and the empiricism of the working gardener.  He had plenty to suggest, but his gardener, like so many of his tribe, had a rooted mistrust of any gardening lore culled from books.  “Books?  They’ll say anything in them books.”  And he shared, moreover, that common superstition, perhaps really based upon a question of labour, that watering of flowers, unnecessary in wet weather, is actively bad in dry.  So my father’s chief occupation in the garden was to march about with a long hose, watering, and watering especially his alpines in the upper garden and along the terraces lying below the house.  The saxifrages and the creepers on the house were his favourite plants.  When he was not watering the one he would be nailing up the other, for the winds of Eastbourne are remarkably boisterous, and shrivel up what they do not blow down.] “I believe I shall take to gardening,” [he writes, a few months after entering the new house,] “if I live long enough.  I have got so far as to take a lively interest in the condition of my shrubs, which have been awfully treated by the long cold.”

[From this time his letters contain many references to his garden.  He is astonished when his gardener asks leave to exhibit at the local show, but delighted with his pluck.  Hooker jestingly sends him a plant “which will flourish on any dry, neglected bit of wall, so I think it will just suit you.”]

Great improvements have been going on (he writes in 1892), and the next time you come you shall walk in the “avenue” of four box-trees.  Only five are to be had for love or money at present, but there are hopes of a sixth, and then the “avenue” will be full ten yards long!  Figurez vous ca!

[It was of this he wrote on October 1:—­]

Thank Heaven we are settled down again and I can vibrate between my beloved books and even more beloved saxifrages.

The additions to the house are great improvements every way, outside and in, and when the conservatory is finished we shall be quite palatial; but, alas, of all my box-trees only one remains green, that is the “amari,” or more properly “fusci” aliquid.

[Sad things will happen, however.  Although the local florists vowed that the box-trees would not stand the winds of Eastbourne, he was set on seeing if he could not get them to grow despite the gardeners, whom he had once or twice found false prophets.  But this time they were right.  Vain were watering and mulching and all the arts of the husbandman.  The trees turned browner and browner every day, and the little avenue from terrace to terrace had to be ignominiously uprooted and removed.

A sad blow this, worse even than the following:—­]

A lovely clematis in full flower, which I had spent hours in nailing up, has just died suddenly.  I am more inconsolable than Jonah!