A GIRL’S GARDEN

A NEIGHBOUR of mine in the village likes to tell how one spring.

When she was a girl on the farm, she did a childlike thing. One day she asked her father to give her a garden plot.

To plant and tend and reap herself, And he said, “Why not?” In casting about for a corner.

He thought of an idle bit or walled-off ground where a shop had stood, And he said, “just it.”

And he said, “That ought to make you.

An ideal one-girl farm, And give you a chance to put some strength on your slim-jim arm.”

It was not enough of a garden,

Her father said, to plough; So she had to work it all by hand, But she don’t mind now.

She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow along a stretch of road;

But she always ran away and left. Her not-nice lead,

And hid from anyone passing. And then she begged the seed. She says she thinks she planted one of all things but weed. A hill each of potatoes, radishes, lettuce, peas, tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn.

And even fruit trees.

And yes, she was long mistrusted.

That a cider apple tree in bearing there today is here or at least may be when all was said and done,

A little bit of everything, A great deal of none.