English Essay on “Pleasures of Gardening
It is not enough to have a garden in front of one's house. One must be able to look after the garden and take an active interest in it. To engage a paid gardener and throw all responsibilities on him is, of course, the commonest way of the world. But gardening has many pleasures.
One of the great pleasures of gardening is to dig out beds for plants and trees, to sow seeds, to put manure and to nourish the growing plants with water. The rich and the well-to-do should not consider this to be below their dignity to do this manual work.
In fact we hear of many great persons-Lloyd George, England's ex-Prime Minister was one of them-who took keen interest in looking after their gardens. Early in the morning they were found in their gardens along with experienced gardeners and other servants digging, watering, sowing, cutting etc.
The advantage of doing our gardening by ourselves is that we can put into practice our own ideas of the lay-out, the arrangement of the garden, the kind of flowers we want and the kind of trees we want.
A paid gardener, however sincere and hardworking, cannot have the same interest in our garden as we can have. Hence, if we do our own gardening, our garden will be better and more beautiful and better looked after. Again if we do our own gardening, we can do everything according to our own taste.
The pleasures of gardening are like the pleasures of creation. When you sow seeds, grow a plant, water it daily with your own hands, you experience the same joy and pride when you see your own child growing before your eyes.
The additional advantage of physical exercise in digging the ground, watering the plants etc. may also be taken into consideration. The healthy, fresh morning air prolongs our life at least by a few years.
Some persons foolishly throw away these pleasures of gardening out of a false sense of dignity. They have a mistaken notion in their head that gardening is to be done by a paid professional gardener. Sometimes, if we do not excuse ourselves under this colour of dignity, we plead that we have no time.
But this also is not true. To spare daily an hour or so in the morning is possible even for the busiest man in the world. The fact is we have never seriously considered what pleasures we lose by entrusting our gardening to servants and labourers.
This does not mean that the problem of gardening is for the rich. Unfortunately, it is too true for India that where a majority of the people have not even a decent house to live in, the question of a garden and gardening does not arise, because, before you can have a garden you must have a house.
But all the same, we can have a small garden within our means and do the gardening by ourselves. Then we would realise what pleasures gardening has in store for us.