The gardener spends so much time on his knees not because he is praying but because he is working in the garden. His devotion or dedication is to that work. Only thus can the glory of the garden of England be preserved. If people assume that they can rely on God to save the country, then it will swiftly and certainly decline. But if everyone works hard at the job, then ‘the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!’ Of course, Fletcher’s views weren’t Kipling’s: my point is merely that the School History wasn’t the place for Kipling to take a strong stand against conventional religious practice. Kipling and Fletcher The seating in the waiting area is very uncomfortable and the room was on the cold side, but thankfully the wait was short. It did seem popular as in the short time we were there they had a high number of other customers.

The nearest Hemans herself gets to admitting that her English homes may at some time require more than God’s protection comes in the final stanza: Line 13] begonia: a plant which has flowers with brightly coloured sepals, no petals, and glossy leaves; bud, to graft a bud from one plant onto another. I respectfully disagree with Dr Keating’ here. The distinction between work and prayer is clearly made in l. 31, and both are encouraged. Whatever Kipling’s private views on prayer (surely complex), an exhortation to pray after work fits perfectly well into the conservative and didactic tone of the School History of England. pp. 33-35 of the School History are indicative here: Christ is called Our Lord; monks are reproached for seeking to withdraw entirely from the world, but also praised for their actual real-world accomplishments, including gardening! (“I think it is to the monks that we English owe our strong love of gardening and flowers”). In short, the mood is: “we are Christians, but not of the silly sort who look down on hard work”. Line 7] cold-frame: a small unheated container with a glass top for protecting young plants; hot-house, a heated building, made largely of glass, for rearing tender or exotic plants; dung-pit, a compost heap; tanks, to store water. Kipling is even more concerned, though, with the popular children’s hymns that inculcated this view of creation and along with it a bland mood of social passivity. Of these hymns, Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander’s “All Things Bright and Beautiful” is the type:There is a very interesting section on Kipling and Fletcher’s collaboration in Peter Sutcliffe’s The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (1978, Oxford), pp. 158-62. I quote from pp. 161-62: It may be that Kipling had this hymn specifically in mind. After all, “The Glory of the Garden,” along with all the other poems in A School History was also written with the aim of instilling into young children a very different set of values and overthrowing the views expressed in hymns like “All Things Bright and Beauty.” He must have felt that this ambition had to some extent been achieved, because on 11 October 1919 he proudly told André Chevrillon that “The Glory of the Garden” had become ‘a sort of school recitation piece’. Letters 4, p. 580. Id not eaten a lot on Friday, just cereals and then the Chinese, so along comes a bad stomach, on Saturday WTF !

Bob was a voracious reader, avid traveller, generous host, controversial conversationalist and consistent friend. From 2000 he made his base a cottage in east Suffolk. Lines 21-4] There’s not a pair of legs so thin … glorifieth every one: lines which capture to perfection the range of attitudes Kipling is balancing throughout the poem. Although everyone has a democratic part to play in maintaining a healthy garden, according entirely, that is, to individual abilities, the process still clearly reveals the hierarchical manner of the whole enterprise already noted in the gardener distributing jobs (line 10). But, with that said, it remains true, that if all members of society really do play a part, with the kind of dedication expected by traditional worship, then the Garden certainly will glorify every one, though the glory will now have been inspired by a patriotic and national passion rather than religious faith. Hemans offers a highly sentimental, idealised view of English home life, from the stately to the humble, and although not carrying the overtly political message that is so important to Kipling, she does – rather oddly given her very different mood – seem to at least look in that direction by prefacing her poem with an epigram taken from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion (1808):Line 26] netting strawberries: Strawberries grow along the ground and are covered with nets to stop birds from eating them. Recent ventures with the illustrator Michael Woods resulted in Reynard the Fox, a new translation of the medieval fable, and Agon, a selection of Greek myths. Title] The Glory of the Garden: Normally such a phrase would refer to the beauty of the flowers, bushes, and trees growing in a garden, and/or to the horticultural skill that has nurtured and arranged the various plants into a splendid pattern. It also invokes many images which link God’s presence with gardens, the ‘glory’ of the one often being equated naturally with the glory of the other. Kipling refers to these various connotations in his poem, but insists that the true glory of the garden lies elsewhere. Line 15] sift the sand and loam: Loam is a rich fine soil formed largely from decomposed vegetation. It is sifted with sand before being used, to lighten and enrich heavy earth. But in 1929 he was making another attempt to persuade the Press to agree to a new edition with his concluding chapter, now further revised. Kipling repeated what he had said ten years earlier. ‘As you know I didn’t do anything at all much beyond the verses,’, he wrote. ‘You lie’, Fletcher replied. ‘Some of the most valuable prose suggestions, and all the pretty little love-poems in prose to England were yours'”.