Laudator Temporis Acti

Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), Country Notes (London: Michael Joseph Ltd, 1939), pp. 86-87:

It is a real experience to open one's garden to the public. In a sense you might think it a desecration, a violation of one's patch of private peace. 'How offensive', you might think, 'to have eight hundred strangers straggling all over one's very personal property!' You would be wrong. It is a pleasure; even a form of flattery. It removes all sense of guilty egoistic pleasure. You share your personal delight; the scheme you have built up for ten, twenty years becomes part of the pleasure of hundreds of inquisitive eager gardeners, makers of beauty. It is very necessary to have makers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness. These mild, gentle men and women who invade one's garden after putting their silver token into the bowl, these true peace-makers, these inoffensive lovers of nature in her gayest form, these homely souls who will travel fifty miles by bus with a fox-terrier on a lead, who will pore over a label, taking notes in a penny note-book—those are some of the people I most gladly welcome and salute. Between them and myself a particular form of courtesy survives, a gardener's courtesy, in a world where courtesy is giving place to rougher things.