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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 12, Issue 6 (September 1, 1937.)

A Seedy Soliloquy

A Seedy Soliloquy.

Yes, alas! There are coarsely materialistic minds that insist that the significance of spring is terrestrial as well as spiritual, who maintain that a beet in the hand is worth two in the heart. Perhaps, of these, wives and seedsmen are the most ruthlessly rampant. In fact, without wives to move the male to unenthusiastic activity, the seedsman would wither and whence. Seedsmen are not romantic. If they dream at all they dream of a seedless existence wherein all the gardens look like asphalt tennis courts. I knew only one retired seedsman (most of them die early of gardener's palsy through having to listen to the horticultural lies of their clients). This retired seedsman spent the evening of his life as happy as a sandboy, in the Sahara Desert. He lived on seedless raisins and weedkiller. He used to sit for hours and hours in rhapsodic contemplation of the miles and miles of howling wilderness that wouldn't grow a thing. But one day he saw a mirage of a bed of spinach and the shock killed him.

But while a seedsman is in business he attends to his vegetables and incites wives to buy cabbages and things for husbands to plant in the spring when the said husbands would far rather dream of the wondrous ways of creation and let Nature take her course.