Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Davies

Davies turns gardening into a quiet argument about ownership that has nothing to do with deeds and everything to do with touch. The line is deceptively plain, almost proverb-like, but its bite is in the sliding definition of "belongs". He is not warning against generosity; he is warning against outsourcing the very labor that gives a thing its meaning. A garden is an artifact of attention: the hours of weeding, the small decisions about what lives and what gets pulled, the intimate noticing of weather and soil. Add helpers and you add distance. The garden may look better, even thrive, but it becomes less an extension of the self and more a managed product.

The subtext is classed, too. "Help" reads like hired hands, the kind of assistance that signals comfort or status. Davies, who lived rough before gaining literary recognition, had an acute sense of how money can purchase results while quietly stripping away experience. This is a poet's version of the critique behind "time-saving" modern life: efficiency can be a form of loss. When you pay someone to do the slow, bodily part, you keep the outcome but surrender the relationship.

Context matters: Davies is often associated with a romantic insistence on direct contact with life, a resistance to industrial pace and mediated living. In that light, the garden stands in for any personal project-beauty, craft, even character. The more you delegate, the more your "ownership" becomes paperwork. What remains yours is the brag, not the bond.