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Show 362. He even had doubts about Jeanne Carr's Carmelita, which seemed to him a foolishly artificial, and therefore unlikely, project. Mrs. Carr hoped to grow a little Eden in Pasadena, and occasionally asked Muir's help, as she collected new plants and researched the trees of California. Said Muir, "I suppose nothing less than an Exhaustive miniature of all the leafy creatures of the globe will satisfy your Pasadena aspirations. You know how little real sympathy I can give in such play-garden schemes." The best Eden was planted by God. How near Muir was in 1879 to disobeying his own advice. A few years later he would be planting gardens on his ranch in Martinez, and grafting trees while he cultivated cash crops. It is doubtful that Muir ever wanted to write about the romance of farming, but when Robert Underwood Johnson of Scribner's requested an essay of "Farm Life," Muir tried to oblige him. He collected his material, and tried to create a unified picture of the state of agriculture in the West. Probably this is a manuscript called "California Agriculture" which was never published. It is a suspiciously humanistic and optimistic document, and perhaps its viewpoint was created by Muir's desire to meet the expectations of Scribner's. In any case, Johnson first tried to get him to condense it, and then finally rejected the essay. Never was Muir more wrong about the direction of history. He observed, for instance, that the farm monopolies in the Central Valley were a thing of the past: |