Three Winters of Growth

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town the printer would run a man off two hundred cards for the price of a day's work, and most trades took it that putting them through doors was the whole of advertising.

Two jobbing gardeners, the same shears, the same parish, the same thin November.
One paid the printer for two hundred cards and served every door in four streets.
The other walked those same four streets on a Sunday and wrote eleven letters.
Both offered the same winter work, at the same price, for the same day's labour.
The two hundred cards brought three replies. The eleven letters brought seven.
Same trade, same offer, same streets. What was in the letters and not in the cards?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two jobbing gardeners in the town I have never named, both honest men with sharp tools and nothing much to do. November is a hungry month in that trade. A householder who pays cheerfully for a lawn in June will tell you in November that the garden can wait.

The first man went to the printer and got the wording right: his name, his trade, winter pruning and clearing, prices from four shillings, apply at the cottage by the toll road. Two hundred cards on good stock, and a cold morning putting one through every door. There was nothing wrong with that card. It was true, the price was fair, and a householder who wanted his apples seen to had all he needed to engage him.

The second man walked those four streets on the Sunday, slowly, looking over the walls as any man may who is walking down a lane. At the third house from the corner there was a Bramley with three winters of growth on it, the branches crossing and rubbing where no light had been for years. At the house with the green gate a pear was trained flat against the south wall, and the wires had gone slack so that the whole thing leaned off the brick. He found eleven such things and pencilled the address against each.

That evening he wrote eleven letters, six lines apiece, each beginning by naming the thing. The apple tree at the end of your garden has not been cut in three winters, and the middle of it is dying for want of light. If it is done this side of February it will crop again next autumn, and it is a morning's work at five shillings. If you want it looked at, I shall be in the street on Thursday and will knock.

Seven of the eleven answered. Five became work before Christmas, two of those asked him back in March, and one sent him on to her sister, who had a plum tree in a worse state than the Bramley. The cards were not wasted either. Three households kept them, and one rang at the cottage in spring.

The first man said afterwards that the parish had no money in November. He had two hundred pieces of evidence and very little work, which is the most convincing way to be wrong.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

An approach nobody asked for must carry something that only a man who had been and looked could know. The householder opening that envelope is not asking whether he wants his tree pruned. He asks a cheaper question first: is this addressed to me, or to anybody. He settles it in two seconds, and everything you hope to say comes afterwards. Winter pruning, prices from four shillings is addressed to anybody, and is read as we all read a thing addressed to anybody, which is to say not at all. The apple tree at the end of your garden has three winters of growth on it could not have been.

There is a second thing working underneath, and it is the stronger. Your reader cannot judge pruning. He cannot tell a good gardener from a bad one until the tree is either cropping or dead, and by then he has paid. So he judges what he can see, which is the trouble you took before you were owed anything. No man spends a Sunday on eleven households he does not mean to serve properly. Anybody may write that he is thorough. Only a thorough man arrives knowing which tree.

The detail does half the selling besides. A general offer asks the reader to look about his garden, find a job, judge its urgency and decide to act, which is four pieces of work handed to a man who was perfectly happy two minutes ago. Naming the thing collapses all four, and the decision left in front of him is small and dated rather than vague. It is the same discipline as a message that will ask for one thing instead of five.

Notice too what it does to your list. The man who posts two hundred cards is served by whoever happens to reply. The man who walks the street writes only to the gardens he has seen and wants, and has quietly chosen the names himself.

You will object on arithmetic, and the objection deserves an answer. Nobody ever grew rich eleven at a time. True as far as it goes, but reckon by replies rather than by pieces: three against seven, for four hours of work against six, and five of the seven paid. Where a job is worth shillings and the trade lives on volume, the printed card is the right instrument. Where one job is worth a week's money, the arithmetic turns over entirely.

Two cautions. What you name must be visible to any passer-by in the ordinary way, from the lane or the street or a page any man may read. Our century has made it very easy to arrive knowing what you were never told, and a stranger who opens with a fact he could only have got by prying does not seem thorough, he seems to have been watching the house. The second is that the observation must be about the work and never about the owner. The apple tree has three winters of growth on it is a fact. Your garden has been shamefully neglected is a verdict, delivered by a man wanting paying.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Could this letter go, word for word, to anybody else in the town? If it could, it is a circular with better manners, and will do what circulars do.
2. What did it cost me to find the thing I have named? The cost is the argument. A fact that could have been had from a directory proves nothing.
3. Can he do what I ask without agreeing to the job? Knocking on Thursday is a small thing to allow. Settling a morning's pruning from a letter is not.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same trade, same offer, same streets, yet two hundred cards brought three replies and eleven letters brought seven. What was in the letters and not in the cards?

Evidence that the sender had been there. Every card said what the gardener did. Every letter said what he had seen, in that garden, with the address on the envelope to prove it. The offer was identical. The proof of attention was not, and attention is what a man goes on when he cannot judge the work.

The verse:

Two hundred cards through two hundred doors, and all of them said the same,
And every house that read one read a thing addressed to none.
Eleven letters named eleven trees, and seven wrote him back,
For a man who knows your apple tree has plainly been and looked.

Until next time. Go and walk one street with a notebook, write down three things you can see that are your trade, put the address against each, and write those three letters tonight.

P.S. The method has an easier half that almost nobody uses. You already hold a list of gardens you have stood in: every customer you ever worked for. Walking the street is for strangers. For your own people the observation is in your head already, and the letter that says I was thinking about that pear of yours, it will want doing before February, writes itself.

Also in the archive: Two Piles at Breakfast, Twenty Strangers and The Four Hundred Who Know You.