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L161— O-1096

BOOKS BY GEORGE W. CABLE

PuBusHED BT CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

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THE AMATEUR GARDEN

OF THE

I'VI'"

"That gardening is best . . . which best ministers to man's fehcity with
least disturbance of nature's freedom. "

This is my study. The tree in the middle of the picture is Barrie's elm. I once lifted it
between my thumb and finger, but I was younger and the tree wa.s smaller. The dark tree
in the foreground on the right is Felix .\dler's hemlock. (Page Si]

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

BY
GEORGE W. CABLE

ILLUSTRATED

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK :: ;: :: MCMXIV

Published October, 1914

71 a

CONTENTS

PAGE

MY OVrS ACRE 1

THE A3IERICAN GARDEN 41

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 79

THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF NORTHAMPTON . . 107

THE PRIVATE GARDEN'S PUBLIC VALUE . . . 129

THE MIDWINTER GARDENS OP NEW ORLEANS . 163

751389

ILLUSTRATIONS

'That gardening is best . . . which best ministers to man's felicity

with least disturbance of nature's freedom" .... Frontispiece

Facing Page

' . . . that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill

River loiters through Paradise" 6

' On this green of the dryads . . . lies My Own Acre " 8

'The beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full

back to the rapids just above My Own Acre " 12

'A fountain . . . where one,— or two, — can sit and hear it whisper" 22

'The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of
the lawn in under the grove was one of the early tasks of My
Own Acre" 24

' Souvenir trees had from time to time been planted on the lawn

by visiting friends" 26

" How the words were said which some of the planters spoke " . 28

"Where are you going?' says the eye. 'Come and see,' says the

roaming line " 34

" The lane is open to view from end to end. It has two deep bays

on the side nearest the lawn" 36

. until the house itself seems as naturally ... to grow up out
of the garden as the high keynote rises at the end of a lady's

song

Vll

ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing Page
"Beautiful results may be got on smallest grounds" 52

" Muffle your architectural angles in foliage and bloom " . . . . 52

Fences masked by shrubbery 64

After the first frost annual plantings cease to be attractive .... 72

Shrubbery versus annuals 72

Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles. South

Hall, Williston Seminary 74

"... a line of shrubbery swinging in and out in strong, graceful

undulations" 74

"However enraptured of wild nature you may be, you do and must

require of her some subserviency about your own dwelling" 84

"Plant it ■where it ■will. best enjoy itself" 86

"... climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by darkness and
breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom belong at its far
end" 94

"Some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon and lure" 96

"... tall, rectangular, three-story piles . . . full of windows all of

one size, pigeon-house style" 100

"You can make gardening a concerted public movement" . . . 112

"Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the foundation-lines

of all its buildings" 122

" Not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but to procure

its widest and most general dissemination" 122

"Having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having spiritual

wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus" . 138

viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing Page
' One such competing garden was so beautiful last year that stran-
gers driving by stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy
a nearer view" 138

' Beauty can be called into life about the most unpretentious domi-
cile" 148

'Those who pay no one to dig, plant or prune for them" . . . 148

' In New Orleans the home is bounded by its fences, not by its

doors — so they clothe them with shrubberies and vines" . . 174

'The lawn . . . lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one shrub-

and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across" . . . 174

'There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the sward. ... In a half-
day's work, the fair scene might be enhanced in lovely dig-
nity by the elimination of these excesses" 176

'The rear walk . . . follows the dwelling's ground contour with

business precision — being a business path" 178

'Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even . . . w^here it does not

conceal, the house's architectural faults " 180

' . . . a lovely stage scene without a hint of the stage's unreality " 182

' Back of the building-line the fences . . . generally more than head-
high . . . are sure to be draped" 184

'. . . from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of

Easter" 184

' The sleeping beauty of the garden's unlost configuration . . . keep-
ing a w^inter's share of its feminine grace and softness "... 186

' It is only there that I see anything so stalw^art as a pine or so rigid

as a spruce " 192

MY OWN ACRE

A LIFELONG habit of story-telling has much
to do with the production of these pages.

All the more does it move me because it has
always included, as perhaps it does in most
story-tellers, a keen preference for true stories,
stories of actual occurrence.

A flower-garden trying to be beautiful is a
charming instance of something which a story-
teller can otherwise only dream of. For such a
garden is itself a story, one which actually and
naturally occurs, yet occurs under its master's
guidance and control and with artistic effect.

Yet it was this same story -telhng bent which
long held me back while from time to time I gen-
eralized on gardening and on gardens other
than my own. A well-designed garden is not
only a true story happening artistically but it
is one that passes through a new revision each
year, *'with the former translations diligently

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

compared and revised." Each year my own
acre has confessed itself so full of mistransla-
tions of the true text of gardening, has promised,
each season, so much fairer a show in its next
edition, and has been kept so prolongedly busy
teaching and reteaching its master w^here to
plant what, while as to money outlays compelled
to live so much more like a poet than like a
prince, that the bent for story-telling itself could
not help but say wait.

Now, however, the company to which this
chapter logically belongs is actually showing ex-
cellent reasons why a history of their writer's
own acre should lead them. Let me, then,
begin by explaining that the small city of North-
ampton, Massachusetts, where I have Hved all
the latter three-fifths of my adult years, sits on
the first rise of ground which from the west over-
looks the alluvial meadows of the Connecticut,
nine miles above South Hadley Falls. Close at
its back a small stream. Mill River, coming out
of the Hampshire hills on its way to the Con-
necticut, winds through a strip of woods so fair
as to have been named — from a much earlier

MY OWN ACRE

day than when Jenny Lind called it so — "Para-
dise." On its town side this wooded ground a
few hundred yards wide drops suddenly a hun-
dred feet or so to the mill stream and is cut into
many transverse ravines.

In its timber growth, conspicuous by their
number, tower white-pines, while among them
stand only less loftily a remarkable variety of
forest trees imperfectly listed by a certain hum-
ble authority as "mostly h-oak, h-ellum, and
h-ash, with a little 'ickory."

Imperfectly listed, for there one may find also
the birch and the beech, the linden, sycamore,
chestnut, poplar, hemlock-spruce, butternut, and
maple overhanging such pleasant undergrowths
as the hornbeam and hop-hornbeam, willows,
black-cherry and choke-cherry, dogwood and
other cornels, several viburnums, bush maples
of two or three kinds, alder, elder, sumach,
hazel, witch-hazel, the shadblow and other per-
ennial, fair-blooming, sweet-smelling favorites,
beneath which lies a leaf-mould rife with ferns
and wild flowers.

From its business quarter the town's chief

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

street of residence, Elm Street, begins a gently
winding westerly ascent to become an open high-
road from one to another of the several farming
and manufacturing villages that use the water-
power of Mill River. But while it is still a street
there runs from it southerly at a right angle a
straight bit of avenue some three hundred yards
long — an exceptional length of unbent street for
Northampton. This short avenue ends at an-
other, still shorter, lying square across its foot
within some seventy yards of that suddenly fall-
ing wooded and broken ground where Mill River
loiters through Paradise. The strip of land
between the woods and this last street is taken
up by half a dozen dwellings of modest dignity,
whose front shade-trees, being on the southerly
side, have been placed not on the sidewalk's
roadside edge but on the side next the dweUings
and close within their line of private ownership:
red, white and post-oaks set there by the pres-
ent writer when he named the street "Dryads'
Green." They are now twenty-one years old
and give a good shade which actually falls where
it is wanted — upon the sidewalk.

■^'^4t<i**

"^«iy--i.

"... that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill River

loiters through Paradise."
A strong wire fence (invisible in the picture) here divides the grove from the old river road.

tlPPA??Y

MY OWN ACRE

On this green of the dryads, where it inter-
cepts the "avenue" that sKps over from the
Elm Street trolley-cars, lies, such as it is, my
own acre; house, lawn, shrubberies and, at the
rear, in the edge of the pines, the study. Back
there by the study — which sometimes in irony
we call the power-house — the lawn merges into
my seven other acres, in Paradise. Really the
whole possession is a much humbler one than I
find myself able to make it appear in the flatter-
ing terms of land measure. Those seven acres
of Paradise I acquired as "waste land." Never-
theless, if I were selKng that "waste," that
"hole in the ground," it would not hurt my
conscience, such as it is, to declare that the birds
on it alone are worth more than it cost: wood-
thrushes and robins, golden orioles, scarlet tana-
gers, blackbirds, bluebirds, oven-birds, cedar-
birds, veeries, vireos, song-sparrows, flycatchers,
kinglets, the flicker, the cuckoo, the nuthatch,
the chickadee and the rose-breasted grosbeak,
not to mention jays or kingfishers, swallows,
the little green heron or that cock of the walk,
the red squirrel.

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

Speaking of walks, it was with them — and
one drive — in this grove, that I made my first
venture toward the artistic enhancement of my
acre, — acre this time in the old sense that
ignores feet and rods. I was quite willing to
make it a matter of as many years as necessary
when pursued as play, not work, on the least
possible money outlay and having for its end
a garden of joy, not of care. By no inborn sa-
gacity did I discover this to be the true first
step, but by the trained eye of an honored and
dear friend, that distinguished engineer and fa-
mous street commissioner of New York, Colonel
George E. Waring, who lost his life in the sani-
tary regeneration of Havana.

"Contour paths" was the word he gave me;
paths starting from the top of the steep broken
ground and bending in and out across and
around its ridges and ravines at a uniform de-
cline of, say, six inches to every ten feet, until
the desired terminus is reached below; much as,
in its larger way, a railway or aqueduct might,
or as cattle do when they roam in the hills.
Thus, by the shghtest possible interference with

MY OWN ACRE

natural conditions, these paths were given a
winding course every step of which was pleas-
ing because justified by the necessities of the
case, traversing the main inequalities of the
ground with the ease of level land yet without
diminishing its superior variety and charm.
And so with contour paths I began to find, right
at my back door and on my own acre, in nerve-
tired hours, an outdoor relaxation which I could
begin, leave off and resume at any moment and
which has never staled on me. For this was
the genesis of all I have learned or done in
gardening, such as it is.

My appliances for laying out the grades were
simple enough: a spirit-level, a stiff ten-foot rod
with an eighteen-inch leg nailed firmly on one
end of it, a twelve-inch leg on the other, a
hatchet, and a basket of short stakes with which
to mark the points, ten feet apart, where the
longer leg, in front on all down grades, rested
when the spirit-level, strapped on the rod,
showed the rod to be exactly horizontal. Trivial
inequalities of surface were arbitrarily cut down
or built up and covered with leaves and pine-

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

straw to disguise the fact, and whenever a tree
or anything worth preserving stood in the way
here came the loaded barrow and the barrow-
ist, hke a piece of artillery sweeping into action,
and a fill undistinguishable from nature soon
brought the path around the obstacle on what
had been its lower side, to meander on at its
unvarying rate of rise or fall as though nothing
— except the trees and wild flowers — had hap-
pened since the vast freshets of the post-glacial
period built the landscape. I made the drive
first, of steeper grade than the paths; but every
new length of way built, whether walk or road,
made the next easier to build, by making easier
going for the artillery, the construction train.
Also each new path has made it easier to bring
up, for the lawn garden, sand, clay, or leaf -mould,
or for hearth consumption all the wood which
the grove's natural mortality each year requires
to be disposed of. There is a superior spiritual
quality in the warmth of a fire of h-oak, h-ash,
and even h-ellum gathered from your own acre,
especially if the acre is very small and has con-
tour paths. By a fire of my own acre's "dead

MY OWN ACRE

and down" I write these lines. I never buy
cordwood.

Only half the grove has required these paths,
the other half being down on the flat margin
of the river, traversed by a cart-road at least
half a century old, though used by wheels hardly
twice a year; but in the three acres where lie
the contour paths there is now three-fifths of a
mile of them, not a rod of which is superfluous.
And then I have two examples of another kind
of path : paths with steps ; paths which for good
and lawful reasons cannot allow you time to go
around on the "five per cent" grade but must
cut across, taking a single ravine lengthwise, to
visit its three fish-pools.

These steps, and two short retaining walls
elsewhere in the grove, are made of the field
stones of the region, uncut. All are laid "dry"
like the ordinary stone fences of New England
farms, and the walls are built with a smart
inward batter so that the winter frosts may
heave them year after year, heave and leave
but not tumble them down. I got that idea
from a book. Everything worth while on my

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

acre is from books except what two or three pro-
fessional friends have from time to time dropped
into my hungry ear. Both my ears have good
appetites — for garden lore.

About half a mile from me, down Mill River,
stands the factory of a prized friend who more
than any other man helps by personal daily care
to promote Northampton's "People's Institute,"
of whose home-garden work I have much to
say in the chapters that follow this one. For
forty years or more this factory has been known
far and wide as the *'Hoe Shop" because it
makes shovels. It has never made hoes. It
uses water-power, and the beautiful mill-pond
behind its high dam keeps the river full back to
the rapids just above my own acre. In winter
this is the favorite skating-pond of the town
and of Smith College. In the greener seasons
of college terms the girls constantly pass up-
stream and down in their pretty rowboats and
canoes, making a charming effect as seen from
my lawn's rear edge at the head of the pine
and oak shaded ravine whose fish-pools are gay
by turns with elder, wild sunflower, sumach,
iris, water-lilies, and forget-me-not.

"The beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full back to
the rapids just above My Own Acre. "

This is the "Hoe Shop." The tower was ruined by fire many years ago, and because of its
unsafely is being taken down at the present writing.

LfPPARY
OF THE

MY OWN ACRE

This ravine, the middle one of the grove's
three, is about a hundred feet wide. When I
first began to venture the human touch in it, it
afforded no open spot level enough to hold a
camp-stool. From the lawn above to the river
road below, the distance is three hundred and
thirty feet, and the fall, of fifty-five feet, is
mostly at the upper end, which is therefore too
steep, as well as too full of varied undergrowth,
for any going but climbing. In the next ravine
on its left there was a clear, cold spring and in
the one on its right ran a natural rivulet that
trickled even in August; but this middle ravine
was dry or merely moist.

Here let me say to any who would try an ama-
teur landscape art on their own acre at the edge
of a growing town, that the town's growth tends
steadily to diminish the amount of their land-
scape's natural water supply by catching on
street pavements and scores and hundreds of
roofs, lawns and walks, and carrying away in
sewers, the rain and melting snows which for
ages filtered slowly through the soil. Small
wonder, I think, that, when in the square
quarter-mile between my acre and Elm Street

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

fifty-three dwellings and three short streets took
the place of an old farm, my grove, by sheer
water famine, lost several of its giant pines.
Wonder to me is that the harm seems at length
to have ceased.

But about that ravine: one day the nature of
its growth and soil, especially its alders, elders,
and willows and a show of clay and gravel,
forced on my notice the likelihood that here,
too, had once been a spring, if no more. I
scratched at its head with a stick and out came
an imprisoned rill like a recollected word from
the scratched head of a schoolboy. Happily the
spot was just at the bottom of the impassably
steep fall of ground next the edge of the lawn
and was almost in the centre of those four
acres — one of sward, three of woods — which I
proposed to hold under more or less discipline,
leaving the rest — a wooded strip running up the
river shore — wholly wild, as college girls, for
example, would count wildness. In both parts
the wealth of foliage on timber and underbrush
almost everywhere shut the river out of view
from the lawn and kept the eye restless for a

MY OWN ACRE

glint, if no more, of water. And so there I
thought at once to give myself what I had all
my life most absurdly wished for, a fish-pool.
I had never been able to look upon an aquarium
and keep the tenth Commandment. I had never
caught a fish without wanting to take it home
and legally adopt it into the family — a tendency
which once led my son to say, *'Yes, he would
be pleased to go fishing with me if I would only
fish in a sportsmanlike manner." What a beau-
tifully marked fish is the sun-perch ! Once,
in boyhood, I kept six of those "pumpkin-
seed" in a cistern, and my smile has never been
the same since I lost them — one of my war
losses.

I resolved to impound the waters of my spring
in the ravine and keep fish at last — without
salt — to my heart's content. Yet I remem-
bered certain restraining precepts: first, that
law of art which condemns incongruity — re-
quires everything to be in keeping with its nat-
ural surroundings — and which therefore, for one
thing, makes an American garden the best pos-
sible sort of garden to have in America; second,

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

that twin art law, against inutility, which de-
mands that everything in an artistic scheme
serve the use it pretends to serve; third, a pre-
cept of Colonel Waring's: *' Don't fool with run-
ning water if you haven't money to fool away";
and, fourth, that best of all gardening rules —
look before you leap.

However, on second thought, and tenth, and
twentieth, one thought a day for twenty days, I
found that if water was to be impounded any-
where on my acre here was the strategic point.
Down this ravine, as I have said, was the lawn's
one good glimpse of the river, and a kindred
gleam intervening would tend, in effect, to draw
those farther waters in under the trees and into
the picture.

Such relationships are very rewarding to find
to whoever would garden well. Hence this men-
tion. One's garden has to do with whatever is
in sight from it, fair or otherwise, and it is as
feasible and important to plant in the fair as to
plant out the otherwise. Also, in making my
grove paths, I had noticed that to cross this ra-
vine where at one or two places in its upper half

MY OWN ACRE

a contour grade would have been pettily cir-
cuitous and uninteresting, and to cross it com-
fortably, there should be either a bridge or a
dam; and a dam with water behind it seemed
pleasanter every way — showed less incongruity
and less inutility — than a bridge with no water
under it.

As to "fooling with running water," the mere
trickle here in question had to be dragged out
of its cradle to make it run at all. It remained
for me to find out by experience that even that
weakling, imprisoned and grown to a pool,
though of only three hundred square feet in sur-
face, when aided and abetted by New England
frosts and exposed on a southern slope to winter
noonday suns, could give its amateur captor as
much trouble — proportionately — as any He-
brew babe drawn from the bulrushes of the Nile
is said to have given his.

Now if there is any value in recording these
experiences it can be only in the art principles
they reveal. To me in the present small instance
the principle illustrated was that of the true
profile line for ascent or descent in a garden.

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

You may go into any American town where
there is any inequality of ground and in half
an hour find a hundred or two private lawns
graded — from the house to each boundary line
— on a single falling curve, or, in plain English,
a hump. The best reason why this curve is not
artistic, not pleasing, but stupid, is that it is not
natural and gains nothing by being unnatural.
All gardening is a certain conquest of Nature,
and even when "formal" should interfere with
her own manner and custom as slightly as is
required by the necessities of the case — the
needs of that particular spot's human use and
joy. The right profile and surface for a lawn of
falling grade, the surface which will permanently
best beguile both eye and foot, should follow a
double curve, an ogee line. For, more or less
emphasized, that is Nature's line in all her
affable moods on land or water: a descent or as-
cent beginning gradually, increasing rapidly, and
concluding gently. We see it in the face of any
smooth knoll or billow. I believe the artists
impute to Praxiteles a certain ownership in this
double curve. It is a living line; it suggests

MY OWN ACRE

Nature conscious and astir as no single curve
or straight line can.

I admit that even among amateurs this is
rather small talk, but it brings me to this point:
in the passage of water down a ravine of its own
making, this line of Nature astir may repeat
itself again and again but is commonly too in-
affable, abrupt, angular, to suggest the ogee.
In that middle part of it where the descent is
swift it may be more or less of a plunge, and
after the plunge the water is likely to pause on
the third turn, in a natural pool, before resuming
its triple action again. And so, in my ravine,
some seasons later, I ventured to detain the over-
flow of my first pool on a second and a third
lingering place, augmenting the water supply by
new springs developed in the bottoms of the
new pools. The second pool has a surface of a
thousand square feet, the third spans nineteen
hundred, and there are fish in all three, hatched
there — "pumpkin-seed" included, but also trout
— among spontaneous bulrushes, pond-lilies,
flags, and dainty water- weeds; and sometimes at
night, when the reflected glory of a ten-o'clock

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

full moon shines up from it to the stone exedra
on the lawn, I seem to have taken my Praxitelean
curves so directly from Nature that she thinks
she took them herself from me and thanks me
for the suggestion.

Please observe that of great gardens, or of
costly gardens whether great or only costly, we
here say nothing. Our theme is such a garden
as a householder may himself make and keep
or for which, at most, he needs professional
advice only in its first planning, and for its
upkeep one gardener, with one occasional helper
in pressing seasons or in constructional work.

Constructional work. Dams, for example. In
two of my dams I built cores of concrete and
thus made acquaintance with that interesting
material. Later I pressed the acquaintanceship,
made garden and grove seats, a table or two, a
very modest fountain for a single jet of water in
my highest, smallest fish-pool, and even a flight
of steps with a pair of gaine-shaped pedestals —
suggested by a sculptor friend — at their top.
The exedra I mentioned just now is of concrete.
The stuff is a temptation to be wary of. The

£0

MY OWN ACRE

ordinary gray sort — I have touched no other

— is a humble medium, and pretentious designs
in humble materials are one of the worst, and
oldest, of garden incongruities. In my ventures
with concrete I have studied for grace in form
but grace subordinated to stability, and have
shunned embellishment. Embellishment for its
own sake is the easiest and commonest sin
against good art wherever art becomes self-con-
scious. It is having a riotous time just now in
concrete. I have rarely seen a commercial con-
crete garden-seat which was not more ornate
than I should want it for my own acre. I hap-
pen to have two or three articles in my garden
which are a trifle elaborate but they are of
terra-cotta, are not home-made and would be
plainer could I have found them so.

A garden needs furniture only less than a
house, and concrete is a boon to "natural" gar-
dening, being inexpensive, rustic, and imperish-
able. I fancy a chief reason why there is such
inconsiderate dearth of seats and steps in our
American amateur gardens is the old fashion

— so well got rid of at any cost — of rustic

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

cedar and hickory stairs and benches. *'Have
none of them," was Colonel Waring's injunc-
tion; "they are forever out of repair."

But I fear another reason is that so often our
gardens are neither for private ease nor social
joy, but for public display and are planned
mainly for street exhibition. That is the way
we commonly treat garden fountains ! We
make a smug show of unfenced, unhedged, uni-
versal hospitality across a sidewalk boundary
which nevertheless we hold inviolate — some-
times by means of a painted sign or gas-pipe —
and never say "Have a seat" to the dearest
friend in any secluded nook of our shrubberies,
if there is such a nook. How many of us know
a fountain beside an embowered seat where one,
— or two, — with or without the book of verses,
can sit and hear it whisper or watch the moon-
light cover it with silent kisses ? In my limited
experience I have known of but two. One is
by the once favorite thought-promoting sum-
mer seat of Augustus Saint-Gaudens on his own
home acre in Vermont; the other I need not
particularize further than to say that it is one

"A fountain . . . where one, — or two, — can sit and hear it whisper."

The ravnne of the three fish pools. There is a drop of thirty feet between the upper and the

lowermost pool.

UBRARY

MY OWN ACRE

of the things which interlock and unify a certain
garden and grove.

The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and
the pushing of the lawn in under the grove was
one of the early tasks of my own acre. When
the house was built its lot and others backed up
to a hard, straight rear line where the old field
had halted at its fence and where the woods
began on ground that fell to the river at an angle
of from forty to fifty degrees. Here my gifted
friend and adviser gave me a precept got from
his earlier gifted friend and adviser, Frederick
Law Olmsted: that passing from any part of a
pleasure-ground to any part next it should be
entirely safe and easy or else impossible. By
the application of this maxim I brought my lawn
and grove together in one of the happiest of mar-
riages. For I proceeded, by filling with earth
(and furnace ashes), to carry the lawn in, prac-
tically level, beyond the old fence line and un-
der the chestnuts and pines sometimes six feet,
sometimes twelve, until the difiicult and unsafe
forty or fifty degrees of abrupt fall were changed
to an impassable sixty and seventy degrees, and

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

every one's instinctive choice of way was the
contour paths.

At the same time this has preserved, and even
enhanced, the place's wildness, especially the
wild flowers and the low-nesting birds. Some-
times a few yards of retaining-wall, never ce-
mented, always laid up dry and with a strong
inward batter, had to be put in to avoid smoth-
ering the roots of some great tree; for, as every-
body knows and nearly everybody forgets, roots,
like fishes, must have air. In one place, across
the filled head of a ravine, the wall, though
but a scant yard high, is fifty feet long, and
there is another place where there should be one
like it. In this work no tree was sacrificed save
one noble oak done to death by a youth who
knew but forgot that roots must have air.

Not to make the work expensive it was pur-
sued slowly, through many successive seasons;
yet before even its easy, first half was done the
lawn was in under the grove on an apparently
natural, irregular crest fine. Moreover the
grove was out on the lawn with an even more
natural haphazard bordering hne; for another

"The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of tlie lawn in
under the grove was one of the early tasks of My Own Acre."

At the point where the party is drinking tea (the site of the Indian mound) the overlap of
grove and lawn is eighty-five feet across the old fence line that once sharply divided them.

UBRARY

MY OWN ACRE

operation had been carried on meantime. Trees,
souvenir trees, had from time to time been
planted on the lawn by visiting friends. Most
of them are set close enough to the grove to
become a part of it, standing in a careful Irregu-
larity which has already obliterated, without mo-
lesting, the tree line of the ancient fence.

Young senators among their seniors, they still
have much growth to make before they can enter
into their full forest dignity, yet Henry Ward
Beecher's elm Is nearly two feet through and has
a spread of fifty; Max O'Rell's white- ash is a
foot in diameter and fifty feet high; Edward
Atkinson's is something more, and Felix Adler's
hemlock-spruce, the maple of Anthony Hope
Hawkins, L. Clark Seelye's English ash, Henry
van Dyke's white-ash, Sol Smith Russell's lin-
den, and Hamilton Wright Mabie's horse-chest-
nut are all about thirty -five feet high and cast a
goodly shade. Sir James M. Barrie's elm — his
and Sir William Robertson NIcoU's, who planted
it with him later than the plantings aforemen-
tioned — has, by some virtue In the soil or in its
own energies, reached a height of nearly sixty-

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

five feet and a diameter of sixteen inches.
Other souvenirs are a horse-chestnut planted by-
Minnie Maddern Fiske, a ginkgo by Ahce Free-
man Palmer, a beech by Paul van Dyke, a horse-
chestnut by Anna Hempstead Branch, another
by Sir Sidney Lee, yet another by Mary E.
Burt, a catalpa by Madelaine Wynne, a Colo-
rado blue spruce — fitly placed after much labor
of mind — by Sir Moses Ezekiel, and a Kentucky
coffee-tree by Gerald Stanley Lee and Jennette
Lee, of our own town. Among these should also
stand the maple of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but
it was killed in its second winter by an unde-
tected mouse at its roots. Except Sir Moses,
all the knights here named received the accolade
after their tree plantings, but I draw no moral.
Would it were practicable to transmit to those
who may know these trees in later days the
scenes of their setting out and to tell just how
the words were said which some of the planters
spoke. Mr. Beecher, lover of young trees and
young children, straightened up after pressing
the soil about the roots with hands as well as
feet and said: "I cannot wish you to five as

'' SoUN ciiir trees had t'luin time tu tlino been pluiited uii the lawn b\ visiting

friends."

The Beecher elm, first of the souvenir trees.

UBRARY
OF THE

MY OWN ACRE

long as this tree, but may your children's chil-
dren and their children sit under its shade."
Said Felix Adler to his hemlock-spruce, " Vivat,
crescat, floreat"; and a sentiment much like it
was implied in Sol Smith Russell's words to the
grove's master as they finished putting in his
linden together — for he was just then propos-
ing to play Rip Van Winkle, which Joseph Jef-
ferson had finally decided to produce no more:
"Here's to your healt', undt der healt' of all
your family; may you lif long undt brosper."

We — the first person singular grows tiresome
— we might have now, on our acre, a tree
planted by Joseph Jefferson had we thought in
time to be provided with a sapling, growing, in a
tub. Have your prospective souvenir tree al-
ready tubbed and waiting. This idea I got from
Andrew Carnegie, with whom I had the honor
to plant an oak at Skibo Castle and from whom
I, like so many others, have had other things
almost as good as ideas. Have your prospective
souvenir tree tubbed and the tub sunk in the
ground, of course, to its rim. Then the dear
friend can plant it at any time that he may

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

chance along between March and December.
But let no souvenir tree, however planted, be
treated, after planting, as other than a Hving
thing if you would be just to it, to your friend,
or to yourself. Cultivate it; coax it on; and it
will grow two or three or four times as fast as if
left to fight its daily battle for life unaided. And
do not forbear to plant trees because they grow
so slowly. They need not. They do not. With
a Uttle attention they grow so swiftly ! Before
you know it you are sitting in their shade. Be-
sides Sir Arthur's maple the only souvenir tree
we have lost was a tulip-tree planted by my friend
of half a lifetime, the late Frankhn H. Head.

So much for my grove. I write of it not in
self-complacency. My many blunders, some of
them yet to be made, are a good insurance
against that. I write because of the countless
acres as good as mine, in this great, dear Amer-
ica, which might now be giving their owners all
the healthful pastime, private solace, or sohtary
or social delights which this one yields, yet which
are only *' waste lands" or *' holes in the ground'*
because unavailable for house lots or tillage.

~ ^ >.:S

5 c-r =-

MY OWN ACRE

And now as to the single acre by measure, of
lawn, shrubs, and plants, close around my house;
for the reason that it was and is my school of
gardening. There was no garden here — I write
this in the midst of it — when I began. Ten
steps from where I sit there had been a small
Indian mound which some one had carefully
excavated. I found stone arrow chips on the
spot, and one whole arrow-head. So here no
one else's earher skill was in evidence to point
my course or impede it. This was my clean
new slate and at that time I had never "done a
sum" in gardening and got anything Hke a right
answer.

It is emphatically an amateur garden and a
book garden : a garden which to me, as to most of
us, would have been impossible in any but these
days when the whole art of gardening has been
printed in books and no amateur is excusable for
trying to garden without reading them, or for
saying after having read them that he has
planned and worked without professional advice.
The books are the professional advice, with few
drawbacks and with the great advantage that

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

they are ours truly and do not even have to be
*"phoned." I should rather have in my hbrary
my Bailey's "American Cyclopedia of Horticul-
ture," than any two garden periodicals once a
month. These, too, I value, but, for me, they are
over-apt to carry too much deckload of the ad-
vice and gentle vaun tings of other amateurs.
I have an amateur's abhorrence of amateurs !
The Cyclopedia knows, and will always send me
to the right books if it cannot thresh a matter out
with me itself. Before Bailey my fount of knowl-
edge was Mr. E. J. Canning, late of Smith Col-
lege Botanic Gardens; a spring still far from dry.

As the books enjoin, I began my book-garden-
ing with a plan on paper; not the elaborate thing
one pays for when he can give his garden more
money than time, but a light sketch, a mere
fundamental suggestion. This came profession-
ally from a landscape-architect. Miss Frances
BuUard, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who had
just finished plotting the grounds of my neigh-
bor, the college.

I tell of my own garden for another reason:
that it shows, I think, how much can be done

MY OWN ACRE

with how httle, if for the doing you take time
instead of money. All things come to the gar-
den that knows how to wait. Mine has acquired
at leisure a group of effects which would have
cost from ten to twenty times as much if got
in a hurry. Garden for ten-year results and get
them for next to nothing, and at the same time
you may quicken speed whenever your exchequer
smiles broadly enough. Of course this argu-
ment is chiefly for those who have the time
and not the money; for by time we mean play
time, time which is money lost if you don't
play. The garden that gives the most joy, "Joy-
ous Gard," as Sir Launcelot named his, is not to
be bought, like a Circassian slave; it must be
brought up, like a daughter. How much of life
they can miss who can buy whatever they want
whenever they want it !

But I tell first of my own garden also because
I believe it summarizes to the eye a number of
primary book-rules, authoritative "don'ts," by
the observance of which a multitude of amateur
gardeners may get better results than it yet
shows. Nevertheless, I will hardly do more than

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

note a few exceptions to these ground rules,
which may give the rules a more convincing
force. First of all, "don't" let any of your
planting cut or split your place in two. How
many a small house-lot lawn we see split down
the middle by a row of ornamental shrubs or
fruit-trees which might as easily have been set
within a few feet of the property line, whose
rigidity, moreover, would have best excused the
rigidity of the planted line. But such glaring
instances aside, there are many subtler ones
quite as unfortunate; "don't" be too sure you
are not unwittingly furnishing one.

"Don't" destroy the openness of your sward
by dotting it with shrubs or pattern flower-beds.
To this rule I doubt if a plausible exception could
be contrived. It is so sweeping and so primary
that we might well withhold it here were we
not seeking to state its artistic reason why.
Which is, that such plantings are mere eruptions
of individual smartness, without dignity and
with no part in any general unity; chirping up
like pert children in a company presumably try-
ing to be rational.

MY OWN ACRE

On the other hand, I hope my acre, despite all
its unconscious or unconfessed mistakes, shows
pleasantly that the best openness of a lawn is not
to be got between unclothed, right-angled and
parallel bounds. The more its verdure-clad
borders swing in and out the longer they look,
not merely because they are longer but also
because they interest and lure the eye. "Where
are you going?" says the eye.

"Come and see," says the roaming line.

"Don't" plant in stiff lines except in close
relation to architectural or legal bounds. A
straight horizontal line Nature scarcely knows
save in her rocks and on a vaster scale than we
here have to do with. Yet straight lines in gar-
dening are often good and fine if only they are
lines of real need. Where, when and in what
degree it is good to subordinate utility to beauty
or beauty to utility depends on time, place and
circumstance, but when in doubt "don't" pinch
either to pet the other. Oppression is never
good art. Yet "don't" cry war, war, where
there is no war. A true beauty and a needed
utility may bristle on first colhsion but they soon

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

make friends. Was it not Ruskin himseK who
wanted to butt the railway-train off the track
and paw up the rails — something like that ?
But even between them and the landscape
there is now an entente cordiale. I have seen
the hand of Joseph Pennell make beautiful
peace with billboards and telegraph-poles and
wires.

The railway points us to the fact that along
the ground Nature is as innocent of parallel hues,
however bent, as of straight ones, and that in
landscape-gardening parallels should be avoided
unless they are lines of utiHty. "Don't" lay
parallel Hues, either straight or curved, where
Nature would not and utiHty need not. Yet
my own acre has taught me a modification of
this rule so marked as to be almost an excep-
tion. On each side of me next my nearest
neighbor I have a turfed alley between a contin-
uous bed of flowering shrubs and plants next the
division hne, and a similar bed whose meander-
ings border my lawn. At first I gave these two
alleys a sinuous course in correspondence with
the windings of the bed bordering the lawn —

MY OWN ACRE

for they were purely ways of pleasure among
the flowers, and a loitering course seemed only
reasonable. But sinuous lines proved as dis-
appointing in the alleys as they were satisfying
out on the lawn, and by and by I saw that
whereas the bendings of the open lawn's borders
lured and rewarded the eye, the same curves in
the alleys obstructed and baffled it. The show
of floral charms was piecemeal, momentary and
therefore trivial. *' Don't" be trivial !

But a cure was easy. I had to straighten but
one side of each alley to restore the eye's freedom
of perspective, and nothing more was wanting.
The American eye's freedom of perspective is
one of our great liberties.

Oh, say, can you see — ?

I made this change, of course, on the side
nearest the straight, property-division bound,
where ran an invisible wire fence. Thus the bed
on that side was set between two straight par-
allels, while the bed on the lawn side remained
between waving parallels. This gave the best
simplicity with the least artificiality. And thus

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

the two lanes are open to view from end to end,
yet each has two deep bays on the side nearest
the lawn, bays which remain unseen till one ac-
tually reaches them in traversing the lane. In
such a bay one should always have, I think, some
floral revelation of special charm worthy of the
seclusion and the surprise. But this thought is
only one of a hundred that tell me my garden
is not a finished thing. To its true lover a
garden never is.

Another sort of bay, the sort resulting from a
swift retreat of a line of shrubberies pursued by
the lawn and then swinging round and returning
upon the lawn in a counter pursuit, I thought I
had learned from books and Miss Bullard and
had established on my own acre, until I saw the
college gardens of Oxford, England, and the
landscape work in Hyde Park, London. On my
return thence I made haste to give my own gar-
den's in-and-out curves twice the boldness they
had had. And doubling their boldness I doubled
their beauty. "Don't" ever let your acre's, or
half or quarter acre's, ground lines relax into
feebleness or shrink into pettiness. "Don't"

"The lane is open to view from end to tnd. it has two deep bays on the
side nearest the lawn. "

The straight line of high growth conceals in the midst of its foliage a wire division fence,
and makes a perfect background for blooming herbaceous perennials.

or ^HE

MY OWN ACRE

ever plan a lay-out for whose free swing your
limits are cramped.

"Don't" ever, if you can help it, says another
of my old mistakes to me, let your acre lead
your guest to any point which can be departed
from only by retracing one's steps. Such neces-
sities involve a lapse — not to say collapse — of
interest, which makes for dulness and loss of
dignity. Lack what my own acre may, I have
it now so that by its alleys, lawns and contour
paths in garden and grove we can walk and walk
through every part of it without once meeting
our own tracks, and that is not all because of
the pleasant fact that the walks, where not
turfed, are covered with pine-straw, of which
each new September drops us a fresh harvest.

A garden, we say, should never compel us to
go back the way we came; but in truth a garden
should never compel us to do anything. Its
don'ts should be laid solely on itseK. Those ap-
phcable to its master, mistress, or guests should
all be impossibihties, not requests. "Private
grounds, no crossing" — take that away, please,
wherever you can, and plant your margins so

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

that there can be no crossing. Wire nettings
hidden by shrubberies from all but the shame-
less trespasser you will find far more effective,
more promotive to beauty and more courteous.
"Don't" make your garden a garden of don'ts.
For no garden is quite a garden until it is
"Joyous Gard." Let not yours or mine be a
garden for display. Then our rhododendrons
and hke splendors will not be at the front gate,
and our grounds be less and less worth seeing the
farther into them we go. Nor let yours or mine
be a garden of pride. The ways of such a garden
are not pleasantness nor its paths peace. And let
us not have a garden of tiring care or a user up
of precious time. That is not good citizenship.
Neither let us have an old-trousers, sun-bonnet,
black finger-nails garden — especially if you are a
woman. A garden that makes a wife, daughter
or sister a dowdy is hardly "Joyous Gard."
Neither is one which makes itself a mania to her
and an affliction to her family. Let us not even
have, you or me, a wonder garden — of arboreal
or floral curiosities. Perhaps because I have not
travelled enough I have never seen a garden of

MY OWN ACRE

exotics that was a real garden in any good art
sense; in any way, that is, lastingly pleasing to a
noble spirit. Let your garden, and let mine, be
the garden of joy. For the only way it can be
that, on and on, year in, year out, is to be so good
in art and so finely human in its purposes that
to have it and daily keep it will make us more
worth while to ourselves and to mankind than
to go without it.

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

ALMOST any good American will admit it to
^ be a part of our national social scheme, I
think, — if we have a social scheme, — that
everybody shall* aspire to all the refinements of
life.

Particularly is it our theory that every one
shall propose to give to his home all the joys and
graces which are anywhere associated with the
name of home. Yet until of late we have neg-
lected the art of gardening. Now and then we
see, or more likely we read about, some garden of
wonderful beauty; but the very fame of it points
the fact that really artistic gardening is not
democratically general with us.

Our cities and towns, without number, have
the architect and the engineer, for house and for
landscape, for sky-scrapers and all manner of
public works; we have the nurseryman, the
florist; we have parks, shaded boulevards and
riverside and lakeside drives. Under private

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

ownership we have a vast multitude of exactly
rectilinear lawns, extremely bare or else very
badly planted; and we have hundreds of thou-
sands of beautiful dames and girls who *'love
flowers." But our home gardens, our home gar-
deners, either professional or amateur, where are
they? Our smaller cities by scores and our
towns by hundreds are full of home-dwellers each
privately puzzled to know why every one of his
neighbors' houses, however respectable in archi-
tecture, stares at him and after him with a va-
cant, deaf-mute air of having just landed in this
country, without friends.

What ails these dwellings is largely lack of
true gardening. They will never look like
homes, never look really human and benign, that
is, until they are set in a gardening worthy of
them. For a garden which alike in its dignity
and in its modesty is worthy of the house around
which it is set, is the smile of the place.

In the small city of Northampton, Massachu-
setts, there has been for many years an annual
prize competition of amateur flower-gardens.
In 1913 there were over a thousand homes,

44 .

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

about one-fourth of all the dwellings in the
town, in this pretty contest. Not all, not half,
these competitors could make a show worthy
the name of good gardening, but every one of
these households stood pledged to do something
during the year for the outdoor improvement
of the home, and hundreds of their house lots
were florally beautiful. If I seem to hurry into
a mention of it here it is partly in the notion
that such a recital may be my best credentials as
the writer of these pages, and partly in the
notion that such a concrete example may possi-
bly have a tendency to help on flower-gardening
in the country at large and even to aid us in de-
termining what American flower-gardening had
best be.

For the reader's better advantage, however,
let me first state one or two general ideas which
have given this activity and its picturesque re-
sults particular aspects and not others.

I lately heard a lady ask an amateur gar-
dener, "What is the garden's foundation prin-
ciple?"

There was a certain overgrown pomp in the

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

question's form, but that is how she very mod-
estly asked it, and I will take no liberty with its
construction. I thought his reply a good one.

"We have all," he said, "come up from wild
nature. In wild nature there are innumerable
dehghts, but they are qualified by countless in-
conveniences. The cave, tent, cabin, cottage
and castle have gradually been evolved by an
orderly accumulation and combination of de-
fences and conveniences which secure to us a
host of advantages over wild nature and wild
man. Yet rightly we are loath to lose any more
of nature than we must in order to be her mas-
ters and her children in one, and to gather from
her the largest fund of profit and delight she can
be made to yield. Hence around the cottage,
the castle or the palace waves and blooms the
garden."

Was he not right ? This is why, in our pleas-
ant Northampton affair, we have accepted it as
our first rule of private gardening that the house
is the climacteric note.

This is why the garden should never be more
architectural and artificial than the house of

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

which it is the setting, and this is why the gar-
den should grow less and less architectural and
artificial as it draws away from the house. To
say the same thing in reverse, the garden, as it
approaches the house, should accept more and
more discipline — domestication — social refine-
ment, until the house itself at length seems as
unabruptly and naturally to grow up out of
the garden as the high keynote rises at the end
of a lady's song.

By this understanding of the matter what a
fine truce-note is blown between the contending
advocates of "natural" and of "formal" garden-
ing ! The right choice between these two as-
pects of the art, and the right degree in either
choice, depend on the character of the house.
The house is a part of the garden. It is the gar-
den's brow and eyes. In gardening, almost the
only thing which costs unduly is for us to try to
give our house some other house's garden.
One's private garden should never be quite so
far removed from a state of nature as his house
is. Its leading function should be to delight its
house's inmates (and intimates) in things of

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

nature so refined as to inspire and satisfy their
happiest moods. Therefore no garden should
cost, nor look as if it cost, an outlay of money,
time or toil that cramps the house's own ability
to minister to the genuine bodily needs and
spiritual enlargements of its indwellers; and
therefore, also, it should never seem to cost, in
its first making or in its daily keeping, so much
pains as to lack, itself, a garden's supreme essen-
tial — tranquilhty.

So, then, to those who would incite whole
streets of American towns to become florally
beautiful, "formal" gardening seems hardly the
sort to recommend. About the palatial dwellings
of men of princely revenue it may be enchanting.
There it appears quite in place. For with all its
exquisite artificiality it still is nearer to nature
than the stately edifice it surrounds and adorns.
But for any less costly homes it costs too much.
It is expensive in its first outlay and it demands
constantly the greatest care and the highest
skill. Our ordinary American life is too busy
for it unless the ground is quite handed over to
the hired professional and openly betrays itself

OF THE

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

as that very unsatisfying thing, a "gardener's
garden."

Our ordinary American Hfe is also too near
nature for the formal garden to come in between.
Unless our formal gardening is of some inexpen-
sive sort our modest dwelling-houses give us an
anti-climax, and there is no inexpensive sort
of formal gardening. Except in the far south
our American climate expatriates it.

A very good practical rule would be for none
of us to venture upon such gardening until he is
well able to keep up an adequate greenhouse.
A formal garden without a greenhouse or two —
or three — is a glorious army on a war footing,
but without a base of supphes. It is largely his
greenhouses which make the public gardener
and the commercial florist so misleading an ex-
ample for the cottager to follow in his private
gardening.

To be beautiful, formal gardening requires
stately proportions. Without these it is almost
certain to be petty and frivolous. In the tiny
gardens of British and European peasants, it is
true, a certain formality of design is often prac-

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

tised with pleasing success ; but these gardens are
a by-product of peasant toil, and in America we
have no joy in contemplating an American
home Umited to the aspirations of peasant life.
In such gardening there is a constraint, a lack of
natural freedom, a distance from nature, and a
certain contented subserviency, which makes it
— however fortunate it may be under other so-
cial conditions — wholly unfit to express the
buoyant, not to say exuberant, complacencies of
the American home. For these we want, what
we have not yet quite evolved, the American
garden. \Mien this comes it must come, of
course, unconsciously; but we may be sure it will
not be much like the gardens of any politically
shut-in people. No, not even of those supreme
artists in gardening, the Japanese. It will ex-
press the traits of our American domestic life;
our strong individuality and self-assurance, our
sense of unguarded security, our affability and
unexclusiveness and our dislike to high-walled
privacy. If we would hasten its day we must
make way for it along the lines of these traits.
On the other hand, if in following these lines

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

we can contrive to adhere faithfully to the world-
wide laws of all true art, who knows but our very-
gardening may tend to correct more than one
shortcoming or excess in our national character ?
In our Northampton experiment it has been
our conviction from the beginning that for a
private garden to be what it should be — to
have a happy individuality — a countenance of
its own — one worthy to be its own — it must
in some practical way be the fruit of its house-
holder's own spirit and not merely of some hired
gardener's. If one can employ a landscape-archi-
tect, all very well; but the most of us cannot,
and after all, the true landscape-architect, the
artist gardener, works on this principle and
seeks to convey into every garden distinctively
the soul of the household for which it springs and
flowers.

"Since when it grows and smells, I swear.
Not of itself but thee."

Few American householders, however, have
any enthusiasm for this theory, which many
would call high-strung, and as we in Northamp-
ton cannot undertake to counsel and direct our

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

neighbors' hired helps, we enroll in the main
branch of our competition only those who garden
for themselves and hire no labor. To such the
twenty-one prizes, ranging from two dollars and
a half up to fifteen dollars, are a strong incentive,
and by such the advice of visiting committees is
eagerly sought and followed. The public edu-
cative value of the movement is probably largest
under these limitations, for in this way we show
what beautiful results may be got on smallest
grounds and with the least outlay. Its private
educative value, too, is probably largest thus,
because thus we disseminate as a home delight a
practical knowledge of aesthetic principles among
those who may at any time find it expedient to
become wage-earning gardeners on the home
grounds of the well-to-do.

The competing gardens being kept wholly
without hired labor, of course our constant ad-
vice to all contestants is to shun formal garden-
ing. It is a pity that in nearly all our cities and
towns the most notable examples of gardening
are found in the parks, boulevards, and ceme-
teries. By these flaring displays thousands of
modest cottagers who might easily provide, on

"Beautiful results may be got on smallest groimds."

This is half of a back yard, the whole of which is equally handsome. The place to which it
belongs took a capital prize in the Carnegie Flower Garden Competition.

"MuflBe your architectural angles in foliage and bloom/'

An in^-isible fault of this planting is that it was set too close to the building and tended
to give an impression, probably groundless, of promoting dampness. Also it wa3 an
inconvenience to mechanics in painting or repairing.

pppAf?Y

or ^HE

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

their small scale, lovely gardens about their
dwellings at virtually no cost and with no bur-
densome care, get a notion that this, and this
only, is artistic gardening and hence that a home
garden for oneself would be too expensive and
troublesome to be thought of. On the other
hand, a few are tempted to mimic them on a
petty scale, and so spoil their little grass-plots
and amuse, without entertaining, their not more
tasteful but only less aspiring neighbors. In
Northampton, in our Carnegie prize contest —
so called for a very sufficient and pleasant reason
— our counsel is to avoid all mimicry in garden-
ing as we would avoid it in speech or in gait.
Sometimes we do not mind being repetitious.
"In gardening," we say — as if we had never
said it before — "almost the only thing which
costs unduly — in money or in mortification —
is for one to try to give himself somebody else's
garden !" Often we say this twice to the same
person.

One of the reasons we give against it is that it
leads to toy gardening, and toy gardening is of
all sorts the most pitiful and ridiculous. "No
true art," we say, "can tolerate any make-be-

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

lieve which is not in some way finer than the
reahty it simulates. In other words, imitation
should always be in the nature of an amiable
condescension. Whatever falseness, pretension
or even mere frailty or smallness, suggests to the
eye the ineffectuality of a toy is out of place in
any sort of gardening." We do not actually
speak all this, but we imply it, and we often find
that the mere utterance of the one word, "toy
gardening," has a magical effect to suggest all the
rest and to overwhelm with contrition the bad
taste and frivolity of many a misguided attempt
at adornment. At that word of exorcism joints
of cerulean sewer-pipe crested with scarlet ge-
raniums, rows of whited cobbles along the walk
or drive like a cannibal's skulls around his hut,
purple paint-kegs of petunias on the scanty door-
steps, crimson wash-kettles of verbenas, ant-hill
rockeries, and well-sweeps and curbs where no
wells are, steal modestly and forever into obliv-
ion.

Now, when we so preach we try also to make
it very plain that there is not one set of rules for
gardening on a small scale of expense in a small
piece of ground, and another set for gardening on

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

a larger scale. For of course the very thing
which makes the small garden different from the
large, the rich man's from the poor man's, the
Scotch or Italian peasant's from the American
mechanic's, or the public garden from the pri-
vate, is the universal and immutable oneness of
the great canons of art. One of our competi-
tors, having honestly purged her soul of every
impulse she may ever have had to mimic the
gardening of the cemeteries, planted her door-
yard with a trueness of art which made it the
joy of all beholders. Only then was it that a
passing admirer stopped and cried: *'Upon me
soul, Mrs. Anonyma, yir gyairden looks joost
loike a pooblic pairk!" He meant — without
knowing it — that the spot was lovely for not
trying to look the least bit Hke a public park,
and he was right. She had kept what it would
be well for the public gardeners to keep much
better than some of them do — the Moral Law
of Gardening.

There is a moral law of gardening. No gar-
den should ever tell a He. No garden should

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

ever put on any false pretence. No garden
should ever break a promise. To the present
reader these proclamations may seem very trite;
it may seem very trite to say that if anything
in or of a garden is meant for adornment, it must
adorn; but we have to say such things to many
who do not know what trite means — who think
it is something you buy from the butcher. A
thing meant for adornment, we tell them, must
so truly and sufficiently adorn as to be worth
all the room and attention it takes up. Thou
shalt not let anything in thy garden take away
thy guest's attention without repaying him for
it; it is stealing.

A lady, not in our competition but one of its
most valued patronesses, lately proposed to her-
self to place in the centre of a wide, oval lawn a
sun-dial and to have four paths cross the grass
and meet there. But on reflection the query
came to her —

*'In my unformal garden of simplest grove
and sward will a sun-dial — posing in an ofl&ce it
never performed there, and will never again be
needed for anywhere — a cabinet reHc now —

THE AMERICAN GARDEX

will a yosed sun-dial be interesting enough when
it is arrived at to justify a special journey and
four kept-up paths which cut my beautiful grass-
plot into ciuarters?"

With that she changed her mind — a thing
the good gardener must often do — and ap-
pointed the dial to a place where one comes upon
it c^uite incidentally while mo\'ing from one
main feature of the grounds to another. It is
now a pleasing, mild surprise instead of a tame
fulfilment of a show^' promise; pleasing, after all,
it must, however, be admitted, to the toy-loving
spirit, since the sun-dial has long been, and
henceforth ever will be, an utterly useless thing
in a garden, only true to art when it stands in an
old garden, a genuine historical survival of its
day of true utility. Only in such a case does
the sun-dial belong to the good morals of gar-
denino;. But mavbe this is an overstrict rule
for the majority of us who are much too fond
of embellishments and display — the rouge and
powder of high art.

On the other hand, we go to ciuite as much
pains to say that though a garden may not He

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

nor steal, it may have its concealments ; they are
as right as they are valuable. One of the first
steps in the making of a garden should be to de-
termine what to hide and how most gracefully
to hide it. A garden is a house's garments, its
fig-leaves, as we may say, and the garden's con-
cealments, like its revelations, ought always to
be in the interest of comfort, dignity, and charm.

We once had a very bumptious member on our
board of judges. "My dear madam!" he ex-
claimed to an aspirant for the prizes, the under-
pinning of whose dwelling stood out unconcealed
by any sprig of floral growth, "your house is
barefooted ! Nobody wants to see your house's
underpinning, any more than he wants to see
your own !"

It is not good to be so brusque about non-
penitentiary offences, but skilful and lovely con-
cealments in gardening were his hobby. To an-
other he whispered, "My dear sir, tell your
pretty house her petticoat shows!" and to yet
another, "Take all those shrubs out of the mid-
dle of your lawn and 'plant out' with them every
feature of your house which would be of no in-

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

terest to you if the house were not yours. Your
house's morals may be all right, but its manners
are insufferable, it talks so much about itself and
its family." To a fourth he said: "In a garden-
ing sense your house makes too much noise; you
can hear its right angles hit the ground. Muffle
them ! Muffle your architectural angles in foli-
age and bloom. Up in the air they may be ever
so correct and fine, but down in the garden and
unclothed they are heinous, heinous !"

Another precept we try to inculcate in our
rounds among the gardens, another command-
ment in the moral law of gardening, is that with
all a garden's worthy concealments it should
never, and need never, be frivolous or be lacking
in candor. I know an amateur gardener — and
the amateur gardener, Hke the amateur pho-
tographer, sometimes ranks higher than the pro-
fessional — who is at this moment altering the
location of a sidewalk gate which by an earlier
owner was architecturally misplaced for the sole
purpose of making a path with curves — and
such curves ! — instead of a straight and honest
one, from the street to the kitchen. When a

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

path is sent on a plain business errand it should
never loaf. And yet those lines of a garden's
layout which are designed not for business but
for pleasure, should never behave as though they
were on business; they should loiter just enough
to make their guests feel at ease, while not
enough to waste time. How like a perfect lady,
or a perfect gentleman, is — however humble or
exalted its rank — a garden with courtly man-
ners !

As to manners, our incipient American garden
has already developed one trait which dis-
tinguishes it from those beyond the Atlantic.
It is a habit which reminds one of what some-
body has lately said about Americans them-
selves: that, whoever they are and whatever
their manners may be, they have this to their
credit, that they unfailingly desire and propose
to be polite. The thing we are hinting at is our
American gardens' excessive openness. Our peo-
ple have, or until just now had, almost abolished
the fence and the hedge. A gard, yard, garth,
garden, used to mean an enclosure, a close, and
implied a privacy to its owner superior to any

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

he enjoyed outside of it. But now that we no
longer have any mihtary need of privacy we are
tempted — are we not ? — to overlook its spir-
itual value. We seem to enjoy publicity better.
In our American eagerness to publish everything
for everybody and to everybody, we have pub-
lished our gardens — published them in paper
bindings; that is to say, with their boundaries
visible only on maps filed with the Registrar of
Deeds.

Foreigners who travel among us complain that
we so overdo our good-natured endurance of
every public inconvenience that we have made
it a national misfortune and are losing our sense
of our public rights. This obliteration of private
boundaries is an instance. Our public spirit and
out imperturbability are flattered by it, but our
gardens, except among the rich, have become
American by ceasing to be gardens.

I have a neighbor who every year plants a
garden of annuals. He has no fence, but two
of his neighbors have each a setter dog. These
dogs are rarely confined. One morning I saw
him put in the seed of his lovely annuals and

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

leave his smoothly raked beds already a pleasant
show and a prophecy of delight while yet with-
out a spray of green. An hour later I saw those
two setter dogs wrestling and sprawling around
in joyous circles all over those garden beds.
*'Gay, guiltless pair!" ^Yhat is one to do in
such a case, in a land where everybody is ex-
pected to take everything good-naturedly, and
where a fence is sign of a sour temper ? Of course
he can do as others do, and have no garden.
But to have no garden is a distinct poverty in
a householder's life, whether he knows it or not,
and — suppose he very much wants a garden.'^
They were the well-to-do who began this
abolition movement against enclosures and I
have an idea it never would have had a begin-
ning had there prevailed generally, democratic-
ally, among us a sentiment for real gardening,
and a knowledge of its practical principles; for
with this sentiment and knowledge we should
have had that sweet experience of outdoor pri-
vacy for lack of which we lose one of the noblest
charms of home. The well-to-do started the
fashion, it cost less money to follow than to with-

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

stand it and presently the landlords of the poor
utilized it.

The poor man — the poor woman — needs
the protection of a fence to a degree of which
the well-to-do know nothing. In the common
interest of the whole community, of any com-
munity, the poor man — the poor woman —
ought to have a garden; but if they are going to
have a garden they ought to have a fence. We
in Northampton know scores of poor homes
whose tenants strive year after year to establish
some floral beauty about them, and fail for want
of enclosures. The neighbors' children, their
dogs, their cats, geese, ducks, hens — it is use-
less. Many refuse to make the effort; some, I
say, make it and give it up, and now and then
some one wins a surprising and delightful suc-
cess. Two or three such have taken high prizes
in our competition. The two chief things which
made their triumph possible were, first, an
invincible passion for gardening, and, second,
poultry-netting.

A great new boon to the home gardener they
are, these wire fencings and nettings. With

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

them ever so many things may be done now at a
quarter or tenth of what they would once have
cost. Our old-fashioned fences were sometimes
very expensive, sometimes very perishable, some-
times both. Also they were apt to be very ugly.
Yet instead of conceahng them we made them a
display, while the shrubbery which should have
masked them in leaf and bloom stood scattered
over the lawn, each little new bush by itseK, vis-
ibly if not audibly saying —

"You'd scarce expect one of my age "

etc. ; the shrubs orphaned, the lawn destroyed.

If the enclosure was a hedge it had to be a tight
one or else it did not enclose. Now wire net-
ting charms away these embarrassments. Your
hedge can be as loose as you care to have it, while
your enclosure may be rigidly effective yet be
hidden from the eye by undulating fence-rows;
and as we now have definite bounds and corners
to plant out, we do not so often as formerly need
to be reminded of Frederick Law Olmsted's fa-
vorite maxim, *'Take care of the corners, and the
centres will take care of themselves."

OF THE

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

Here there is a word to be added in the inter-
est of home-lovers, whose tastes we properly
expect to find more highly trained than those of
the average tenant cottager. Our American
love of spaciousness leads us to fancy that —
not to-day or to-morrow, but somewhere in a
near future — we are going to unite our unfenced
lawns in a concerted park treatment: a sort
of wee horticultural United States comprised
within a few city squares ; but ever our American
individualism stands broadly in the way, and
our gardens almost never relate themselves to
one another with that intimacy which their
absence of boundaries demands in order to take
on any special beauty, nobility, delightsomeness,
of gardening. The true gardener — who, if he
is reading this, must be getting very tired of our
insistent triteness — carefully keeps in mind the
laws of linear and of aerial perspective, no mat-
ter how large or small the garden. The relative
stature of things, both actual and prospective;
their breadth; the breadth or slenderness, dark-
ness or lightness, openness or density, of their
foliage; the splendor or delicacy of their flowers,

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

whether in size or in color; the season of their
blooming; the contour of the grounds — all these
points must be taken into account in determin-
ing where things are to stand and how be
grouped. Once the fence or hedge was the
frame of the picture; but now our pictures, on
almost any street of unpalatial, comfortable
homes, touch edge to edge without frames, and
the reason they do not mar one another's ef-
fects is that they have no particular effects to
be marred, but lie side by side as undiscord-
antly as so many string instruments without
strings. Let us hope for a time when they will
rise in insurrection, resolved to be either parts
of a private park, or each one a whole private
garden.

In our Carnegie prize contest nothing yields
its judges more pleasure than to inculcate the
garden rules of perspective to which we have
just referred and to see the blissful complacency
of those who successfully carry them out. I
have now in my mind's eye a garden to which
was awarded the capital prize of 1903. A cot-
tage of maybe six small rooms crowns a high

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

bank on a corner where two rural streets cross.
There are a few square yards of lawn on its
front, and still fewer (scarcely eight or ten) on
the side next the cross-street, but on the other
two sides there is nearly a quarter of an acre.
On these two sides the limits touch other gar-
dens, and all four sides are entirely without
fencing. From the front sward have been taken
away a number of good shrubs which once broke
it into ineffectual bits, and these have been
grouped against the inward and outward angles
of the house. The front porch is garlanded —
not smothered — with vines whose flowers are
all white, pink, blue or light purple. About
the base of the porch and of all the house's front,
bloom flowers of these same delicate tints, the
tallest nearest the house, the lesser at their knees
and feet. The edges of the beds — gentle waves
that never degenerate to straightness — are
thickly bordered with mignonette. Not an
audacious thing, not a red blossom nor a strong
yellow one, nor one broad leaf, nor any mass of
dense or dark foliage, comes into view until one
reaches a side of the dwelling. But there at

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

once he finds the second phase in a crescendo
of floral colors. The base of the house, and es-
pecially those empty eye-sockets, the cellar win-
dows, are veiled in exultant bloom, yellows pre-
dominating. Then at the back of the place
comes the full chorus, and red flowers overmaster
the yellow, though the delicate tints with which
the scheme began are still present to preserve the
dignity and suavity of all — the ladies of the
feast. The paths are only one or two and
they never turn abruptly and ask you to keep off
their corners; they have none. Neither have the
flower-beds. They flow wideningly around the
hard turnings of the house with the grace of a
rivulet. Out on the two wider sides of the lawn
nothing breaks the smooth green but a well-
situated tree or two until the hmits of the prem-
ises are reached, and there, in lines that widen
and narrow and widen again and hide the sur-
veyor's angles, the flowers rise once more in a
final burst of innumerable blossoms and splendid
hues — a kind of sunset of the garden's own.

When this place, five seasons ago, first entered
the competition, it could hardly be called a gar-

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

den at all. Yet it was already superior to many
rivals. In those days it seemed to us as though
scarcely one of our working people in a hundred
knew that a garden was anything more than a
bed of flowers set down anywhere and anyhow.
It was a common experience for us to be led by
an unkept path and through a patch of weeds or
across an ungrassed dooryard full of rubbish,
in order to reach a so-called garden which had
never spoken a civil word to the house nor got
one from it. Now, the understanding is that
every part of the premises, every outdoor thing
on the premises — path, fence, truck-patch, sta-
ble, stable-yard, hen-yard, tennis or croquet-
court — everything is either a part of the gar-
den or is so reasonably related to it that from
whatever point one views the place he beholds a
single satisfactory picture.

This, I say, is the understanding. I do not
say that even among our prize-winners anybody
has yet perfectly attained this, although a few
have come very near it. With these the main
surviving drawback is that the artistic effect is
each season so long coming and passes away

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

so soon — Cometh up as a flower and presently
has withered.

One of our most gifted hterary critics a while
ago pointed out the poetic charm of evanescence;
pointed it out more plainly, I fancy, than it has
ever been shown before. But evanescence has
this poetic charm chiefly in nature, almost never
in art. The transitoriness of a sunset glory, or of
human life, is rife with poetic pathos because
it is a transitoriness which cannot he helped.
Therein lay the charm of that poetic wonder
and marvel of its day (1893) the Columbian Ex-
position's "White City"; it was an architectural
triumph and glory which we could not have ex-
cept on condition that it should vanish with the
swiftness of an aurora. Even so, there would
have been little poetry in its evanescence if,
through bad workmanship or any obvious folly,
it had failed to fulfil the transient purpose for
which it was erected. The only poetic evanes-
cence is the evanescence that is inevitable. An
unnecessary evanescence in things we make is
bad art. If I remember the story correctly, it
was to a Roman lady that Benvenuto Cellini

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

took the exquisite waxen model of some piece of
goldsmithing she had commissioned him to exe-
cute for her. So dehghted was she with this
mere model that she longed to keep it and called
it the perfection of art, or some such word. But
Benvenuto said, No, he could not claim for it
the high name of art until he should have repro-
duced it in gold, that being the most worthy
material in which it would endure the use for
which it was designed.

Unless the great Itahan was in error, then, a
garden ought not to be so largely made up of
plants which perish with the summer as to be,
at their death, no longer a garden. Said that
harsh-spoken judge whom we have already once
or twice quoted — that shepherd's-dog of a judge
— at one of the annual bestowals of our Car-
negie garden prizes:

"Almost any planting about the base of a
building, fence or wall is better than none; but
for this purpose shrubs are far better than an-
nual flowers. Annuals do not suflSciently mask
the hard, offensive right-angles of the structure's
corners or of the Hne whence it starts up from

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

the ground. And even if sometimes they do,
they take so long to grow enough to do it, and
are so soon gone with the first cold blast, that
the things they are to hide are for the most of
the year not hidden. Besides which, even at
their best moments, when undoubtedly they are
very beautiful, they have not a sufficiently sub-
stantial look to be good company for the sohd
structure they are set against. Sweetly, mod-
estly, yet obstinately, they confess to ever}'
passer-by that they did not come, but were
put there and were put there only last spring.
Shrubs, contrariwise, give a feeling that they
have sprung and grown there in the course of
nature and of the years, and so convey to the
house what so many American homes stand in
want of — a quiet air of being long married and
a mother of growing children.

"Flowering shrubs of well-chosen kinds are in
leaf two-thirds of the year, and their leafless
branches and twigs are a pleasing relief to the
structure's cold nakedness even through the
winter. I have seen a house, whose mistress
was too exclusivelv fond of annuals, stand wait-

iZ±

After the Brst frost annnal p.

ttiactiTe.

tlPP*RY

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

ing for its shoes and stockings from October clear
round to August, and then barefooted again in
October. In such gardening there is too much
of love's labor lost. If one's grounds are so
small that there is no better place for the an-
nuals they can be planted against the shrubs,
as the shrubs are planted against the building or
fence. At any rate they should never be bedded
out in the midst of the lawn, and quite as em-
phatically they should never, alone, be set to
mark the boundary lines of a property."

It is hoped these sayings, quoted or other-
wise, may seem the more in place here because
they contemplate the aspects likely to char-
acterize the American garden whenever that
garden fully arrives. We like largeness. There
are many other qualities to desire, and to desire
even more; but if we give them also the liking
we truly owe them it is right for us to like
largeness. Certainly it is better to like large-
ness even for itself, rather than smallness for
itself. Especially is it right that we should like
our gardens to look as large as we can make
them appear. Our countless lawns, naked clear

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

up into their rigid corners and to their dividing
lines, are naked in revolt against the earlier fash-
ion of spotting them over with shrubs, the easi-
est as well as the worst way of making a place
look small. But a naked lawn does not make
the premises look as large, nor does it look as
large itself, as it will if planted in the manner
we venture to commend to our Northampton
prize-seekers. Between any two points a Une of
shrubbery swinging in and out in strong, grace-
ful undulations appears much longer than a
straight one, because it is longer. But, over
and above this, it makes the distance between
the two points seem greater. Everybody knows
the old boast of the landscape-architects — that
they can make one piece of ground look twice as
large as another of the same measure, however
small, by merely grading and planting the two
on contrary schemes. The present writer knows
one small street in his town, a street of fair
dwellings, on which every lawn is diminished
to the eye by faulty grading.

For this he has no occasion to make himself
responsible but there are certain empty lots not

Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles. South Hall, Wil-
liston Seminary. (See "Where to Plant What.")

*'. . . a line of shrubbery swinging in and out in strong, graceful undulations."

The straight planting on this picture's left masks the back yards of three neighbors, and
gives them a privacy as well as My Own Acre. The curved planting shows but one of
three bends. It was here that I first made the mistake of planting a sinuous alley. (See
"My Own Acre," p. 34.)

OF THE

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

far from him for whose aspect he is answerable,
having graded them himself (before he knew
how). He has repeatedly heard their depth
estimated at ninety feet, never at more. In
fact it is one hundred and thirty-nine. How-
ever, he has somewhat to do also with a garden
whose grading was quite as bad — identical,
indeed — whose fault has been covered up and
its depth made to seem actually greater than it
is, entirely by a corrective planting of its shrub-
bery.

One of the happiest things about gardening is
that when it is bad you can always — you and
time — you and year after next — make it good.
It is very easy to think of the plants, beds and
paths of a garden as things which, being once
placed, must stay where they are; but it is short-
sighted and it is fatal to effective gardening.
We should look upon the arrangement of things
in our garden very much as a housekeeper looks
on the arrangement of the furniture in her house.
Except buildings, pavements and great trees —
and not always excepting the trees — we should
regard nothing in it as permanent architecture

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

but only as furnisliment and decoration. At
favorable moments you will make whatever rear-
rangement may seem to you good. A shrub's
mere being in a certain place is no final reason
that it should stay there; a shrub or a dozen
shrubs — next spring or fall you may transplant
them. A shrub, or even a tree, may belong where
it is this season, and the next and the next;
and yet in the fourth year, because of its excessive
growth, of the more desired growth of something
else, or of some rearrangement of other things,
that spot may be no longer the best place for it.
Very few shrubs are injured by careful and
seasonable, even though repeated, transplant-
ing. Many are benefited by one or another
effect of the process: by the root pruning they
get, by the "division," by the change of soil, by
change of exposure or even by backset in
growth. Transplanting is part of a garden's
good discipline. It is almost as necessary to
the best results as pruning — on which grave
subject there is no room to speak here. The
owner even of an American garden should rule
his garden, not be ruled by it. Yet he should

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

rule without oppression, and it will not be truly
American if it fails to show at a glance that
it is not overgardened.

Thus do we propose to exhort our next sea-
son's competitors as this fall and winter they
gather at our projected indoor garden-talks, or
as we go among them to offer counsel concerning
their grounds plans for next spring. And we
hope not to omit to say, as we had almost omit-
ted to say here, in behalf of the kind of garden
we preach, that shrubs, the most of them, re-
quire no great enrichment of the soil — an im-
portant consideration. And we shall take much
care to recommend the perusal of books on gar-
dening. Once this gentle art was largely kept a
close secret of craftsmen; but now all that can
be put into books is in books, and the books are
non-technical, brief and inexpensive; or if vo-
luminous and costly, as some of the best needs
must be, are in the public libraries. In their
pages are a host of facts (indexed I) which once
had to be burdensomely remembered. For one
preoccupied with other cares — as every ama-
teur gardener ought to be — these books are

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

no mean part of his equipment; they are as
necessary to his best gardening as the dictionary
to his best Enghsh.

What a daily, hourly, unfailing wonder are the
modern opportunities and facilities by which we
are surrounded ! If the present reader and the
present writer, and maybe a few others, will but
respond to them worthily, who knows but we
may ourselves live to see, and to see as demo-
cratically common as telephones and electric
cars, the American garden? Of course there is
ever and ever so much more to be said about
it, and the present writer is not at all weary;
but he hears his reader's clock telling the hour
and feels very sure it is correct.

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

/^ FTEN one's hands are too heavily veneered
^^^ with garden loam for him to go to his
books to verify a quotation. It was the great
Jefferson, was it not, who laid into the founda-
tions of American democracy the imperishable
maxim that "That gardening is best which gar-
dens the least"? My rendition of it may be
more a parody than a quotation but, whatever
its inaccuracy, to me it still sounds Jefferso-
nian — Joseph Jeffersonian.

WTiether we read it "garden" or "govern," it
has this fine mark of a masterful utterance, that
it makes no perceptible effort to protect itself
against the caviller or the simpleton ; from men,
for instance, who would interpret it as meaning
that the only perfect government, or gardening,
is none at all. Speaking from the point of view
of a garden-lover, I suppose the true signification
is that the best government is the government

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

which procures and preserves the noblest hap-
piness of the community with the least enthral-
ment of the individual.

Now. I hope that as world-citizens and even
as Americans we may bear in mind that, while
this maxim may be wholly true, it is not there-
fore the whole truth. What maxim is ? Let us
ever keep a sweet, self-respecting modesty with
which to confront and consort with those who
see the science of government, or art of garden-
ing, from the standpoint of some other equally
true fraction of the whole truth. All we need
here maintain for our JefiFersonian maxim is that
its wide domination in American sentiment ex-
plains the larger part of all the merits and
faults of American government — and American
gardening. It accounts for nearly all our Amer-
ican laws and ordinances, manners, customs,
and whims, and in the great discussion of Where
to Plant AMiat (in America) no one need hope
to prevail who does not recognize that this high
principle of American democracy is the best rule
for American gardening. That gardening is
best, for most Americans, which best ministers

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

to man's feKcity with least disturbance of na-
ture's freedom.

Hence the initial question — a question which
every amateur gardener must answer for him-
self. How much subserviency of nature to art
and utility is really necessary to my own and
my friends' and neighbors' best dehght ? For —
be not deceived — however enraptured of wild
nature you may be,, you do and must require
of her some subserviency close about your own
dwelling. You cannot there persistently enjoy
the wolf and the panther, the muskrat.. buzzard,
gopher, rattlesnake, poison-ivy and skunk in
full swing, as it were. How much, then, of na-
ture's subserviencv does the range of vour tastes
demand ? ALso, how much will your purse
allow ? For it is as true in gardening as in
statecraft that, your government being once
genuinely estabhshed, the more of it you have,
the more you must pay for it. In gardening, as
in government, the cost of the scheme is not in
proportion to the goodness or badness of its art,
but to its intensity.

This is whv the general and ver%' sane incli-

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

nation of our American preferences is away from
that intense sort of gardening called "formal,"
and toward that rather unfairly termed "in-
formal" method which here, at least, I should
like to distinguish as "free-line" gardening. A
free people who govern leniently will garden
leniently. Their gardening will not be a vexing
tax upon themselves, upon others, or upon the
garden. Whatever freedom it takes away from
themselves or others or the garden will be no
more than is required for the noblest delight;
and whatever freedom remains untaken, such
gardening will help everybody to exercise and
enjoy.

The garden of free lines, provided only it be a
real garden under a real government, is, to my
eye, an angel's protest against every species and
degree of tyranny and oppression, and such a
garden, however small or extensive, will contain
a large proportion of flowering shrubbery. Be-
cause a garden should not, any more than my
lady's face, have all its features — nose, eyes,
ears, lips — of one size ? No, that is true of
all gardening alike; but because with flowering

or THE

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

shrubbery our gardening can be more lenient
than with annuals alone, or with only herbaceous
plants and evergreens.

So, then, our problem. Where to Plant What,
may become for a moment. Where to Plant
Shrubbery; and the response of the free-line gar-
den will be, of course, "Remember, concerning
each separate shrub, that he or she — or it, if
you really f refer the neuter — is your guest, and
plant him or her or it where it will best enjoy
itself, while promoting the whole company's
joy." Before it has arrived in the garden,
therefore, learn — and carefully consider — its
likes and dislikes, habits, manners and accom-
plishments and its friendly or possibly un-
friendly relations with your other guests. This
done, determine between whom and whom you
will seat it; between what and what you will
plant it, that is, so as to "draw it out," as we
say of diffident or reticent persons; or to use it
for drawing out others of less social address.
But how many a lovely shrub has arrived where
it was urgently invited, and found that its host
or hostess, or both, had actually forgotten its

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

name ! Did not know how to introduce it to
any fellow guest, or whether it loved sun or
shade, loam, peat, clay, leaf-mould or sand,
wetness or dryness; and yet should have found
all that out in the proper blue-book (horticul-
tural dictionary) before inviting the poor mor-
tified guest at all.

*'0h, pray be seated — anywhere. Plant
yourself alone in the middle. This is Liberty
Garden."

"It is no such thing," says the tear-bedewed
beauty to herself; "it's Anarchy Garden." Yet,
like the lady she is, she stays where she is put,
and gets along surprisingly well.

New England calls Northampton one of her
most beautiful towns. But its beauty lies in the
natural landscape in and around it, in the rise,
fall, and swing of the seat on which it sits, the
graceful curving of its streets, the noble spread
of its great elms and maples, the green and blue
openness of grounds everywhere about its mod-
est homes and its highly picturesque outlook
upon distant hills and mountains and interven-
ing meadows and fields, with the Connecticut

or THE

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

winding through. Its architecture is in three or
four instances admirable though not extraor-
dinary, and, as in almost every town in our vast
America, there are hardly five householders in
it who are really skilled flower-gardeners, either
professional or amateur.

As the present century was coming in, how-
ever, the opportunity, through private flower-
gardening, to double or quadruple the town's
beauty and to do it without great trouble or
expense, yet with great individual delight and
social pleasure, came to the lively notice of a
number of us. It is, then, for the promotion of
this object throughout all our bounds, and not
for the perfection of the art for its own sake,
that we maintain this competition and award
these "'Carnegie" prizes. Hence certain fea-
tures of our method the value and necessity of
which might not be clear to the casual inquirer
without this explanation.

May I repeat it ? Not to reward two or three
persons yearly for reaching some dizzy peak
of art unattainable by ordinary taste and skill,
nor to reward one part of the town or one ele-

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

ment of its people for gardening better than
another, nor to promote the production of indi-
vidual plants or flowers of extraordinary splen-
dor, nor even to incite children to raise patches
of flowers, is our design; but to make the modest
and democratic art of Where to Plant What
(an art, nevertheless, quite beyond the grasp of
children) so well known and so valued that
its practical adoption shall overrun the whole
town.

To this end we have divided our field into
seven districts, in each of which the number of
gardens is about the same. In each of these
seven districts only three prizes (out of twenty-
one) may be taken in any one season. Conse-
quently three prizes must fall to each district
every year. Yet the best garden of all still car-
ries off the capital prize, the second-best may
win the second, and cannot take a lower than
the third, and the lowest awards go into the dis-
trict showing the poorest results. Even this
plan is so modified as further to stimulate those
who strive against odds of location or conditions,
for no district is allowed to receive two prizes

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

consecutive in the list. The second prize can-
not be bestowed in the same district in which
the first is being awarded, though the third can.
The third cannot go into the same district as
the second, though the fourth may. And so on
to the twenty-first. Moreover, a garden show-
ing much improvement over the previous season
may take a prize, as against a better garden
which shows no such improvement. Also no
garden can take the capital prize twice nor ever
take a prize not higher than it has taken before.
The twenty-one prizes are for those who hire no
help in their gardening; two others are for those
who reserve the liberty to employ help, and still
another two are exclusively for previous winners
of the capital prize, competing among them-
selves. In each of the five districts a committee
of ladies visits the competing gardens, inspecting,
advising, encouraging, sometimes learning more
than they teach, and reporting to headquarters,
the People's Institute. At these headquarters,
on two acres of ground in the heart of the city,
we have brought gradually into shape, on a plan
furnished by Frederick Law Olmsted's Sons,

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

Landscape Architects, of Boston (Brookline), a
remarkably handsome garden of flowers and
shrubbery designed as a model for the guidance
of those in the competition who seek to combine
artistic beauty with inexpensiveness. From time
to time we have given at these headquarters
winter courses of lectures on practical flower-
gardening.

As a result we have improved, and are still
improving, the aspect of entire streets and are
interesting the whole city.

But to return to our discussion. Here is a
short story of two ladies. They are not in our
competition, though among its most ardent well-
wishers. A friend had given one of them a bit of
green, woody growth some two feet high and half
an inch thick. She had a wee square bit of
front grass-plot something larger than a table-
cloth, but certainly not large enough for a game
of marbles. In the centre of this bit of grass she
planted her friend's gift. Then came our other
lady, making a call, and with her best smile of
humorous commendation, saying:

"My dear, you have violated the first rule of

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

gardening. You've planted your bush where
you wanted it."

The dehghted gardener went in the strength
of that witticism for forty weeks or at least
until some fiend of candor, a brother, like as
not, said:

*'Yes, truly you have violated the first rule of
gardening, for you have put your willow-tree —
that's what it is — where a minute's real reflec-
tion would have told you you'd wish you
hadn't."

Where to Plant What ! Plant it where you —
and your friends — your friends of best gar-
dening taste — will be glad you planted it when
all your things are planted. Please those who
know best, and so best please yourself. Never-
theless, beware ! Watch yourself ! Do so spe-
cially when you think you have njastered the
whole art. Watch even those who indisputably
know better than you do, for everybody makes
mistakes which he never would have dreamed
he could make. Only the other day I heard
an amateur say to a distinguished professional
gardener :

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

"Did you plant those shrubs of gorgeous
flower and broad, dark leaf out on your street
front purely as a matter of artistic taste ? "

"I did," he replied. *'I wanted to put my
best foot foremost. Wouldn't you ? "

"Why should 1?" asked the amateur. "I
wouldn't begin a song with my highest note, nor
a game with my strongest card, nor an address
with my most impassioned declaration, nor a
sonnet with its most pregnant line. If I should,
where were my climax.'^"

Certainly the amateur had the best of it. A
garden is a discourse. A garden is a play. See
with what care both the dramatist and the stage-
manager avoid putting the best foot foremost.
See how warily they hold back the supreme
strength of the four or five act piece for the
last act but one. There is a charmingly instruct-
ive analogy between a garden and a drama. In
each you have preparation, progress, climax, and
close. And then, also, in each you must have
your lesser climaxes leading masterfully up to
the supreme one, and a final quiet one to let
gratefully down from the giddy height.

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

In Northampton nearly all of our hundreds of
gardens contesting for prizes are plays of only
one or two acts. I mean they have only one or
two buildings to garden up to and between and
around and away from. Yet it is among these
one-act plays, these one-house gardens, that I
find the art truth most gracefully emphasized,
that the best foot should not go foremost. In a
large garden a false start may be atoned for by
better art farther on and in; but in a small gar-
den, for mere want of room and the chance to
forget, a bad start spoils all. No, be the garden
a prince's or a cottager's, the climaxes to be
got by superiority of stature, by darkness and
breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom
belong at its far end. Even in the one-house
garden I should like to see the climaxes plural
to the extent of two; one immediately at the back
of the house, the other at the extreme rear of
the ground. At the far end of the lot I would
have the final storm of passion and riot of dis-
closure, and then close about the rear of the
house there should be the things of supreme rich-
ness, exquisiteness and rarity.

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

This soft- voiced echo answering back out of
the inmost heart of the whole demesne gives
genuineness of sentiment to the entire scheme.
To plant a conflagration of color against the back
fence and stop there would be worse than melo-
dramatic. It would be to close the play with a
bang, and even a worthy one-act play does not
close with a bang. The back of the lot is not
the absolute end of the garden-play. Like the
stage-play, the garden-play brings its beholder
back at the very last, by a sweet reversion, to
the point from which it started. The true gar-
den-lover gardens not mainly for the passer-by,
but rather for himself and the friends who come
to see him. Even when he treads his garden
paths alone he is a pleased and welcome visitor to
himself, and shows his garden to himself as to a
visitor. Hence there is always at last a turning
back to the house or to the front entrance, and
this is the play's final hues, the last grouping of
the players, the relief of all tension and the
descent of the curtain.

One point farther in this direction and we may
give our hard-worked analogy a respite. It is

"... climaxes to be fjot by superiority of stature, by darkness ami breadth
of foliage and by splendor of bloom belong at its far end."

Everything in this photograph was planted by the amateur gardener except the pine-trees in

perspective.

UBRaRY
OF THE

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

this : as those who make and present a play take
great pains that, by flashes of revelation to eye
and to ear, the secrets most unguessed by the
characters in the piece shall be early revealed to
the audience and persistently pressed upon its
attention, so should the planting of a garden
be; that, as if quite without the gardener's or
the garden's knowledge, always, to the eye, nos-
tril or ear, some clear disclosure of charm still
remote may beckon and lure across easy and
tempting distances from nook to nook of the
small garden, or from alley to alley and from
glade to glade of the large one. Where to
Plant What ? Plant it as far away as, according
to the force of its character or the splendor of its
charms, it can stand and beckon back with best
advantage for the whole garden.

Thus we generalize. And as long as one may
generalize he is comparatively safe from humil-
iating criticism. It is only when he begins to
name things by name and say what is best for
just where, that he touches the naked eyeball (or
the funny-bone) of others whose crotchets are not
identical with his. Yet in Northampton this

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

is what we have to do, and since the competitors
for our prizes always have the Where before they
are moved to get and place the What, we find
our where-and-what problem easiest to handle
when we Hft it, so to speak, by the tail. Then
it is "^Tiat to Plant WTiere," and for answer
we have made a short list of famihar flowering
shrubs best suited to our immediate geographical
locality. We name only fourteen and we so
describe each as to indicate clearly enough, with-
out dictating, whereabouts to put it. We begin:
"Azalea. Our common wild azalea is the
flowering bush best known as *swamp honey-
suckle.' The two azaleas listed here, A. mollis
and the Ghent varieties, are of large, beautiful
and luxuriant bloom, and except the * swamp
honeysuckle' are the only azaleas hardy in
western Massachusetts. MoUis is from two to
six feet high, three to six feet broad, and blooms
in April and May. Its blossoms are yellow,
orange or pink, single or double. Its soil may
be sandy or peaty, and moist, but any good gar-
den soil will serve; its position partly shaded or
in full sunUght. The Ghents are somewhat

\t.*r>'""'

^*<--»vt- V

,*%' 'I

-^fe^^

"Some dear disclosure of charm still remote maj- beckon and lure."

From a photograph taken on My Own Acre, showing how I pulled the lawn in under the
trees. The big chestnuts in the middle are on the old fence line that stood on the very
edge of the precipitously falling ground. All the ground in sight in the picture is a 611.

OF THE

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

taller and not so broad in proportion. They
bloom from May to July, and their blossoms are
white, yellow, orange, pink, carmine, or red,
single or double. Soil and position about the
same as for mollis.

"Berberis. Berberis is the barbem% so well
known by its beautiful pendent berries. It is
one of the best shrubs to use where a thorny
bush is wanted. B. vulgaris, the common sort,
and one of the most beautiful, grows from four
to eight feet high, with a breadth of from three
to six feet. B. Thunbergu, or Thunberg's bar-
berry, is the well-known Japanese variety, a
dense, drooping bush from two to fom* feet
high and somewhat greater breadth. Its pale-
yellow blossoms come in April and May, and
its small, slender, bright-red berries remain on
the spray until spring. A dry soil is the best for
it, though it will grow in any, and needs httle
shade or none. B. purpurea is a variety of vul-
garis and is as handsome as the common. It
answers to the same description, except that its
foHage is purple, which makes it very tempting
to new gardeners, but very hard to relate in good

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

artistic taste among the other shrubs of the gar-
den. Few small gardens can make good use of
purple foliage.

''Deutzia gracilis. The gracilis is one of the
most beautiful of all the deutzias. Its delicate
foliage of rather light green, its snowy flowers
and its somewhat bending form, make it one of
the fairest ornaments of the home grounds. Its
height is three feet, its breadth from two to four
feet. It blooms in May and June. Its soil may
be any well-drained sort, and its position any
slightly sheltered aspect."

So we hurry down the alphabet. The list is
short for several good reasons, one being that
it is well to give other Hsts from season to sea-
son. No doubt our inaccuracies would distress a
botanist or scientific gardener, but we convey
the information, such as it is, to our fellow
citizens, and they use it. In the last ten years
we have furnished to our amateurs thousands of
shrubs and plants, at the same reduced rates for
a few specimens each which we pay for them by
the hundred.

But of the really good sorts are there shrubs

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

enough, you ask, to afford new lists year after
year ? Well, for the campus of a certain prepara-
tory school for boys, with the planting of which
the present writer had somewhat to do a few
years ago, the list of shrubs set round the bases
of four large buildings and several hundred
yards of fence numbered seventy-five kinds.
To end the chapter, let us say something about
that operation. On a pictorial page or two we
give ourselves the pleasure of showing the results
of this undertaking; but first, both by pictures
and by verbal description let me show where we
planted what. Of course we made sundry mis-
takes. Each thing we did may be vulnerable to
criticism, and our own largest hope is that our
results may not fall entirely beneath that sort
of compliment.

This campus covers some five acres in the
midst of a small town. Along three of its
boundaries old maples and elms, in ordinary
single-file shade-tree lines, tower and spread.
On the fourth line, the rear bound, a board fence
divides the ground from the very unattractive
back yards, stables and sheds of a number of

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

town residents. The front lies along the main
street of the place, facing the usual "shop-row."
The entire area has nearly always been grassed.
Not what an Englishman would call so, but
turfed in a stuttering fashion, impetuous and
abashed by turns, and very easy to keep off;
most rank up against the granite underpinnings
of the buildings, and managing somehow to
writhe to all the fences, of which those on the
street fronts are of iron. Parallel with the front
fence and some fifty feet behind it, three of the
institution's buildings stand abreast and about
a hundred feet apart. All three are tall, rect-
angular three-story piles of old red brick, on
granite foundations, and full of windows all of
one size, pigeon-house style. The middle one
has a fairly good Greek-pillared porch, of wood,
on the middle half of its front.

Among these buildings we began our planting.
We had drawn, of course, a ground plan of the
whole place, to scale, showing each ground-floor
door and window, so that we might respect its
customary or projected use. A great point, that,
in Where to Plant What. I once heard of a

100

D ;^

j; .5

"5 s

^ 3

Of THE

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

school whose small boys were accused of wan-
tonly trampling down some newly set shrubs on
the playground. "Well," demanded one brave
urchin, "what made 'em go and plant a lot of
bushes right on first base?" And no one was
ready with an answer, for there is something
morally wrong about any garden that will rob a
boy of his rights.

With this ground plan before us we decided
indoors where to plant what outdoors and cal-
culated arithmetically the number of each sort of
shrub we should need for the particular interval
we designed that sort to fill. Our scheme of ar-
rangement was a crescendo of foliage and flower
effects, beginning on the fronts of the buildings
and rising toward their rears, while at all points
making more of foliage than of bloom, because
the bloom shows for only a month or less, while
the leaf remains for seven or more. Beginning
thus with our quietest note, the interest of any
one looking in, or coming in, from the public
front is steadily quickened and progressively re-
warded, while the crowning effects at the rear
of the buildings are reserved for the crowning

101

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

moment when the visitor may be said to be fully
received. On the other hand, if the approach is
a returning one from the rear of the entire
campus, — where stands the institution's only
other building, a large tall-towered gymnasium,
also of red brick, — these superlative effects
show out across an open grassy distance of from
two hundred to three hundred feet.

Wherefore — and here at last we venture to
bring names of things and their places together
— at the fronts of the northernmost and south-
ernmost of these three "Halls" we set favorite
varieties of white-flowering spireas {Thunhergia,
sorbifolia,arguta,Van Houttei), the pearl-bush {ex-
ochorda), pink diervillas, and flowering-almonds.
After these, on the southern side of the south-
ernmost building, for example, followed lilacs,
white and purple, against the masonry, — the
white against the red brick, the lilac tint
well away from it, — with tamarisk and kerria
outside, abreast of them, and then pink and red
spireas {Bumaldi and its dwarf variety, An-
thony Waterer). On the other side of the same
house we set deutzias {scabra against the brick-

102

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

work and Lemoynei and gracilis outside). In a
wing corner, where melting snows crash down
from a roof -valley, we placed the purple-flowered
Lespedeza penduliflorum, which each year dies
to the ground before the snow-slides come, yet
each September blooms from three to four feet
high in drooping profusion. Then from that
angle to the rear corner we put in a mass of
pink wild roses. Lastly, on the tall, doorless,
windowless rear end, we planted the crimson-
rambler rose, and under it a good hundred of
the red rugosas.

In the arrangement of these plantings we
found ourselves called upon to deal with a very
attractive and, to us, new phase of our question.
The rising progression from front to rear was a
matter of course, but how about the progression
at right angles to it; from building to build-
ing, that is, of these three so nearly ahke in
size and dignity ? To the passer-by along their
Main Street front — the admiring passer-by, as
we hope — should there be no augmentation of
charm in the direction of his steps .^ And if
there should be, then where and how ought it to

103

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

show forth so as to avoid an anticlimax to one
passing along the same front from the opposite
direction ? We promptly saw, — as the reader
sees, no doubt, before we can tell it, — that what
we wanted was two crescendos meeting some-
where near the middle; a crescendo passing into
a diminuendo from whichever end you moved
to the other — a swell. We saw that our loud-
pedal effect should come upon "Middle Hall."
So there, on its lucky bit of Greek porch, we
bestowed the purple wistaria for spring, and for
late summer that fragrant snowdrift, the clema-
tis paniculata, so adapted as to festoon and
chaplet, but never to smother, the Greek col-
umns. On one of this structure's sides we
planted forsythia, backed closer against the
masonry by althaeas, with the low and ex-
quisite mahonia (holly-leafed barberry) under
its outer spread. On the other side of the house
we placed, first, loniceras (bush honeysuckles);
next, azaleas, in variety and profusion; then,
toward the rear end, a mass of hardy hydrangeas
{Hydrangea 'paniculata grandiflora), and at the
very back of the pile another mass, of the flower-

104

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

ing-quince (Pyrus japonica), with the trumpet-
creeper {Tecoma radicans), to chmb out of it.

About *' North Hall," the third building, we
planted more quietly, and most quietly on its
outer, its northern, side where our lateral
*' swell" (rising effect) begins, or ends, accord-
ing to the direction of your going, beginning
with that modest but pretty bloomer the Ligus-
trum ibota, a perfectly hardy privet more grace-
ful than the California {ovalifolium) species,
which really has little business in icy New Eng-
land away from the seashore.

I might have remarked before that nearly all
the walls of these three buildings, as well as the
gymnasium on the far side of the campus, were
already adorned with the ''Boston i\'y" {Am-
pelopsis Veitchii). With the plantings thus de-
scribed, and with the g^^mnasium surrounded
by yet stronger greenery; with the back fence
masked by willows, elders and red-stemmed
cornus; and with a number of haphazard foot-
paths reduced to an equally convenient and far
more graceful few, our scheme stands complete
in its first, but only, please notice, its first, phase.

105

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

The picture is submitted to your imagination
not as it looked the day we ceased planting, but
as we expected it to appear after a season or
two, and as it does look now.

At present, rather tardily, we have begun
to introduce herbaceous flowering perennials,
which we ignored in the first part of our plan,
because herbaceous plants are the flesh and
blood and garments of a complete living and
breathing garden; the walls, shrubs, trees, walks
and drives are its bones. When this secondary
phase has been more fully realized and we have
placed bush-clumps and tree-clumps out on the
open campus, and when our hundreds of cottage
gardens are shaking off the prison irons of frost,
we hope, if you cannot do us the honor to be
with us bodily, your spirit may be near, aiding
us on in the conquest of this ever beautiful
WTiere-to-Plant-What problem, which I believe
would make us a finer and happier nation if it
could be expanded to national proportions.

106

THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF
NORTHAMPTON

ADAM and Eve, it is generally conceded,
-^ ^ were precocious. They entered into the
cares and joys of adult life at an earher age than
any later human prodigJ^ We call them the
grand old gardener and his wife, but, in fact,
they were the youngest gardeners the world has
ever seen, and they really did not give entire
satisfaction. How could they without tools ?

Let it pass. The whole allusion is prompted
only by the thought that youth does not spon-
taneously garden. If it was actually necessary
that our first parents should begin life as gar-
deners, that fully explains why they had to begin
it also as adults. Youth enjoys the garden,
yes ! but not its making or tending. Childhood,
the abecedarian, may love to plant seeds, to
watch them spring, grow, and flower, and to
help them do so; but that is the merest a-b-c of

109

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

gardening, and no more makes him an ama-
teur in the art than spelHng words of one letter
makes him a poet. One may raise or love
flowers for a Ufetime, yet never in any art sense
become a gardener.

In front of the main building of a public in-
stitution which we must presently mention again
there is a sloping strip of sward a hundred feet
long and some fifteen wide. A florist of fully half
a century's experience one day halted beside it
and exclaimed to the present writer, ''Only say
the word, and I'll set out the 'ole len'th o' that
strip in foliage-plants a-spellin' o' the name:
'People's Hinstitute!'" Yet that gentle en-
thusiast advertised himself as a landscape-
gardener and got clients. For who was there to
tell them or him that he was not one ?

Not only must we confess that youth does not
spontaneously garden, but that our whole Amer-
ican civiHzation is still so lingeringly in its non-
gardening youth that only now and then, here
and there, does it reahze that a florist, whether
professional or amateur, or even a nurseryman,
is not necessarily a constructive gardener, or

110

COTTAGE GARDENS

that artistic gardening, however informal, is
nine-tenths constructive.

Yet particularly because such gardening is so,
and because some of its finest rewards are so
slow-coming and long-abiding, there is no stage
of life in which it is so reasonable for man or
woman to love and practise the art as when
youth is in its first full stature and may garden
for itself and not merely for posterity. "John,"
said his aged father to one of our living poets,
*'I know now how to transplant full-grown trees
successfully. Do it a long time ago." Let the
stripling plant the sapling.

Youth, however, and especially our American
youth, has his or her excuses, such as they are.
Of the garden or the place to be gardened, "It's
not mine," he or she warmly says; "it's only my
father's," or "my mother's."

Young man ! Young maiden ! True, the
place, so pathetically begging to be gardened,
may not be your future home, may never be
your property, and it is right enough that a
feeling for ownership should begin to shape your
daily life. But let it not misshape it. You

111

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

know that ownership is not all of life nor the
better half of it, and it is quite as good for you
to give the fact due recognition by gardening
early in life as it was for Adam and Eve.

It is better, for you can do so in a much more
fortunate manner, having tools and the first
pair's warning example. It is better also be-
cause you can do what to them was impossible;
you can make gardening a concerted public
movement.

That is what we have made it in Northamp-
ton, Massachusetts, whose curving streets and
ancient elms you may have heard of as making
it very garden-like in its mere layout; many of
whose windows, piazzas, and hillside lawns look
ofif across the beautiful Connecticut, winding
broadly among its farmed meadows and vanish-
ing southward through the towering gateway
made for or by it millenniums ago between
Mounts Tom and Holyoke.

There Smith College is, as well as that "Peo-
ple's Institute" aforementioned, and it is through
that institute, one of whose several branches of
work is carried on wholly by Smith College stu-

112

*B SS .,-?-r'

i'ir

:i' /i^ • ^

^?^ '

VW--

■■ i^l,'! 4^^

C' THE

COTTAGE GARDENS

dents, that we, the Northampton townspeople,
estabHshed and maintain another branch, our
concerted gardening.

One evening in September a company of
several hundred persons gathered in the main
hall of the institute's "Carnegie House" to wit-
ness and receive the prize awards of their twelfth
annual flower-garden competition.

The place was filled. A strong majority of
those present were men and women who earn
their daily bread with their hands. The whole
population of Northampton is but twenty thou-
sand or so, and the entire number of its voters
hardly exceeds four thousand, yet there were one
thousand and thirteen gardens in the competi-
tion, the gardens of that many homes; and
although children had taken part in the care of
many of them, and now were present to see
the prizes go to their winners, not one was sepa-
rately a child's garden. By a rule of the con-
test, each garden had been required to comprise
the entire home lot, with the dwelling for its
dominating feature and the family its spiritual
unit.

113

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

The ceremony of award began with the lowest
cash prize and moved steadily up to the second
and first, these two being accompanied by bril-
liantly illuminated diplomas, and as each award
was bestowed, the whole gathering of winners
and non-winners — for no one could be called
a loser — sounded their congratulations by a
hearty clapping of hands. They had made the
matter a pubhc, concerted movement, and were
interested in its results and rewards as spiritual
proprietors in a common possession much wider
than mere personal ownership under the law.

This wider sentiment of community, so valu-
able to the whole public interest, was further
promoted by the combining of nearly two hun-
dred of these same gardens in "neighborhood
garden clubs" of seven or more gardens each,
every garden in each club directly adjoining an-
other, and the clubs competing for prizes of so
much a garden to the best and second-best clubs.

Yet none the less for all this, but much more, a
great majority of the multitude of home garden-
ers represented by this gathering were enjoying
also — each home pair through their own home

114

COTTAGE GARDENS

garden — the pleasures of personal ownership
and achievement.

Many of the prize-winners were young, but
many were gray, and some were even aged, yet
all alike would have testified that even for age,
and so all the more for youth, artistic flower-
gardening is as self -rewarding a form of unselfish
work and as promptly rewarding a mode of wait-
ing on the future as can easily be found; that
there is no more beautifully rewarding way by
which youth may

" Learn to labor and to wait."

Maybe that is why Adam and Eve were appren-
ticed to it so very young.

It should have been said before that in advance
of the award of prizes some very pleasant music
and song were given from the platform by a few
Smith College girls, and that then the company
were shown stereopticon pictures of a number of
their own gardens as they looked during the past
summer and as they had looked when, a few
years ago, — although seemingly but yesterday,
— their owners began to plan and to plant.

115

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

The contrasts were amazing and lent great
emphasis to the two or three truths we have
here dwelt on probably long enough. To wit:
first, that, as a rule, all true gardeners are grown-
ups; second, that therein lies the finest value of
concerted gardening; third, that the younger
the grown-up the better, for the very reason
that the crowning recompenses of true gardening
come surely, but come late; and fourth, that,
nevertheless, gardening yields a lovely ampli-
tude of immediate rewards.

For instance, this gathering in our People's
Institute also, before the announcement of prizes,
took delight in hearing reported the aggregate
of the flowers, mostly of that season's planting,
distributed by a considerable number of the
competitors to the shut-in and the bereaved.
This feature of the movement had been begun
only the previous year, and its total was no more
than some three thousand dozens of flowers; but
many grateful acknowledgments, both verbal
and written, prove that it gave solace and joy
to many hearts and we may call it a good
beginning.

116

COTTAGE GARDENS

A garden should be owned not to be monopo-
lized, but to be shared, as a song is owned not
to be hushed, but to be sung; and the wide giving
of its flowers is but one of several ways in which
a garden may sing or be sung — for the garden
is both song and singer. At any rate it cannot
help but be a public benefaction and a public
asset, if only its art be true.

Hence one of the values of our gardening in
Northampton : making the gardens so many and
so artistically true and good, it makes the town,
as a whole, more interesting and pleasing to
itself, and in corresponding degree the better
to Uve in. Possibly there may be some further
value in telling here how we do it.

As soon as signs of spring are plain to the gen-
eral eye the visiting for enrolment begins. A
secretary of the institute sets out to canvass such
quarters of the field as have not been appor-
tioned among themselves individually by the
ladies composing the committee of "volunteer
garden visitors." At the same time these ladies
begin their calls, some undertaking more, some
less, according to each one's wiUingness or ability.

117

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

This first round consists merely in enrolKng
the competitors by name, street, and number
and in sending these registrations in to the in-
stitute. Later, by the same ladies, the same
ground is more or less gone over again in \isits
of observation, inquiry and counsel, and once
a month throughout the season the ladies meet
together with the president of the institute to
report the conditions and sentiments encoun-
tered and to plan further work.

The importance of these calls is not confined
to the advancement of good gardening. They
promote fellowship among neighbors and kind
feeling between widely parted elements of so-
ciety. Last year this committee made nearly
eleven hundred such \'isits.

Meanwhile a circular letter has been early
mailed to the pre\'ious year's competitors, urging
them to re-enroll by post-card. Last year hun-
dreds did so. Meanwhile, too, as soon as the
enrolment is completed, the institute's general
secretary' begins a tour of oflBcial inspection, and
as he is an experienc-ed teacher of his art, his in-
spections are expert. His errand is known by

118

COTTAGE GARDEN'S

the time he is in sight, and, &5 a rile. :iie ho^ise-
hcdder joins him in a arcait c^ the pJace, doov-
ing afduerements, lecitii^ ciifficiilties and &-

appcMntmeDts. confessmg exTcc?. and takni? tawt-
ful advice.

Anc - _- :::zi i- z" :^ ::: -i:: H- ^- - .

grave-^: . : :-:i zj zr „ 7

ofafz::^.. r:^-i:~\:i — :-. -::-:r~2.

young ciieek; a pen ci . . _

"Where:;:^ li- ^!ir--:/ ;. .- 1;: : : :_r
sward but for tne z;-'T:r V: . j. .- t :_ .-- "^tTt
to show off at their ce:?. .-

*' Yes. Don't thev do it ?**

"Xot quite." He looks again. "Nine feet
long — dve wide. If you'll plant th-zi zfxt
year in a foot-w: i : - \:z : : : :

give you a" .rAii forty :^~- ::':.:- ::

nine, ^"i -'^r"".i ^\:zi:z-.:z 7:„r ':.: :: f"iri
insteil :: ":l.y >:ng it."

In .:i::_7: jirir- hr s^y?. "Srlfziid szin-
tiir^t ' i ' ' ---_-_-.- — - - - - - ^ ,.- - „..'•*.- .^ .J

** If you'd sink the tu : : : _ v :; : : .^1 : . -.:. : .: : - z

11^

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

to the rim they'd take up no more room and
they'd look natural. Besides, you wouldn't
have to water them continually."

"That's true!" says the householder, quite
in the incredible way of an old-fashioned book.
"I'll do it!"

"And then," says the caller, "if you will set
it away off on that far corner of the lawn it
will shine clear across, showing everything be-
tween here and there, Hke a hghthouse across a
harbor, or hke a mirror, which you hang not in
your parlor door, but at the far end of the room."

"When you come back you shall see it there,"
is the reply.

Sometimes, yet not often, a contestant is met
who does not want advice, and who can hardly
hide his scorn for book statements and experts.
The present writer came upon one last year
who "could not see what beauty there was in
John Smith's garden, yet we had given him and
his wife the capital prize !"

Frequently one finds the house of a com-
petitor fast locked and dumb, its occupants
being at work in some mill or shop. Then if the

120

COTTAGE GARDENS

visit is one of official inspection a card stating
that fact and dated and signed on the spot is
left under the door, and on its reverse side the
returning householder finds printed the fol-
lowing :

"In marking for merit your whole place is
considered your garden. It is marked on four
points: (1) Its layout, or ground plan; (2) its
harmonies — of arrangement as to color of
blooms and as to form and size of trees, shrubs
and plants; (3) its condition — as to the neatness
and order of everj^thing; and (4) its duration —
from how early in the year to how late it will
make a pleasing show.

"Mow your lawn as often as the mower will
cut the grass, but also keep it thoroughly weeded.
As a rule, in laying out your plantings avoid
straight lines and hard angles; the double curve,
or wave line, is the hue of grace. Plant all the
flowers you wish, few or many, but set shrubs
at their back to give stronger and more lasting
effects when the flowers are out of season as well
as while they are in bloom.

"Try to plant so as to make your whole place
1:21

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

one single picture of a hoTne, with the house
the chief element and the boundary -lines of the
lot the frame. Plant on all your lot's bound-
aries, plant out the foundation-lines of all its
buildings; but between these plantings keep the
space grassed only, and open. In these house
and boundary borders let your chief plantings
be shrubs, and so have a nine months' instead of
a three months' garden."

The secretary's tour completed and his score
of all the gardens tabulated, a list is drawn
from it of the one hundred and fifty best gar-
dens, and a second circuit of counsel and in-
spection, limited to this greatly reduced number,
is made by the president of the institute, who
marks them again on the same four points of
merit.

These two markings, averaged, determine the
standing of all prize-winning gardens except the
leading four. Then the president calls in one
professional and one amateur expert, visits with
them as many of the most promising contestants
as can be seen in an afternoon's drive, and with
them decides the award of the four highest prizes.

122

"Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the foundation-lines of all its

buildings."

A secluded back corner of a prize-winner's garden which shows how slight a planting may
redeem the homeliness of an old fence.

"Not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but to procure its
widest and most general dissemination."

A cheap apartment row whose landlord had its planting done by the People's Institute.

Of THE

|'»»1V'-

COTTAGE GARDENS

That is all. WTien we have given two or
three lesser items our story is told — for what it
is worth. It is well to say we began small; in
our first season, fifteen years ago, our whole roll
of competitors numbered but sixty. It is the
visiting that makes the difference; last season
these \'isits, volunteer and official, were more
than thirty-one hundred.

Another source of our success we believe to be
the fact that our prizes are many and the leading
ones large — fifteen, twelve, nine dollars, and so
on down. Prizes and all, the whole movement
costs a yearly cash outlay of less than three hun-
dred dollars; without the People's Institute at
its back it could still be done for five hundred.

And now, this being told in the hope that it
may incite others, and especially youth, to make
experiments hke it elsewhere, to what impulse
shall we appeal ?

Will it not suffice if we invoke that adolescent
instinct which moves us to merge our individual
hfe — to consolidate it, as the stock-manipulators
say — in the world's one great life, our "celes-
tial selfishness" being intuitively assured that

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

our own priceless individuality will gain, not
lose, thereby ?

Or shall we make our plea to an "art im-
pulse"? No? Is the world already artificial
enough? Not by half, although it is full,
crammed, with the things the long-vanished
dead have done for it in every art, from cameos
to shade-trees; done for it because it was al-
ready so fair that, Hve long or die soon, they
could not hold themselves back from making it
fairer.

Yet, all that aside, is not this concerted gar-
dening precisely such a work that young man-
hood and womanhood, however artificial or un-
artificial, anywhere, everywhere. Old World or
newest frontier, ought to take to naturally?
Adam and Eve did, and they — but we have
squeezed Adam and Eve dry enough.

Patriotism ! Can you imagine a young man
or woman without it? And if you are young
and a lover of your country, do you not love
its physical aspects, "its rocks and rills, its
woods and templed hills"? And if so, do you
love only those parts of it which you never see

124

COTTAGE GARDENS

and the appearance of which you have no power
to modify? Or do j^ou love the land only and
not the people, the nation, the government?
Or, loving these, have you no love for the near-
est public fraction of it, your own town and
neighbors? Why, then, your love of the Stars
and Stripes is the flattest, silliest idolatry; so
flat and silly it is hardly worth chiding. Your
patriotism is a patriotism for w^ar only, and a
country with only that kind is never long with-
out war.

You see the difference? Patriotism for war
generalizes. A patriotism for peace particu-
larizes, localizes. Ah, you do love, despite all
their faults, your nation, your government, your
town and townspeople, else you would not so
often scold them! Otherwise, why do you let
us call them yours? Because they belong to
you? No, because you belong to them. Be-
yond cavil you are your own, but beyond cavil,
too, you are theirs; their purchased possession,
paid for long, long in advance and sight-unseen.

You cannot use a sidew^alk, a street-lamp, or
a post-box, or slip away into the woods and find

125

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

them cleared of savages and deadly serpents,
without seeing part of the price paid for you
before your great-grandfather was born. So,
then, loving your town enough to scold it, you
will also serve it !

Now this we say not so much to be preaching
as to bring in a last word descriptive of our
Northampton movement. We do not make
that work a mere aggregation of private kind-
nesses, but a public business for the promotion
of the town in sanitary upkeep, beauty and civic
fellowship.

And so our aim is not chiefly to reward the
highest art in gardening, but to procure its
widest and most general dissemination. The
individual is definitely subordinated to the com-
munity's undivided interest. Since gardening
tends to develop in fortunate sections and to die
out in others, we have laid off our town map in
seven parts and made a rule that to each of
these shall go three of the prizes.

Moreover, no two consecutive prizes can be
awarded in any one of these districts. Where
a competitor takes the capital prize no other

126

COTTAGE GARDENS

can take a higher than the third, and if two in
one district win the first and third prizes no
one else there can take a higher than the fifth.
So on through to prize twenty-one.

Still further, a garden taking any of these
prizes can never again take any of them but a
higher one, and those who attain to the capital
prize are thenceforth hors concours except to
strive for the "Past Competitors' Prizes," first
and second.

Thus the seasons come and go, the gardens
wake, rise, rejoice and slumber again; and
because this arrangement is so evidently for
the common weal and fellowship first, and yet
leaves personal ownership all its liberties, rights
and delights, it is cordially accepted of the
whole people. And, lastly, as a certain dear
lady whom we may not more closely specify
exclaimed when, to her glad surprise, she easily
turned the ceremonial golden key which first
unlocked the Carnegie House of our People's
Institute, "It works !"

127

THE PRIVATE GARDEN'S
PUBLIC VALUE

WHAT its pages are to a book, a town's pri-
vate households are to a town.

No true home, standing sohtarily apart from
the town (unbound, as it were) could be the
blessed thing it is were there not so many other
houses not standing apart but gathered into
villages, towns and cities.

Whence comes civilization but from dvitas, the
city "^ And where did civitas get its name, when
city and state were one, but from citizen.'' He
is not named for the city but the city for him,
and his title meant first the head of a house-
hold, the master of a home. To make a civili-
zation, great numbers of men must have homes,
must mass them compactly together and must
not mass them together on a dead level of equal
material equipment but in a confederation of
homes of all ranks and conditions.

131

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

The home is the cornerstone of the state.

The town, the organized assemblage of homes,
is the keystone of civiHzation's arch.

In order to keep our whole civilization moving
on and up, which is the only way for home and
town to pay to each other their endless spiral of
reciprocal indebtedness, every home in a town —
or state, for that matter — should be made as
truly and fully a home as every wise effort and
kind influence of all the other homes can make
it. Unless it takes part in this effort and influ-
ence, no home, be it ever so favored, can realize,
even for itself and in itself, the finest civiHza-
tion it might attain. Why should it? I be-
lieve this is a moral duty, a debt as real as
taxes and very much like them.

In our People's Institute over in Northamp-
ton, Massachusetts, this is the a-b-c of all they
seek to do: the individual tutoring, by college
girls and town residents, of hundreds of young
working men and women in whatever these may
choose from among a score or so of light studies
calculated to refine their aspirations; the training
of young girls, by paid experts, in the arts of the

132

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

home, from cooking to embroidery; the training
of both sexes in all the social amenities ; and the
enlistment of more than a thousand cottage
homes in a yearly prize competition.

It is particularly of this happy garden contest
that I wish to say a word or two more. In 1914
it completed its sixteenth season, but it is modelled
on a much older one in the town of Dunfermline,
Scotland, the birthplace of Mr. Andrew Carnegie,
and it is from the bountiful spirit of that great
citizen of two lands that both affairs draw at
least one vital element of their existence.

We in Northampton first learned of the Dun-
fermline movement in 1898. We saw at once
how strongly such a scheme might promote the
general spiritual enrichment of our working peo-
ple's homes if made one of the functions of our
home-culture clubs, several features of whose
work were already from five to ten years old.
We proceeded to adopt and adapt the plan, and
had our first competition and award of prizes in
1898-99.

Like Dunfermline, we made our prizes large,
and to this we attribute no small part of our

133

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

success. When we saw fit to increase their
number we increased the total outlay as well,
and at present we award twenty-one prizes a
year, the highest being fifteen dollars, and one
hundred dollars the sum of the whole twenty-one
prizes. So we have gained one of our main pur-
poses: to tempt into the contest the man of the
house and thus to stimulate in him that care and
pride of his home, the decline of which, in the
man of the house, is one of the costliest losses of
hard living.

One day on ' their round of inspection our
garden judges came to a small house at the edge
of the town, near the top of a hill through which
the rustic street cuts its way some twelve or fif-
teen feet below. The air was pure, the sur-
roundings green, the prospect wide and lovely.
Here was a rare chance for picturesque garden-
ing. Although the yard was without a fence
there had been some planting of flowers in it.
Yet it could hardly be called a garden. So desti-
tute was it of any intelligent plan and so un-
cared for that it seemed almost to have a con-
scious, awkward self-contempt. In the flecked

134

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

shade of a rude trellis of grapes that sheltered
a side door two children of the household fell to
work with great parade at a small machine, set-
ting bristles into tooth-brushes for a neighboring
factory, but it was amusingly plain that their
labor was spasmodic and capricious.

The mother was away on a business errand.
The father was present. He had done his day's
stint in the cutlery works very early, and with
five hours of sunlight yet before him had no use
to make of them but to sit on a bowlder on the
crest of the pleasant hill and smoke and whittle.
Had he been mentally trained he might, without
leaving that stone, have turned those hours into
real living, communing with nature and his
own mind; but he had, as half an eye could see,
no developed powers of observation, reflection
or imagination, and probably, for sheer want of
practice, could not have fixed his attention on a
worthy book through five of its pages. The
question that arose in the minds of his visitors
comes again here : what could have been so good
to keep idleness from breeding its swarm of evils
in his brain and hands — and home — as for

135

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

somebody, something, somehow, to put it into
his head — well — for example — to make a
garden? A garden, we will say, that should
win a prize, and — even though it failed to win
— should render him and his house and house-
hold more interesting to himself, his neighbors
and his town.

He and his house seemed to be keeping the
Ten Commandments in a slouching sort of
way and we may even suppose they were out of
debt — money debt ; yet already they were an
unconscious menace to society; their wage-
earning powers had outgrown their wants. Out-
grown them not because the wages were too high
but because their wants were too low; were only
wants of the body, wants of the barrenest uncul-
ture; the inelastic wants.

That is "my own invention," that phrase!
The bodily wants of a reptile are elastic. If an
alligator or a boa-constrictor catches a dog he
can swallow him whole and enjoy that one meal
in unriotous bliss for weeks. Thereafter if he
must put up with no more than a minnow or a
mouse he can do that for weeks in unriotous

136

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

patience. In a spring in one of our Northamp-
ton gardens I saw a catfish swallow a frog so
big that the hind toes stuck out of the devourer's
mouth for four days; but they went in at last,
and the fish, in his fishy fashion, from start to
finish was happy. He was never demoralized.
It is not so with us. We cannot much distend
or contract our purely physical needs. Espe-
cially is any oversupply of them mischievous.
They have not the reptilian elasticity. Day by
day they must have just enough. But the civ-
ilized man has spiritual wants and they are as
elastic as air.

A home is a house well filled with these elastic
wants. Home-culture is getting such wants into
households — not merely into single individuals
— that lack them. What makes a man rich ?
Is the term merely comparative? Not merely.
To be rich is to have, beyond the demands of
our bodily needs, abundant means to supply
our spiritual wants. To possess more material
resources than we can or will use or bestow to
the spiritual advantage of ourselves and others
is to be perilously rich, whether we belong to a

137

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

grinders' union in the cutlery works or to a
royal family. Why is it so often right that a
rich college, for example, should, in its money-
chest, feel poor? Because it could so easily
supply more spiritual wants if it had more
money.

Not low wages will ever make men harmless,
nor high wages make them happy, nor low nor
high save them from a spirit of pauperism or of
malignant envy; but having wages bigger than
their bodily wants, and having spiritual wants
numerous and elastic enough to use up the sur-
plus— spiritual wants, that know both how to
suffer need and how to abound, and to do either
without backsliding toward savagery. Whoever
would help this state of things on, let him seek
at the same time to increase the home's wage-
earning power and its spiritual powers to put
to fine use the wages earned: to augment the
love of beauty in nature and in art, the love of
truth and knowledge, the love of achievement
and of service, the love of God and of human
society, the ambition to put more into the world
than we get out of it. Wages will never be too

138

"Having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and liaving spiritual wants
numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus."

The owner of this cottage, who stands on the lawn, spaded and graded it and grassed it
herself, and by shrubljery plantings about the house's foundation and on the outer
t)oundaries of the grass has so transformed it since this picture was taken as to win one
of the highest prizes awarded among more than a thousand competitors.

"One such competing garden was so beautiful last year that strangers driving
by stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy a nearer view."

A capital prize-winners back yard which was a sand bank when he entered the competition.
His front yard is still handsomer.

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

high, nor the hours of a day's work too many or
too few, which follow that "sUding scale." How
much our garden contest may do of this sort
for that cottage on the hill we have yet to know;
last year was its first in the competition. But
it has shown the ambition to enter the lists,
and a number that promised no more at the
outset have since won prizes. One such was so
beautiful last year that strangers driving by
stopped and asked leave to dismount and en-
joy a nearer view.

A certain garden to which we early awarded
a high prize was, and yet remains, among the
loveliest in Northampton. Its house stands
perhaps seventy feet back from the public way
and so nearly at one edge of its broad lot that
all its exits and entrances are away from that
side and toward the garden. A lawn and front
bordered on side by loose hedges of Regel's
privet and Thunberg's barberrj^ and with only
one or two slim trees of delicate foliage near
its street line, rises sHghtly from the sidewalk
to the house in a smooth half wave that never
sinks below any level it has attained and yet

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THE AMATEUR GARDEN

consists of two curves. (It takes two curves,
let us say once more, to make even half of the
gentlest wave that can be made, if you take
it from the middle of the crest to the middle
of the trough, and in our American garden-
ing thousands of lawns, especially small front
lawns, are spoiled in their first lay-out by being
sloped in a single curve instead of in two curves
bending opposite ways.) Along a side of this
greensward farthest from the boundary to
which the house is so closely set are the drive
and walk, in one, and on the farther side of these,
next the sun, is the main flower-garden, half
surrounding another and smaller piece of lawn.
The dwelling stands endwise to the street and
broadside to this expanse of bloom. Against
its front foundations lies a bed of flowering
shrubs which at the corner farthest from the
drive swings away along that side's boundary
line and borders it with shrubbery down to
the street, the main feature of the group being a
luxuriant flowering quince as large as ten ordi-
nary ones and in every springtime a red splendor.
But the focus of the gardening scheme is at
140

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

the southeasterly side entrance of the house.
To this the drive comes on unrigorous Hues from
the street. The walk curves away a few steps
earlier to go to the front door but the drive,
passing on, swings in under the rear corner
windows and to the kitchen steps, veers around
by the carriage-house door and so loops back
into itself. In this loop, and all about the
bases of the dwelling and carriage-house the
flowers rise in dense abundance, related to one
another with clever taste and with a happy
care for a procession of bloom uninterrupted
throughout the season. Straightaway from the
side door, leaving the drive at a right angle,
runs a short arbor of vines. Four or five steps
to the left of this bower a clump of shrubbery
veils the view from the street and in between
shrubs and arbor lies a small pool of water
flowers and goldfish. On the arbor's right, in
charming privacy, masked by hollyhocks, dah-
lias and other tall-maidenly things, lie beds of
strawberries and lettuce and all the prim ranks
and orders of the kitchen garden.

Words are poor things to paint with; I wish
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THE AMATEUR GARDEN

I could set forth all in one clear picture: lawn,
drive, house, loop, lily pond, bower, rose-bordered
drive again (as the eye comes back) and flowers
crowding before, behind and beside you, some
following clear out to the street and beseeching
you not to go so soon. Such is the garden,
kept without hired labor, of two soft-handed
women; not beyond criticism in any of its
aspects but bearing witness to their love of
nature, of beauty and of home and of their
wisdom and skill to exalt and refine them.

This competitor early won, I say, a leading
prize, and in later seasons easily held — still
holds — a fine pre-eminence. Yet the later
prizes fell to others, because, while this one
had been a beautiful garden for years before
the competition began, they, rising from much
newer and humbler beginnings, sometimes from
very chaos, showed between one season and the
next far greater advances toward artistic ex-
cellence. In the very next year a high prize
fell to a garden in full sight of this one, a garden
whose makers had caught their inspiration from
this one, and, copying its art, had brought forth

142

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

a charming result out of what our judges de-
scribed as "particularly forlorn conditions."

Does this seem hardly fair to the first garden ?
But to spread the gardening contagion and to
instigate a wise copying after the right gar-
deners — these are what our prizes and honors
are for. Progress first, perfection afterward, is
our maxim. We value and reward originality,
nevertheless, and only count it a stronger neces-
sity to see not merely that no talented or hap-
pily circumstanced few, but that not even any
one or two fortunate neighborhoods, shall pres-
ently be capturing all the prizes. Hence the
rules already cited, which a prompt discovery
of this tendency forced upon us.

About this copying: no art is more inoffen-
sively imitated than gardening but unluckily
none is more easily, or more absurdly, mis-
copied. A safe way is to copy the gardener
rather than the garden. To copy any perform-
ance in a way to do it honor we must discern
and adapt its art without mimicking its act.
To miscopy is far easier — we have only to mimic
the act and murder the art. I once heard a

143

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

man ask an architect if it would not answer to
give his plan to the contractor and let him work
it out without the architect's supervision.

"My dear sir," the architect replied, "you
wouldn't know the corpse."

I suppose one reason why even the miscopy-
ing of gardens provokes so little offence is that
the acts it mimics have no art it can murder.
Mrs. Budd sets out her one little "high ge-
raingia" in the middle of her tiny grass-plat
(probably trimming it to look like a ballet-
dancer on one leg). Whereupon Mrs. Mudd,
the situation of whose house and grounds is
not in the least like her neighbor's, plants and
trims hers the same way and feels sure it has
the same effect, for — why shouldn't it ?

The prize-winning copyist I am telling of
copied principles only. To have copied mere
performance would have been particularly un-
lucky, for though his garden stands within
fifty yards of the one from which it drew its
inspiration the two are so differently located
that the same art principles demand of them
very different performances. An old-time lover

144

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

of gardens whom I have to quote at second-hand
mentions in contrast "gardens to look in upon"
and "gardens to look out from." The garden
I have described at length is planned to be
looked in upon; most town gardens must be,
of course; but its competitor across the street,
of which I am about to give account, is an ex-
ception. The lot has a very broad front and
very little depth — at one side almost none, at
the other barely enough for a small house
and a few feet of front yard. Why there should
be a drive I cannot say, but it is so well taken
into the general scheme that to call it to account
would be ungenerous. It enters at the narrow-
est part of the ground, farthest from the house,
makes a long parabola, and turns again into
the street close beside the dwelling. In the bit
of lawn thus marked off, shrubs have place near
the street, three or four old apple-trees range
down the middle, and along the drive runs a
gay border of annual flowers. Along the rear
side of the drive lies but a narrow strip of turf
beyond which the ground drops all at once to
another level some thirty feet below. On the

145

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

right this fall is so abrupt that the only way
down to it is by a steep rustic stair. On the
left, behind the house, the face of the bluff is
broken into narrow terraces, from top to bot-
tom of which, and well out on the lower level,
the entire space is mantled with the richly
burdened treUises of a small vineyard. At the
right on this lower ground is a kitchen garden;
beyond it stretch fair meadows too low to
build on, but fruitful in hay and grain; farther
away, on higher ground, the town again shows
its gables and steeples among its great maples
and elms, and still beyond, some three miles
distant, the green domes and brown precipices
of the Mount Holyoke Range stand across the
sky in sharp billows of forest and rock. It
seems at times a pity that Mount Holyoke and
Mount Tom cannot themselves know how
many modest gardens they are a component
part of — the high violin note of: gardens, like
this one, "to look out from."

It stops one's pen for one to find himself
using the same phrases for these New England
cottage gardens that famous travellers have

146

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

used in telling of the gardens of Italian princes;
yet why should we not, when the one nature
and the one art are mother and godmother of
them all ? It is a laughing wonder what beauty
can be called into hfe about the most unpre-
tentious domicile, out of what ugliness such
beauty can be evoked and at how trivial a
cost in money. Three years before this "garden
to look out from" won its Carnegie prize it was
for the most part a rubbish heap. Let me
now tell of one other, that sprang from conditions
still more unlovely because cramped and shut in.
It was on the other side of the town from
those I have been telling of. The house stood
broadside to the street and flush with the side-
walk. The front of the lot was only broad
enough for the house and an alley hardly four
feet wide between the house's end and a high,
tight board fence. The alley led into a small,
square back yard one of whose bounds was the
back fence of the house. On a second side was
a low, mossy, picturesquely old wing-building
set at right angles to the larger house, its doors
and windows letting into the yard. A third

147

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

boundary was the side of one well weathered
barn and the back of another, with a scanty
glimpse between them of meadows stretching
down to the Connecticut River. The fourth
was an open fence marking off a field of riotous
weeds. When the tenant mistress of this un-
promising spot began to occupy it the yard and
alley were a free range for the poultry of the
neighborhood, and its only greenery was two
or three haphazard patches of weedy turf.
One-fourth of the ground, in the angle made
by the open fence and one of the barns, had been
a hen-yard and was still inclosed within a high
wire-netting; but outside that space every
plant she set out had to be protected from the
grubbing fowls by four stakes driven down with
a hammer. Three years afterward she bore off
our capital prize in a competition of one hun-
dred gardens. Let me tell what the judges
found.

Out in the street, at the off side of the alley-
gate, between a rude fence and an electric-
railway siding, in about as much space as
would give standing room to one horse and

148

"Beauty can be called into life about the most unpretentious domicile."

One of a great number of competing cottages whose gardens are handsomer in the rear and
out of sight than on the street-front, though well kept there also.

"Those who pay no one to dig, plant or prune for them."

The aged owner of this place has hired no help for twenty years. Behind her honey-locust
hedge a highly kept and handsome flower and shrubbery garden fills the whole house lot.
She is a capital prize-winner.

LIBRARY
Of THE

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

cart, bloomed — not by right of lease, but by
permission of the railway company — a wealth
of annual flowers, the lowest (pansies and such
like) at the outer edge, the tallest against the
unsightly fence. This was the prelude. In the
alley the fence was clothed with vines; the win-
dows — of which there were two — were decked
with boxes of plumbago — pink, violet, white
and blue, and of lady-ferns and maiden-hair.
The back yard was a soft, smooth turf wher-
ever there were not flowers. Along the back
doors and windows of the house and the low-
roofed wing a rough arbor was covered with a
vine whose countless blossoms scented the air
and feasted the bees, while its luminous canopy
sheltered a rare assemblage of such flowers as
bloom and thrive only for those whom they
know and trust. But the crowning transforma-
tion was out in the open sunlight, in the space
which had been the hen-yard. Within it was a
holiday throng of the gardening world's best-
known and loved gentles and commons, from
roses down to forget-me-nots. Its screen of
poultry -netting had been kept in place, and no

149

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

feature on the premises more charmingly showed
that this floral profusion came of no mere greed
for abundance or diversity, but of a true art
instinct recognizing the Hmits of its resources.
The garden had to be made a "garden to look
in upon," a veritable imprisoned garden; the
question of expense required it to be chiefly of
annuals, and all the structural features of the
place called for concealment. These wire net-
tings did so; on their outside, next the grassy
two complete groups of herbaceous things were
so disposed as to keep them veiled in bloom
throughout the whole warm half of the year.
Close against them and overpeering their tops
were hollyhocks and dahlias; against these stood
at lesser height sweet peas, asters, zinnias,
coreopsis and others of like stature; in front of
these were poppies for summer, marigolds for
autumn; beneath these again were verbenas,
candytuft — all this is sketched from memory,
and I recall the winsome effect rather than
species and names; and still below nestled por-
tulaca and periwinkle. I fear the enumeration
gives but a harlequin effect; but the fault of

150

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

that is surely mine, for the result was delight-
ful.

I have ventured to make report of these two
or three gardens, not as in themselves worthy
of a great public's consideration and praise
but as happy instances of a fruitage we are
gathering among hundreds of homes in a little
city where it is proposed to give every home, if
possible, its utmost value. Many other pleas-
ing examples could be cited if further turnings
of the kaleidoscope were a real need, but this
slender discourse is as long now as it should be.
It seems droll to call grave attention to such
humble things in a world so rightly preoccupied
with great sciences and high arts, vast industries,
shining discoveries and international rivalries,
strifes and projects; yet what are all these for,
at last, but the simple citizen, his family and his
home, and for him and them in the cottage as
well as in the palace.'^ The poor man's home
may shine dimly but it is one of the stars by
which civilization must guide its onward course.

It may well be supposed that those whose
office it is to award the twenty-one prizes of our

151

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

garden competition among our eleven hundred
competitors have an intricate task. Yet some
of its intricacies add to the pleasure of it.

One of these pleasing complications arises
from our division of the field of contest into
seven parts, in each of which prizes must be
given to three contestants. Another comes from
our rule that not alone the competitors who
show the best gardening are to be rewarded,
but also those who have made the most earnest
effort and largest progress toward the best gar-
dening. Under this plan one whose work shows
a patient and signal progress in the face of
many disadvantages may outrank on our prize
Hst a rival whose superior artistic result has
been got easily under favoring conditions and
reveals no marked advance beyond the season
before.

After the manner of Dunfermline again, our
rules are that no gardener by trade and no one
who hires help in his garden may compete. Any
friend may help his friend, and any one may use
all the advice he can get from amateur or pro-
fessional. Children may help in the care of

152

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

the gardens, and many do; but children may not
themselves put gardens into the competition.

*'If the head of the house is the gardener-in-
chief," shrewdly argued one of our committee,
"the children, oftener than otherwise, will gar-
den with him, or will catch the gardening spirit
as they grow up; but if the children are head-
gardeners we shall get only children's gardening.
We want to dispel the notion that flower-garden-
ing is only woman's work and child's play."

Our rule against hired labor sets naturally a
maximum limit to the extent of ground a garden
may cover. Our minimum is but fifty square
yards, including turf, beds, and walks, and it
may be of any shape whatever if only it does
not leave out any part of the dooryard, front or
rear, and give it up to neglect and disorder. To
the ear even fifty square yards seems extensive,
but really it is very small. It had so formidable
a sound when we first named it that one of our
most esteemed friends, pastor of a Catholic
church in that very pretty and thrifty part of
Northampton called for its silk mills Florence,
generously added two supplementary prizes for

153

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

gardens under the limit of size. This happy
thought had a good effect, for, although in the
first and second years Father Gallen's people
took prizes for gardens above the minimum
limit in size, while his own two prizes fell to
contestants not in his flock, yet only in the
third year did it become to all of us quite as
plain as a pikestafl' that fifty square yards are
only the one-fiftieth part of fifty yards square,
and that whoever in Northampton had a door-
yard at all had fifty square yards. In 1903
more than two hundred and fifty gardens were
already in the contest but every one was large
enough to compete for the Carnegie prizes, and
the kind bestower of the extra ones (withdrawn
as superfluous) , unselfishly ignoring his own large
share of credit, wrote:

"Your gardens have altered the aspect of my
parish."

Such praise is high wages. It is better than
to have achieved the very perfection of garden-
ing about any one home. We are not trying to
raise the world's standard of the gardening art.
Our work is for the home and its indwellers;

154

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

for the home and the town. Our ideal is a town
of homes all taking pleasant care of one an-
other. We want to make all neighbors and all
homes esthetically interesting to one another,
believing that this will relate them humanely,
morally and politically. We began with those
who pay no one to dig, plant or prune for them,
but soon we went further and ventured to
open to gardens kept with hired service an allied
competition for a separate list of prizes. In this
way we put into motion, between two elements
of our people which there are always more than
enough influences to hold sufficiently apart, a
joint pursuit of the same refining dehght and
so promoted the fellowship of an unconflicting
common interest. In degree some of us who
use hired help had already obtained this effect.
Last season:

"Come," I often heard one of our judges say
on his rounds, "see my own garden some after-
noon; I'll show you all the mistakes I've made !"
And some came, and exchanged seeds and plants
with him.

"A high civiUzation," said an old soldier to me
155

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

only a few days ago, "must always produce great
social inequalities. They are needed mainly by
and for those who see no need of them."

I admitted that the need is as real, though not
so stern, as the need of inequaUties in military
rank.

"But," I said, "in the military relation you
must also vividly keep up, across all inequalities
of rank, a splendid sentiment of common inter-
est and devotion, mutual confidence and affec-
tion, or your army will be but a broken weapon,
a sword without a hilt."

"Yes," he agreed, "and so in civilization; if
it would be of the highest it must draw across
its lines of social cleavage the bonds of civic fel-
lowship."

It was what I had intended to say myself.
Social selection raises walls between us which
we all help to build, but they need not be
Chinese walls. They need not be so high that
civic fellowship, even at its most feminine
stature, may not look over them every now and
then to ask:

"How does my neighbor's garden grow?"

156

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

It is with this end in view as well as for
practical convenience that we have divided our
field into seven districts and from our "women's
council" have appointed residents of each to
visit, animate and counsel the contestants of
that district. The plan works well.

On the other hand, to prevent the move-
ment, in any district, from shrinking into vil-
lage isolation; in order to keep the whole town
comprised, and, as nearly as may be, to win the
whole town's sympathy and participation, we
have made a rule that in whatever district the
capital prize is awarded, the second prize must
go to some other district. If we have said this
before you may slip it here; a certain repeti-
tiousness is one part of our policy. A competi-
tor in the district where the capital prize is
awarded may take the third prize, but no one
may take the third in the district where the
second has been awarded. He may, however,
be given the fourth. In a word, no two con-
secutive prizes can be won in the same district.
Also, not more than three prizes of the fifteen
may in one season be awarded in any one district.

157

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

So each district has three prize-winners each
year, and each year the prizes go all over town.
Again, no garden may take the same prize two
years in succession; it must take a higher one
or else wait over.

"This prize-garden business is just all right !"
said one of the competitors to our general secre-
tary. "It gives us good things to say to one
another's face instead o' bad things at one an-
other's back, it does!"

That is a merit we claim for it; that it oper-
ates, in the most inexpensive way that can be, to
restore the social bond. Hard poverty minus
village neighborship drives the social relation
out of the home and starves out of its victims
their spiritual powers to interest and entertain
one another, or even themselves. If something
could keep alive the good aspects of village
neighborship without disturbing what is good in
that more energetic social assortment which
follows the expansion of the village into the
town or city, we should have better and fairer
towns and cities and a sounder and safer civili-
zation. But it must be something which will

158

THE PRIVATE GARDEN

give entirely differing social elements "good
things to say to one another's face instead of bad
things at one another's back."

We believe our Northampton garden com-
petition tends to do this. It brings together
in neighborly fellowship those whom the dis-
crepancies of social accomphshments would for-
ever hold asunder and it brings them together
without forced equality or awkward condescen-
sion, civic partners in that common weal to
neglect which is one of the ''dangers and temp-
tations of the home."

Two of our committee called one day at a
house whose garden seemed to have fallen into
its ill condition after a very happy start. Its
mistress came to the door wearing a heart-weary
look. The weather had been very drj% she
said in a melodious French accent, and she
had not felt so verv^ well, and so she had not
cared to struggle for a garden, much less for a
prize.

"But the weather," suggested her visitors,
"had been quite as dry for her competitors, and
few of them had made so fair a beginning. To

159

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

say nothing of prizes, was not the garden itself
its own reward?"

She shook her head drearily; she did not
know that she should ever care to garden any
more.

"Why?" exclaimed one questioner persua-
sively, "you didn't talk so when I was here last
month !'*

"No," was the reply, "but since three week'
ag-o — " and all at once up came the stifled
tears, filhng her great black eyes and coursing
down her cheeks unhindered, "I los' my baby."

The abashed visitors stammered such apolo-
gies as they could. "They would not have come
on this untimely errand could they have known."
They begged forgiveness for their slowness to
perceive.

"Yet do not wholly," they presently ven-
tured to urge, "give up your garden. The day
may come when the thought that is now so
bitter will, as a memory, yield some sweetness
as well, and then it may be that the least of
bitterness and the most of sweetness will come
to you when you are busy among your flowers."

160

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"It may be," she sighed, but with an uncon-
vinced shrug. And still, before the summer was
gone, the garden sedately, yet very sweetly,
smiled again and even the visitors ventured
back.

That was nearly three years ago. Only a
few weeks since those two were in the company
of an accomplished man who by some chance —
being a Frenchman — had met and talked with
this mother and her husband.

"We made a sad bungle there," said the
visitors.

"Do not think it !" he protested. "They are
your devoted friends. They speak of you with
the tenderest regard. Moreover, I think they
told me that last year — "

"Yes," rejoined one of the visitors, "last year
their garden took one of the prizes."

161

THE MIDWINTER GARDENS
OF NEW ORLEANS

TF the following pages might choose their
-^ own time and place they would meet their
reader not in the trolley-car or on the suburban
train, but in his own home, comfortably seated.
For in order to justify the eulogistic tone of the
descriptions which must presently occupy them
their first word must be a conciliatory protest
against hurry. One reason we Americans gar-
den so little is that we are so perpetually in
haste. The art of gardening is primarily a
leisurely and gentle one.

And gentility still has some rights. Our
Louisiana Creoles know this, and at times
maintain it far beyond the pales of their ever-
green gardens.

" *Step Hvely'?" one of them is said to have
amazedly retorted in a New York street-car.
*'No, the lady shall not step hvely. At yo'

165

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

leisure, madame, entrez!" In New Orleans
the conductors do not cry "Step lively ! " Right
or wrong, the cars there are not absolutely
democratic. Gentility really enjoys in them a
certain right to be treated gently.

If democracy could know its own tjTants it
would know that one of them is haste — the
haste, the hurry of the crowd; that hurry whose
cracking whip makes every one a compulsory
sharer in it. The street-car conductor, poor lad,
is not to blame. The fault is ours, many of
us being in such a scramble to buy democracy
at any price that, as if we were belatedly buying
railway tickets, we forget to wait for our change.

Now one of this tyrant's human forms is a
man a part of whose tyranny is to call himself
a gardener, though he knows he is not one, and
the symbol of whose oppression is nothing more
or less than that germ enemj^ of good garden-
ing, the lawn-mower. You, if you know the
gardening of our average American home al-
most anywhere else, would see, yourself, how
true this is, were you in New Orleans. But you
see it beautifully proved not by the presence

166

MIDWINTER GARDENS

but by the absence of the tyranny. The lawn-
mower is there, of course; no one is going to
propose that the lawn-mower anywhere be
abohshed. It is one of our modern marvels
of convenience, a blessed release of countless
human backs from countless hours of crouching,
sickle-shaped, over the sickle. It is not the
tyrant, but only like so many other instruments
of beneficent democratic emancipation, the ty-
rant's opportunity. A large part of its conven-
ience is expedition, and expedition is the eas-
iest thing in the world to become vulgarized:
vulgarized it becomes haste, and haste is the
tyrant. Such arguing would sound absurdly
subtle aimed against the uncloaked, barefaced
tyranny of the street-car conductor, but the
tyranny of the man with the lawn-mower is
itself subtle, masked, and requires subtlety to
unmask it.

See how it operates. For so we shall be the
better prepared for a generous appreciation of
those far Southern gardens whose beauty has
singled them out for our admiration. We know,
of course, that the "formal garden," by reason

167

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

of its initial and continuing costliness, is, and
must remain, the garden of the wealthy few,
and that the gardening for the great democracy
of our land, the kind that will make the country
at large a gardened land, is "informal,'* free-
hand, ungeometrical gardening. In this sort,
on whatever scale, whether of the capitalist or
of the cottager, the supreme feature is the lawn;
the lawn-mower puts this feature within the
reach of all, and pretty nearly every American
householder has, such as it is, his bit of Eden.

But just in that happy moment the Tempter
gets in. The garden's mistress or master is
beguiled to believe that one may have a garden
without the expense of a gardener and at the
same time without any gardening knowledge.
The stable-boy, or the man-of-all-work, or the
cook, or the cottager himself, pushes the lawn-
mower, and except for green grass, or change-
able brown and green, their bit of Eden is naked
and is not ashamed.

Or if ashamed, certain other beguilements,
other masked democratic tyrannies, entering,
reassure it: bliss of publicity, contempt of skill,

168

MIDWINTER GARDENS

and joy in machinery and machine results.
An itinerant ignoramus comes round with his
own lawn-mower, the pushing of which he now
makes his sole occupation for the green half of
the year, and the entire length, breadth and
thickness of whose wisdom is a wisdom not of
the lawn but only of the lawn-mower: how to
keep its bearings oiled and its knives chewing
fine; and the lawn becomes staringly a factory
product.

Then tyranny turns the screw again, and in
the bliss of publicity and a very reasonable de-
sire to make the small home lot look as large
as possible, down come the fences, side and
front, and the applauding specialist of the lawn-
mower begs that those obstructions may never
be set up again, because now the householder
can have his lawn mowed so much quicker^
and he, the pusher, can serve more customers.
Were he truly a gardener he might know some-
what of the sweet, sunlit, zephyrous, fragrant
out-door privacies possible to a real garden, and
more or less of that benign art which, by skil-
ful shrubbery plantings, can make a small

169

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

place look much larger — as well as incompa-
rably more interesting — than can any mere
abolition of fences, and particularly of the street
fence. But he has not so much as one eye of
a genuine gardener or he would know that he
is not keeping your lawn but only keeping it
shaven. He is not even a good garden laborer.
You might as well ask him how to know the
wild flowers as how to know the lawn pests —
dandelion, chickweed, summer-grass, heal-all,
moneywort and the like — with which you must
reckon wearily by and by because he only
mows them in his bUndness and lets them
flatten to the ground anxl scatter their seed
like an infantry firing-line. Inquire of him
concerning any one of the few orphan shrubs
he has permitted you to set where he least
dislikes them, and which he has trimmed clear
of the sod — put into short skirts — so that he
may run his whirling razors under (and now
and then against) them at full speed. Will he
know the smallest fact about it or yield any
echo of your interest in it?

There is a late story of an aged mother, in a
170

MIDWINTER GARDENS

darkened room, saying falteringly to the kind
son who has brought in some flowers which she
caresses with her soft touch, "I was wishing
to-day — We used to have them in the yard
— before the lawn-mower — " and saying no
more. I know it for a fact, that in a certain
cemetery the "Sons of the American Revolu-
tion'* have for years been prevented from
setting up their modest marks of commemora-
tion upon the graves of Revolutionary heroes,
because they would be in the way of the sexton's
lawn-mower.

Now in New Orleans the case is so different
that really the amateur gardener elsewhere has
not all his rights until he knows why it is so
different. Let us, therefore, look into it. In
that city one day the present writer accosted
an Irishman who stood, pruning-shears in hand,
at the foot of Clay's statue, Lafayette Square.
It was the first week of January, but beside
him bloomed abundantly that lovely drooping
jasmine called in the books jasminum multi-
florum.

"Can you tell me what shrub this is.''"
171

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

"That, sor, is the monthly flora! Thim as
don't know the but-hanical nayum sometimes
calls it the stare jismin, but the but-hanical
nayum is the monthly flora.''

The inquirer spoke his thanks and passed on,
but an eager footfall overtook him, his elbow
felt a touch, and the high title came a third
time: "The but-hanical nayum is the monthly
flora''

The querist passed on, warmed by a grateful
esteem for one who, though doubtless a skilled
and frequent tinkler of the lawn-mower within
its just limitations, was no mere dragoon of it,
but kept a regard for things higher than the
bare sod, things of grace in form, in bloom, in
odor, and worthy of "but-hanical nayum." No
mere chauffeur he, of the little two-wheeled
machine whose cult, throughout the most of
our land, has all but exterminated ornamental
gardening.

In New Orleans, where it has not conquered,
there is no crowding for room. A ten-story
building is called there a sky-scraper. The
town has not a dozen in all, and not one of that

172

MIDWINTER GARDENS

stature is an apartment or tenement house.
Having felled her surrounding forests of cypress
and drained the swamps in which they stood,
she has at command an open plain capable of
housing a population seven times her present
three hundred and fifty thousand, if ever she
chooses to build skyward as other cities do.

But this explains only why New Orleans
inight have gardens, not why she chooses to
have them, and has them by thousands, when
hundreds of other towns that have the room —
and the lawns — choose not to have the shrub-
beries, vines and flowers, or have them with-
out arrangement. Why should New Orleans so
exceptionally choose to garden, and garden
with such exceptional grace .'^ Her house-lots
are extraordinarily numerous in proportion to
the numbers of her people, and that is a begin-
ning of the explanation; but it is only a be-
ginning. Individually the most of those lots
are no roomier than lots elsewhere. Thousands
of them, prettily planted, are extremely small.

The explanation lies mainly in certain pe-
culiar limitations, already hinted, of her —

173

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

democracy ! That is to say, it lies in her fences.
Her fences remain, her democracy is different
from the Northern variety. The difference may
consist only in faults both there and here which
we all hope to see democracy itself one day
eliminate; but the difference is palpable. The
fences mean that the dwellers behind them
have never accorded to each other, as neighbors,
that liberty-to-take-liberties of which Northern
householders and garden-holders, after a quar-
ter-century's disappointing experiment, are a bit
weary.

In New Orleans virtually every home, be it
ever so proud or poor, has a fence on each of
its four sides. As a result the home is bounded
by its fences, not by its doors. Unpleasant ne-
cessities these barriers are admitted to be, and
those who have them are quite right in not
liking them in their bare anatomy. So they
clothe them with shrubberies and vines and
thus on the home's true corporate bound the
garden's profile, countenance and character are
established in the best way possible; without,
that is, any impulse toward embellishment in-

174

"In New Orleans the home is bounded by its fences, not by its doors
— so they clothe them with shrubberies and vines."

It is pleasant to notice how entirely the evergreen-vine-covered wall preserves the general
air of spaciousness. The forest tree at the front and right (evergreen magnolia) is covered
with an evergreen vine from the turf to its branches.

"The lawn . . . lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one shrub-and-
flower-planted side to the other, along and across."

A common garden feature in New Orleans is the di\nsion fence with front half of wire, rear
half of boards, both planted out with shrubs. The overhanging forest tree is the ever-
green magnolia (J/, grandi flora).

or THE

MIDWINTER GARDENS

sulated from utility. Compelled by the common
frailties of all human nature (even in a democ-
racy) to maintain fortifications, the householder
has veiled the militant aspect of his defences
in the flowered robes and garlandries of nature's
diplomacy and hospitality. Thus reassured, his
own inner hospitality can freely overflow into
the fragrant open air and out upon the lawn —
a lawn whose dimensions are enlarged to both
eye and mind, inasmuch as every step around
its edges — around its meandering shrubbery
borders — is made affable and entertaining by
Flora's versatilities.

At the same time, let us note in passing,
this enlargement is partly because the lawn
— not always but very much oftener than
where lawns go unenclosed — lies clean-breast-
ed, green-breasted, from one shrub-and-flower-
planted side to the other, along and across;
free of bush, statue, urn, fountain, sun-dial or
pattern-bed, an uninterrupted sward. Even
where there are lapses from this delightful ex-
cellence they often do not spoil, but only dis-
count, more or less, the beauty of the general

175

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

scheme, as may be noted — if without offence
we may offer it the homage of criticism — in
one of the gardens we have photographed
[page 176] to illustrate these argumentations.
There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the
sward without in the least adding to the gar-
den's abounding charm. The smallest effort of
the reader's eye will show how largely, in a
short half-day's work, the fair scene might be
enhanced in lovely dignity simply by the elim-
ination of these slight excesses, or by their
withdrawal toward the lawn's margins and into
closer company with the tall trees.

In New Orleans, where, even when there
are basements, of which there are many, the
domains of the cook and butler are somewhere
else, a nearly universal feature of every sort of
dwelling — the banker's on two or three lots,
the laborer's on half a one — is a paved walk
along one side of the house, between the house
and the lawn, from a front gate to the kitchen.
Generally there is but the one front gate, facing
the front door, with a short walk leading directly
up to this door. In such case the rear walk, be-

176

"-i'?m

MIDWINTER GARDENS

ginning at the front door-steps, turns squarely
along the house's front, then at its corner
turns again as squarely to the rear as a drill-
sergeant and follows the dwelling's ground con-
tour with business precision — being a business
path. In fact it is only the same path we see
in uncrowded town life everywhere in our
land.

But down there it shows this peculiarity,
that it is altogether likely to be well bordered
with blooming shrubs and plants along all that
side of it next the lawn. Of course it is a fault
that this shrubbery border — and all the more
so because it is very apt to be, as in three of our
illustrations [pages 174, 178, 180], a rose border
— should, so often as it is, be pinched in be-
tween parallel edges. "No pinching" is as good
a rule for the garden as for the kindergarten.
Manifestly, on the side next the house the edge
between the walk and the planted border should
run parallel with the base hne of the house, for
these are business lines and therefore ever so
properly lines of promptitude — of the shortest
practicable distance between two points — lines

177

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

of supply and demand, lines of need. For lines
of need, business speed !

But for lines of pleasure, grace and leisure.
It is the tactful office of this shrubbery border
to veil the business path from the lawn — from
the pleasure-ground. Therefore its outside,
lawn-side edge should be a line of pleasure,
hence a line of grace, hence not a straight line
(dead line), nor yet a line of but one lethargic
curve, but a line of suavity and tranquil on-
going, a leisurely undulating line.

Not to have it so is an error, but the error
is an inoffensive one easily corrected and the
merit is that the dwelling's business path is
greenly, bloomingly screened from its pleasure-
ground by a lovely natural drapery which at
the same time furnishes, as far as the path
goes, the house's robes of modesty. Indeed
they are furnished farther than the path goes;
for no good work gathers momentum more
readily than does good gardening, and the
householder, having begun so rightly, has now
nothing to do to complete the main fabric of
his garden but to carry this flow of natural

178

'The rear walk . . • follows the dwelling's ground contour with business
precision — being a business path."

■ov

MIDWINTER GARDENS

draperies on round the domicile's back and
farther side and forward to its front again.
Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even above
its reach and where it does not conceal, the
house's architectural faults, thus winsomely en-
hance all its architectural charm; like a sweet
human mistress of the place, putting into
generous shadow all the ill, and into open sun-
shine all the best, of a husband's strong char-
acter. (See both right and left foreground of
illustration on page 178, and right foreground on
page 180.)

And now if this New Orleans idea — that
enough private enclosure to secure good home
gardening is not incompatible with public free-
dom, green lawns, good neighborship, sense of
room and fulness of hospitality, and that a
house-lot which is a picture is worth more to
everybody (and therefore is even more demo-
cratic) than one which is little else than a map
— if this idea, we say, finds any credence among
sister cities and towns that may be able to
teach the Creole city much in other realms of
art and criticism, let us cast away chalk and

179

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

charcoal for palette and brush and show in
floral, arborescent, redolent detail what is the
actual pictorial excellence of these New Orleans
gardens.

For notwithstanding all their shut-in state,
neither their virtues nor their faults are hid
from the passing eye. The street fence, oftenest
of iron, is rarely more than breast-high and is
always an open fence. Against its inner side
frequently runs an evergreen hedge never taller
than the fence's top. Commonly it is not so
tall, is always well clipped and is so civil to
strangers that one would wish to see its hke on
every street front, though he might prefer to
find it not so invariably of the one sort of growth
— a small, handsome privet, that is, which
nevertheless fulfils its office with the perfection
of a soHd line of palace sentries. Unluckily
there still prevails a very old-fashioned tendency
to treat the front fence as in itself ornamental
and to forget two things: First, that its naked-
ness is no part of its ornamental value; that it
would be much handsomer lightly clothed —
underclothed — like, probably, its very next

180

pfoitfY

MIDWINTER GARDENS

neighbor; clothed with a hedge, either close or
loose, and generously kept below the passer's
line of sight. And, second, that from the house-
holder's point of view, looking streetward from
his garden's inner depth, its fence, when un-
planted, is a blank interruption to his whole
fair scheme of meandering foliage and bloom
which on the other three sides frames in the
lawn; as though the garden were a lovely stage
scene with the fence for footlights, and some
one had left the footlights unlit.

A lovely stage scene, we say, without a hint
of the stage's unreality; for the side and rear
fences and walls, being frankly unornamental,
call for more careful management than the
front and are often charmingly treated. (Page
174.) (See, for an example of a side fence with
front half of wire and rear half of boards, page
174, and for solid walls, pages 180 and 184.)
Where they separate neighbors' front lawns they
may be low and open, but back of the building-
line, being oftenest tight and generally more than
head-high, they are sure to be draped with such
climbing floral fineries as honeysuckles, ivies,

181

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

jasmines white and yellow, lantanas, roses or
the Madeira vine. More frequently than not
they are planted also, in strong masses, with
ever so many beautiful sorts of firmer-stemmed
growths, herbaceous next the sod, woody be-
hind, assembled according to stature, from one
to twelve feet high, swinging in and out around
the lawn until all stiffness of boundaries is
waved and smiled away.

In that first week of January already men-
tioned the present wTiter saw at every turn, in
such borders and in leaf and blossom, the deli-
cate blue-flowered plumbago; two or three
kinds of white jasmine, also in bloom; and the
broad bush-form of the yellow jasmine, begin-
ning to flower. With them were blooming
roses of a dozen kinds; the hibiscus (not althaea
but the H. rosasinensis of our Northern green-
houses), shm and tall, flaring its mallow-
flowers pink, orange, salmon and deep red;
the trailing-lantana, covering broad treUises of
ten feet in height and with its drooping masses
of delicate foliage turned from green to mingled
hues of hlac and rose by a complete mantle of

182

UP*»*RY

MIDWINTER GARDENS

their blossoms. He saw the low, sweet-scented
geraniums of lemon, rose and nutmeg odors,
persisting through the winter unblighted, and
the round-leaved, "zonal" sorts surprisingly
large of growth — in one case, on a division
fence, trained to the width and height of six
feet. There, too, was the poinsettia still bend-
ing in its Christmas red, taller than the tallest
man's reach, often set too forthpushingly at the
front, but at times, with truer art, glowing like
a red constellation from the remoter bays of
the lawn; and there, taller yet, the evergreen
Magnolia fuscata, full of its waxen, cream-
tinted, inch-long flowers smelling delicately like
the banana. He found the sweet olive, of re-
fined leaf and minute axillary flowers yielding
their ravishing tonic odor with the reserve of
the violet; the pittosporum; the box; the myrtle;
the camphor-tree with its neat foliage answer-
ing fragrantly the grasp of the hand. The dark
camellia was there, as broad and tall as a lilac-
bush, its firm, glossy leaves of the deepest green
and its splendid red flowers covering it from
tip to sod, one specimen showing by count a

183

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

thousand blossoms open at once and the sod
beneath innumerably starred with others al-
ready fallen. The night jasmine, in full green,
was not yet in blossom but it was visibly think-
ing of the spring. The Chinese privet, of twenty
feet stature, in perennial leaf, was saving its
flowers for May. The sea-green oleander, fif-
teen feet high and wide (see extreme left fore-
ground, page 176), drooped to the sward on four
sides but hoarded its floral cascade for June.
The evergreen loquat (locally miscalled the
mespilus plum) was already faltering into bloom;
also the orange, with its flower-buds among its
polished leaves, whitening for their own wed-
ding; while high over them towered the date
and other palms, spired the cedar and arbor-
vitae, and with majestic infrequency, where
grounds were ample, spread the lofty green,
scintillating boughs of the magnolia grandiflora
(see left foregrounds on pages 174, 182 and 184),
the giant, winter-bare pecan and the wide, mossy
arms of the vast live-oak.

Now while the time of year in which these
conditions are visible heightens their lovely

184

'Back of the building-line the fences . . . generally more than head-high
. . . are sure to be draped."

•.^S£^9S

K <*

■^ .•v;'--?^^..?f?5t;s

. ^'-

.: • t

V ^ \

•iw4 ^

"/: _,

;■ ' ■

k • V -«

" ■

nmm^s^i^i

JH|

^->L.-''Op^^^y^^H

"... from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer sitle of Easter."

In any garden as fair a> this there should be some place to sit down. This deficiency is
one of the commonest faults in American gardening.

Of THE

I fnnir»

MIDWINTER GARDENS

wonder, their practical value to Northern home-
lovers is not the marvel and delight of some-
thing inimitable but their inspiring suggestion
of what may be done with ordinary Northern
home grounds, to the end that the floral pag-
eantry of the Southern January may be fully
rivalled by the glory of the Northern June.

For of course the Flora of the North, who
in the winter of long white nights puts off all
her jewelry and nearly all her robes and "lies
down to pleasant dreams," is the blonde sister
of, and equal heiress with, this darker one who,
in undivested greenery and flowered trappings,
persists in open-air revelry through all the
months from the autumn side of Christmas to
the summer side of Easter. Wherefore it seems
to me the Northern householder's first step
should be to lay hold upon this New Orleans
idea in gardening — which is merely by adop-
tion a New Orleans idea, while through and
through, except where now and then its votaries
stoop to folly, it is by book a Northern voice,
the garden gospel of Frederick Law Olmsted.

Wherever American homes are assembled we
185

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

may have, all winter, for the asking — if we
will but ask ourselves instead of the lawn-
mower man — an effect of home, of comfort,
cheer and grace, of summer and autumn remi-
niscences and of spring's anticipations, immeas-
urably better than any ordinary eye or fancy
can extort from the rectangular and stiffened-
out nakedness of unplanted boundaries; im-
measurably better than the month-by-month
daily death-stare of shroud-like snow around
houses standing barefooted on the frozen ground.
It may be by hearty choice that we abide where
we must forego outdoor roses in Christmas
week and broad-leaved evergreens blooming at
New Year's, Twelfth-night or Carnival. Well
and good ! But we can have even in mid-
January, and ought to allow ourselves, the lawn-
garden's surviving form and tranced life rather
than the shrubless lawn's unmarked grave
flattened beneath the void of the snow. We
ought to retain the sleeping beauty of the
ordered garden's unlost configuration, with the
warm house for its bosom, with all its remoter
contours — alleys, bays, bushy networks and

186

" The sleeping bcjuity of tlie gardons unlost configuration . . . keeping a
winter's share of its feminine grace and softness."

This picUire was taken in tlie first flush of spring. The trees in l)h)ssoui are the wild
Japanese cherry.

UPRARY
or TH^

,.v

MIDWINTER GARDENS

sky-line — keeping a winter share of their
feminine grace and softness. We ought to re-
tain the "frozen music" of its myriad gray,
red and yellow stems and twigs and lingering
blue and scarlet berries stirring, though leaf-
lessly, for the kiss of spring. And we ought to
retain the invincible green of cedars, junipers
and box, cypress, laurel, hemlock spruce and
cloaking ivy, darkling amid and above these,
receiving from and giving to them a cheer which
neither could have in their frostbound Eden
without mutual contrast.

Eden ! If I so recklessly ignore latitude as
to borrow the name of the first gardener's
garden for such a shivering garden as this it
is because I see this one in a dream of hope — a
diffident, interrogating hope — really to behold,
some day, this dream-garden of Northern winters
as I have never with actual open eyes found one
kept by any merely well-to-do American citizen.
If I describe it I must preface with all the dis-
claimers of a self-conscious amateur whose most
venturesome argument goes no farther than
"WTiy not?" yet whom the evergreen gardens

187

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

of New Orleans revisited in January impel to
protest against every needless submission to
the tyrannies of frost and of a gardening art —
or non-art, a submission which only in the out-
door embelHshment of the home takes winter
supinely, abjectly.

This garden of a hope's dream covers but
three ordinary town lots. Often it shrinks to
but one without asking for any notable change
of plan. Following all the Hues, the hard, law
lines, that divide it from its neighbors and the
street, there runs, waist-high on its street front,
shoulder-high on its side bounds, a close ever-
green hedge of hemlock spruce. In its young
way this hedge has been handsome from in-
fancy; though still but a few years old it gives,
the twelvemonth round, a note both virile and
refined in color, texture and form, and if the
art that planted it and the care that keeps it
do not decay neither need the hedge for a cen-
tury to come. Against the intensest cold this
side of Labrador it is perfectly hardy, is
trimmed with a sloping top to shed snows
whose weight might mutilate it, and can be

188

MIDWINTER GARDENS

kept in repair from generation to generation,
like the house's plumbing or roof, or hke some
green-uniformed pet regiment with ranks yet
full after the last of its first members has per-
ished.

Furthermore, along the inner side of this
green hedge (sometimes close against it, some-
times with a turfed alley between), as well as
all round about the house, extend borders of de-
ciduous shrubs, with such meandering boundaries
next the broad white lawn as the present writer,
for this time, has probably extolled enough.
These bare, gray shrub masses are not wholly
bare or gray and have other and most pleas-
ingly visible advantages over unplanted, pallid
vacancy, others besides the mere lace-work of
their twigs and the occasional tenderness of a
last summer's bird's nest. Here and there,
breaking the cold monotone, a bush of moose
maple shows the white-streaked green of its
bare stems and sprays, or cornus or willow gives
a soft glow of red, purple or yellow. Only
here and there, insists my dream, lest when
winter at length gives way to the "rosy time

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THE AMATEUR GARDEN

of the year" their large and rustic gentleness
mar the nuptial revels of summer's returned
aristocracy. Because, moreover, there is a far
stronger effect of life, home and cheer from
the broad-leaved evergreens which, in duly
limited numbers, assemble with and behind
these, and from the lither sorts of conifers that
spire out of the network and haze of living
things in winter sleep. The plantings at the
garden's and dwelling's front being properly, of
course, lower than those farther back, I see
among them, in this dream, the evergreen box
and several kinds of evergreen ferns. I see two
or three species of evergreen barberries, not to
speak of Thunberg's leafless one warm red with
its all-winter berries, the winter garden's rubric.
I see two varieties of euonymus; various low
junipers; two sorts of laurel; two of andromeda,
and the high-clambering evergreen ivy. Be-
ginning with these in front, infrequent there
but multiplying toward the place's rear, are
bush and tree forms of evergreen holly, native
rhododendrons, the many sorts of foreign cedars
and our native ones white and red, their sky-

190

MIDWINTER GARDENS

ward lines modified as the square or pointed
architecture of the house may call for con-
trasts in pointed or broad-topped arborescence.
If, at times, I dream behind all this a grove,
with now and then one of its broad, steepling
or columnar trees pushed forward upon the
lawn, it is only there that I see anything so
stalwart as a pine or so rigid as a spruce.

Such is the vision, and if I never see it with
open eyes and in real sunlight, even as a dream
it is — like certain other things of less dignity
— grateful, comforting. I warrant there are
mistakes in it, but you will find mistakes wher-
ever you find achievement, and there is no law
against them — in well-meant dreams. Ob-
serve, if you please, this vision lays no draw-
back on the garden's summer beauty and
aflBuence. Twelve months of the year it en-
hances its dignity and elegance. Both the
numerical proportions of evergreens to other
greens, and the scheme of their distribution,
are quite as correct and effective for contrast
and background to the transient foliage and
countless flowers of July as amid the bare

191

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

ramage of January. Summer and winter alike,
the gravest items among them all, the conifers,
retain their values even in those New Orleans
gardens. When we remember that in New
England and on all its isotherm it is winter all
that half of the year when most of us are at
home, why should we not seek to realize this
snow-garden dream? Even a partial or faulty
achievement of it will surely look lovelier than
the naked house left out on its naked white
lawn like an unclaimed trunk on a way-station
platform. I would not, for anything, offend
the reader's dignity, but I must think that this
midwinter garden may be made at least as
much lovelier than no garden as Ahce's Cheshire
cat was lovelier — with or without its grin —
than the grin without the cat.

Shall we summarize? Our gist is this: that
those gardens of New Orleans are as they are,
not by mere advantage of climate but for
several other reasons. Their bounds of owner-
ship and privacy are enclosed in hedges, tight
or loose, or in vine-clad fences or walls. The
lawn is regarded as a ruling feature of the home's

192

MIDWINTER GARDENS

visage, but not as its whole countenance —
one flat feature never yet made a lovely face.
This lawn feature is beautified and magnified
by keeping it open from shrub border to shrub
border, saving it, above all things, from the
gaudy barbarism of pattern -bedding; and by
giving it swing and sweep of graceful con-
tours. And lastly, all ground lines of the house
are clothed with shrubberies whose deciduous
growths are companioned with broad-leafed
evergreens and varied conifers, in whatever
proportions will secure the best midwinter
effects without such abatement to those of
summer as would diminish the total of the
whole year's joy.

These are things that can be done anywhere
in our land, and wherever done with due re-
gard to soil as well as to climate will give us
gardens worthy to be named with those of
New Orleans, if not, in some aspects and at
particular times of the year, excelling them.
As long as mistakes are made in the architec-
ture of houses they will be made in the architec-
ture of gardening, and New Orleans herself, by

193

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

a little more care for the fundamentals of art,
of all art, could easily surpass her present floral
charm. Yet in her gardens there is one further
point calling for approval and imitation: the
very high trimming of the stems of lofty trees.
Here many a reader will feel a start of resent-
ment; but in the name of the exceptional
beauty one may there see resulting from the
practice let us allow the idea a moment's enter-
tainment, put argument aside and consider a
concrete instance whose description shall be
our closing word.

Across the street in which, that Januarj^ we
sojourned (we were two), there was a piece of
ground of an ordinary town square's length and
somewhat less breadth. It had been a private
garden. Its owner had given it to the city.
Along its broad side, which our windows looked
out upon, stood perfectly straight and upright
across the sky to the south of them a row of
magnohas (grandiflora) at least sixty feet high,
with their boles, as smooth as the beach,
trimmed bare for two-thirds of their stature.
The really decorative marks of the trimming

194

MIDWINTER GARDENS

had been so many years, so many decades,
healed as to show that no harm had come of
it or would come. The soaring, dark-green, gUt-
tering foliage stood out against the almost per-
petually blue and white sky. Beyond them, a
few yards within the place but not in a straight
line, rose even higher a number of old cedars
similarly treated and offering a pleasing con-
trast to the magnoHas by the feathery texture
of their dense sprays and the very different cast
of their lack-lustre green. Overtopping all, on
the farther hne of the grounds, southern Hne,
several pecan-trees of nearly a hundred feet in
height, leafless, with a multitude of broad-
spreading boughs all high in air by natural
habit, gave an effect strongly like that of winter
elms, though much enlivened by the near com-
pany of the evergreen masses of cedar and
magnoUa. These made the upper-air half of
the garden, the other half being assembled be-
low. For the lofty trim of the wintergreen-
trees — the beauty of which may have been
learned from the palms — allowed and invited
another planting beneath them. Magnolias,

195

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

when permitted to branch low, are, to under-
growth, among the most inhospitable of trees,
but in this garden, where the sunlight and the
breezes passed abundantly under such high-
lifted arms and among such clean, bare stems, a
congregation of shrubs, undershrubs and plants
of every stature and breadth, arose, flourished
and flowered without stint. Yonder the wind-
split, fathom-long leaves of the banana, bright-
ening the background, arched upward, drooped
again and faintly oscillated to the air's caress.
Here bloomed and smelled the delicate magnolia
f uscata, and here, redder with flowers than green
with shining leaves, shone the camellia. Here
spread the dark oleander, the pittosporum and
the Chinese privet; and here were the camphor-
tree and the slender sweet olive — we have
named them all before and our steps should
not take us over the same ground twice in one
circuit; that would be bad gardening. But
there they were, under those ordinarily so in-
tolerant trees, prospering and singing praises
with them, some in full blossom and perfume,
some waiting their turn, like parts of a choir.

196

MIDWINTER GARDENS

In the midst of all, where a broad path eddied
quite round an irregular open space, and that
tender quaintness of decay appeared which is
the unfailing New Orleans touch, the space was
filled with roses. This spot was lovely enough
by day and not less so for being a haunt
of toddling babes and their nurses; but at
night — ! Regularly at evening there comes
into the New Orleans air, from Heaven knows
whither, not a mist, not a fog nor a dampness,
but a soft, transparent, poetical dimness that
in no wise shortens the range of vision — a
counterpart of that condition which so many
thousands of favored travellers in other longi-
tudes know as the "Atlantic haze." One night
— oh, oftener than that, but let us say one for
the value of understatement — returning to our
quarters some time before midnight, we stepped
out upon the balcony to gaze across into that
garden. The sky was clear, the neighborhood
silent. A wind stirred, but the shrubberies
stood motionless. The moon, nearly full, swung
directly before us, pouring its gracious light
through the tenuous cross-hatchings of the

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

pecans, nestling it in the dense tops of the cedars
and magnolias and sprinkling it to the ground
among the lower growths and between their
green-black shadows. When in a certain im-
potence of rapture we cast about in our minds
for an adequate comparison — where descrip-
tion in words seemed impossible — the only-
parallel we could find was the art of Corot and
such masters from the lands where the wonder-
ful pictorial value of trees trimmed high has
been known for centuries and is still cherished.
For without those trees so disciplined the ravish-
ing picture of that garden would have been
impossible.

Of course our Northern gardens cannot smile
like that in winter. But they need not perish,
as tens of thousands of lawn-mower, pattern-
bed, so-called gardens do. They should but
hibernate, as snugly as the bear, the squirrel,
the bee; and who that ever in full health of
mind and body saw spring come back to a
Northern garden of blossoming trees, shrubs
and undershrubs has not rejoiced in a year of
four clear-cut seasons? Or who that ever saw

198

MIDWINTER GARDENS

mating birds, greening swards, starting vio-
lets and all the early flowers loved of Shake-
speare, Milton, Shelley, Bryant and Tennyson,
has not felt that the resurrection of landscape
and garden owes at least half its glory to the
long trance of winter, and wished that dwellers
in Creole lands might see New England's First
of June? For what says the brave old song-
couplet of New England's mothers ? That —

"Spring would be but wintry weather
If we had nothing else but spring."

Every year, even in Massachusetts — even in
Michigan — spring, summer, and autumn are
sure to come overladen with their gifts and
make us a good, long, merry visit. All the
other enlightened and well-to-do nations of the
world entertain them with the gardening art
and its joys and so make fairer, richer and
stronger than can be made indoors alone the
individual soul, the family, the social, the civic,
the national life. In this small matter we
Americans are at the wrong end of the proces-
sion. What shall we do about it.'^

199

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA

3 0112 052508964

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