—It 
 
 
ALBERT R. MANN 
 LIBRARY 
 
 New York State Colleges 
 
 OF 
 
 Agriculture and Home Economics 
 
 AT 
 
 Cornell University 
 
Cornell University Library 
 SB 453.C12 
 
 The amateur garden. 
 
 3 1924 002 844 581 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924002844581 
 
BOOKS BY GEORGE W. CABLE 
 
 PcBLisHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
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THE AMATEUR GARDEN 
 

 
 
 y-'m^' ^ ^^mM 
 
 
 
 
 
 "That gardening is best . . . which best ministers to man's felicity 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 was smaller. The dark tree 
 in the foreground on the right is Felix Adler's hemlock. [Page 82] 
 
THE AMATEUR GARDEN 
 
 BY ,, ' 
 GEORGE W. CABLE 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 NEW YORK :: :: :: MCMXIV 
 
374190 
 
 Copyright. 1914, by 
 CHAItLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Publiihed October, 1914 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 MY OWN ACRE 1 
 
 THE AMERICAN GARDEN 41 
 
 WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 79 
 
 THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF NORTHAMPTON . . 107 
 
 THE PRIVATE GARDEN'S PUBLIC VALUE . . . 129 
 
 THE MIDWINTER GARDENS OF NEW^ ORLEANS . 163 
 
ILLUSTRATI ON S 
 
 "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 w^hich 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 law^n" 36 
 
 "... until the house itself seems as naturally ... to gro^v up out 
 of the garden as the high keynote rises at the end of a lady's 
 song" 48 
 
 vil 
 
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 
 
 Ho^^cver enraptured of wild nature you may be, you do and must 
 
 require of her some subserviency about your o^^n dwelling" 84 
 
 'Plant it 'where it ^11. 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 yriih shrubberies and vines" . . 174 
 
 "The lawn . . . lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one shrub- 
 
 and-f lower-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 . . . where it does not 
 
 conceal, the house's architectural faults " 180 
 
 "... a lovely stage scene wathout 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 stalwart as a pine or so rigid 
 
 as a spruce" 192 
 
 IX 
 
MY OWN ACRE 
 
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 itseK 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-telUng 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 
 
 3 
 
. 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 where 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 lived 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 
 
 4 
 
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 Uttle '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-smeUing favorites, 
 beneath which hes a leaf-mould rife with ferns 
 and wild flowers. 
 
 From its business quarter the town's chief 
 
 5 
 
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 dwellings 
 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. 
 
 6 
 
"... 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. 
 
MY OWN ACRE 
 
 On this green of the dryads, where it inter- 
 cepts the "avenue" that sUps 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 selling 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 Uttle green heron or that cock of the walk, 
 the red squirrel. 
 
 7 
 
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 xmiform 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 slightest possible interference with 
 
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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 apphances 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- 
 
 9 
 
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, Kke 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 
 
 10 
 
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 
 aroimd 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 
 
 11 
 
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. 
 
 12 
 
"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 
 UDsafety is being taken down at the present writing. 
 
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 hvmdreds 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 
 
 13 
 
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 hkeUhood 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 hke 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 imder 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 foUage on timber and underbrush 
 almost everywhere shut the river out of view 
 from the lawn and kept the eye restless for a 
 
 14 
 
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 sportsmanUke 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, 
 
 15 
 
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 impoimded 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 
 
 16 
 
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. 
 
 17 
 
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 cvurve. It is a living line; it suggests 
 
 18 
 
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-hhes, 
 flags, and dainty water-weeds; and sometimes at 
 night, when the reflected glory of a ten-o'clock 
 
 19 
 
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 himseK 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 stufiF is a temptation to be wary of. The 
 
 20 
 
MY OWN ACRE 
 
 ordinary gray sort — I have touched no other 
 
 — is a hiunble 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 stabihty, and have 
 shunned embeUishment. EmbeUishment 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 
 
 21 
 
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 pubUc 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 ravine of the three fish pools. There is a drop of thirty feet between the upper and the 
 
 lowermost pool. 
 
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 Ohnsted: 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 fiUing with earth 
 (and furnace ashes), to carry the lawn in, prac- 
 tically level, beyond the old fence Hne and un- 
 der the chestnuts and pines sometimes six feet, 
 sometimes twelve, until the diflficult 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 line. Moreover the 
 grove was out on the lawn with an even more 
 natural haphazard bordering line; for another 
 
 £4 
 
"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. 
 
 At the point where the party is drinking tea (the site of the Indian mound) the overlap of 
 
 prove and llwn is eigfity-five feet across the old fence line that once sharply divided them. 
 
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- 
 
 25 
 
^^ 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 Alice 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 
 
 26 
 
i^";^^-^y>^^^ 
 
 " Souvenir trees had from time to time been planted on the lawn by visiting 
 
 friends." 
 
 The Beecher elm, first of the souvenir trees. 
 
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 hf 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 
 
 27 
 
THE AMATEUR GARDEN 
 
 chance along between March and December. 
 But let no souvenir tree, however planted, be 
 treated, after planting, as other than a living 
 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 xmaided. And 
 do not forbear to plant trees because they grow 
 so slowly. They need not. They do not. With 
 a little 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 Ufetime, the late Franklin 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 tha,t. 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 soUtary 
 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. 
 
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 earlier 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 like 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 
 
 29 
 
THE AMATEUR GARDEN 
 
 they are ours truly and do not even have to be 
 "'phoned." I should rather have in my library 
 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 vauntings 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 little, 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 
 
 31 
 
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 Hue. 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 Une. 
 
 "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 hues 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 
 utiUty may bristle on first colUsion but they soon 
 
 33 
 
THE AMATEUR GARDEN 
 
 make friends. Was it not Ruskin himself 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 lines, 
 however bent, as of straight ones, and that in 
 landscape-gardening parallels should be avoided 
 unless they are Unes of utiUty. "Don't" lay 
 parallel hues, either straight or curved, where 
 Nature would not and utiUty 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 — 
 
o 
 
 
 
 
 
 >> 
 
 a-H 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 n 
 
 .■5 
 
 M 
 
 U 
 
 S 
 
 Si 
 
 o 
 
 13 
 
 >> 
 
 s 
 
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 
 
 35 
 
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 BuUard 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" 
 
 36 
 
"The lane is open to view from end to end. 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. 
 Ihe ''"•«''2„f^^'^J'fp »^°„t background for blooming herbaceous perennials. 
 
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 itself. Those ap- 
 phcable to its master, mistress, or guests should 
 all be impossibilities, not requests. "Private 
 grounds, no crossing" — take that away, please, 
 wherever you can, and plant your margins so 
 
 37 
 
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 like 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 
 
 38 
 
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. 
 
 39 
 
THE AMERICAN GARDEN 
 
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 
 
 43 
 
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 
 
 45 
 
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 
 delights, but they are quahfied 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. Yetrightly 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 aflfair, 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 
 
 46 
 
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 
 
 47 
 
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 — tranquillity. 
 
 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 
 
 48 
 
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 imtil 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 limited 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. When 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 individuahty and self-assurance, our 
 sense of unguarded security, our affability and 
 unexclusiveness and our disHke 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 Unes 
 
 50 
 
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 
 
 51 
 
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 
 
 52 
 
"Beautiful results may be got on smallest grounds.'* 
 
 This is half of a back yard, the whole of which is egually handsome. The place to which it 
 belongs took a capital prize in the Carnegie Flower Garden CompeLition. 
 
 "Muffle your architectiu-al angles in foliage and bloom." 
 
 An invisible 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 was an 
 inconvenience to mechanics in painting or repairing. 
 
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 httle 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 suflScient and pleasant reason 
 — our coimsel 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- 
 
 63 
 
THE AMATEUR GARDEN 
 
 lieve which is not in some way finer than the 
 reality 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 ineflfectuality 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 
 
 54 
 
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 pubUc 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 like a public park, 
 and he was right. She had kept what it would 
 be well for the pubhc 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 lie. No garden should 
 
 55 
 
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 office it 
 never performed there, and will never again be 
 needed for anywhere — a cabinet reUc now — 
 
 56 
 
THE AMERICAN GARDEN 
 
 will a 'posed 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 quarters?" 
 
 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 quite incidentally while moving from one 
 main feature of the grounds to another. It is 
 now a pleasing, mild surprise instead of a tame 
 fulfilment of a showy 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- 
 dening. But maybe 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 quite as much 
 pains to say that though a garden may not lie 
 
 57 
 
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 ! I^fobody 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- 
 
 58 
 
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 
 imclothed 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 
 
 59 
 
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 pohte. 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 
 imphed a privacy to its owner superior to any 
 
 60 
 
THE AMERICAN GARDEN 
 
 he enjoyed outside of it. But now that we no 
 longer have any miUtary 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 — pubhshed 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 pubUc inconvenience that we have made 
 it a national misfortime and are losing our sense 
 of our public rights. This obliteration of private 
 boimdaries 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 
 
 61 
 
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 ! " What 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- 
 
 62 
 
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 
 
 63 
 
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 concealing 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 itself, 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 eflFective 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." 
 
 64 
 
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 ■; "5 
 
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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 
 fohage; the splendor or dehcacy of their flowers, 
 
 65 
 
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 bhssful 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 hght 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 
 
 67 
 
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 oflf 
 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 limits 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- 
 
 68 
 
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 
 
 69 
 
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 
 
 70 
 
THE AMERICAN GARDEN 
 
 took the exquisite waxen model of some piece of 
 goldsmithing she had commissioned him to exe- 
 cute for her. So delighted 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 Italian 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 sufficiently mask 
 the hard, offensive right-angles of the structure's 
 corners or of the hne whence it starts up from 
 
 71 
 
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 solid 
 structure they are set against. Sweetly, mod- 
 estly, yet obstinately, they confess to every 
 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 Jiave seen a house, whose mistress 
 was too exclusively fond of annuals, stand wait- 
 
 72 
 
After the first frost annual plantings cease to be attractive. 
 
 Shrubbery versus annuals. 
 
 The contrast in these two pictures is between two small street plantings standing in sight 
 of each other, one of annuals with a decorative effect and lasting three months, the other 
 with shrubberies and lasting nine months. 
 
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 
 
 73 
 
THE AMATEUR GARDEN 
 
 up into their rigid comers 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 line 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 
 
 74 
 
Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles. South Hall, Wil- 
 liston Seminary. (See "Where to Plant What.") 
 
 "... alineof 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.) 
 
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 
 
 75 
 
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 
 
 76 
 
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 !) which once 
 had to be burdensomely remembered. For one 
 preoccupied with other cares — as every ama- 
 teur gardener ought to be — these books are 
 
 77 
 
THE AMATEUR GARDEN 
 
 no mean part of his equipment; they are as 
 necessary to his best gardening as the dictionary 
 to his best EngUsh. 
 
 What a daily, hourly, unfailing wonder are the 
 modern opportunities and facilities by which we 
 are sin-rounded ! 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. 
 
 78 
 
WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 
 
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. 
 
 Whether 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 
 
 81 
 
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 JeflFersonian 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 What (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 
 
 82 
 
WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 
 
 to man's felicity 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 delight ? 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 subserviency does the range of your 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 established, 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 why the general and very sane incli- 
 
 83 
 
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 
 
 84 
 
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 'prefer 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 dishkes, 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 
 
 85 
 
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. 
 
 "Oh, 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 
 
 86 
 
la 
 
 St 
 
 <u2 
 
 j3-a 
 &■« 
 o. - 
 
 V a 
 
 .ss 
 
 3 S 
 
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 deUght and 
 social pleasure, came to the hvely 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- 
 
 87 
 
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 
 
 88 
 
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 hberty 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, 
 
 89 
 
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 
 
 90 
 
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 yourseK. Never- 
 theless, beware ! Watch yourself ! Do so spe- 
 cially when you think you have mastered 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: 
 
 91 
 
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 I.''" 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 fohage and by splendor of bloom 
 belong at its far end. Even in the one-house 
 garden I should hke 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. 
 
 93 
 
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 lines, 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 
 
 94 
 
"... climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by darkness and 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. 
 
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 generaUze. 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 
 
 95 
 
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 lift it, so to speak, by the tail. Then 
 it is "What to Plant Where," and for answer 
 we have made a short list of familiar 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. MolUs 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 sunlight. The Ghents are somewhat 
 
"Some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon and lure." 
 
 From a photograph taken on My Own Acre, showing how T 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 !a sight in the picture is a fill. 
 
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 barberry, 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. Thunhergii, or Thunberg's bar- 
 berry, is the well-known Japanese variety, a 
 dense, drooping bush from two to four 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 little 
 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 
 foliage is purple, which makes it very tempting 
 to new gardeners, but very hard to relate in good 
 
 97 
 
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 lists 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 
 
 98 
 
WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 
 
 enough, you ask, to aflford 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 oflf; 
 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 groimd 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 
 
rt i 
 
 q 15 
 
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 fohage 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 {Thunbergia, 
 sorhifolia,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 Hlac 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 {scahra 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 
 f oimd 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 alike 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 efiFect 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 efifect) begins, or ends, accord- 
 ing to the direction of your going, beginning 
 with that modest but pretty bloomer the Ligus- 
 trum ihota, 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 ivy" {Am- 
 pelopsis Veitchii). With the plantings thus de- 
 scribed, and with the gymnasium 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 begim 
 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 
 Where-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 
 
THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF 
 NORTHAMPTON 
 
 A DAM and Eve, it is generally conceded, 
 ■^ ^ were precocious. They entered into the 
 cares and joys of adult hfe at an earUer age than 
 any later human prodigy. 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 "i 
 
 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 spelling words of one letter 
 makes him a poet. One may raise or love 
 flowers for a lifetime, 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-spelUn' 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 civilization is still so lingeringly in its non- 
 gardening youth that only now and then, here 
 and there, does it realize 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 
 feeUng 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 ehns you may have heard of as making 
 it very garden-hke in its mere layout; many of 
 whose windows, piazzas, and hillside lawns look 
 off 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 
 
COTTAGE GARDENS 
 
 dents, that we, the Northampton townspeople, 
 established 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 dwelUng 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 public, 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 pubUc 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 pubhc 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 live 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 willingness or abiUty. 
 
 117 
 
THE AMATEUR GARDEN 
 
 This first round consists merely in enrolling 
 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 visits 
 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 visits. 
 
 Meanwhile a circular letter has been early 
 mailed to the previous 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 experienced teacher of his art, his in- 
 spections are expert. His errand is known by 
 
 118 
 
COTTAGE GARDENS 
 
 the time he is in sight, and, as a rule, the house- 
 holder joins him in a circuit of the place, show- 
 ing achievements, reciting difficulties and dis- 
 appointments, confessing errors, and taking tact- 
 ful advice. 
 
 And what room he finds for tact ! He sees a 
 grave-like bed of verbenas defacing the middle 
 of a small greensward — a dab of rouge on a 
 young cheek; a pert child doing all the talking. 
 "Whereupon he shrewdly pleads not for the 
 sward but for the flowers, "You have those there 
 to show oflf at their best.''" 
 
 "Yes. Don't they doit?" 
 
 "Not quite." He looks again. "Nine feet 
 long — five wide. If you'll plant them next 
 year in a foot-wide ribbon under that border of 
 stronger things along your side boundary they'll 
 give you at least forty feet of color instead of 
 nine, and they'll illuminate your bit of sward 
 instead of ecHpsing it." 
 
 In another garden he says, "Splendid sun- 
 burst of color, that big tub of geraniums !" and 
 the householder is pleased to admit the fact. 
 "If you'd sink the tub into the ground clear down 
 
 119 
 
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, like a lighthouse across a 
 harbor, or like 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 oflScial 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 everything; 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 line 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 
 
 121 
 
THE AMATEUR GARDEN 
 
 one single picture of a home, 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. 
 
COTTAGE GARDENS 
 
 That is all. When 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 niunbered but sixty. It is the 
 visiting that makes the difference; last season 
 these visits, 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 
 life — to consolidate it, as the stock-manipulators 
 say — in the world's one great life, our "celes- 
 tial selfishness" being intuitively assured that 
 
 123 
 
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, live 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 yoimg 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 you love the land only and 
 not the people, the nation, the government? 
 Or, loving these, have you no love for the near- 
 est pubHc fraction of it, your own town and 
 neighbors ? Why, then, your love of the Stars 
 and Stripes is the flattest, silUest idolatry; so 
 flat and silly it is hardly worth chiding. Your 
 patriotism is a patriotism for war 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 sidewalk, 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 dehghts, 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 
 
THE PRIVATE GARDEN'S 
 PUBLIC VALUE 
 
 T^ZHAT 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 dvitas 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 eflFort 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 reaUze, 
 even for itself and in itself, the finest civiliza- 
 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 hght 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 Pun- 
 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 imriotous 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 
 sufiFer 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 having 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 shrubbery plantings about the house's foundation and on the outer 
 boundaries 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-winner's 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 " shding 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 jBrst 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 barberry and with only 
 one or two shm trees of delicate foliage near 
 its street line, rises slightly from the sidewalk 
 to the house in a smooth half wave that never 
 sinks below any level it has attained and yet 
 
 139 
 
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 hnes 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 
 
 141 
 
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 Uke 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 dwelhng. 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 hes but a narrow strip of turf 
 beyond which the groimd 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 trellises 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 life 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 imlovely because cramped and shut in. 
 It was on the other side of the town from 
 those I have been telUng 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 oflF 
 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 
 
I^^^H^^^^^^^^^ 
 
 
 
 tftt 
 
 
 V. 
 
 fee... 
 
 :■■ - 
 
 
 --■ ' 
 
 "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 
 hedfe a highly kept and handsome flower and shrubbery garden fills the whole house lot. 
 She is a capital prize-winner. 
 
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 limits 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 grass, 
 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 dahUas; 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 civiUzation 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 
 list 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 hmit 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 pikestaff 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, 
 beheving 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 aUied 
 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 delight 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 civilization," 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 inequahties 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 pohcy. 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 ealch 
 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 beheve our Northampton garden com- 
 petition tends to do this. It brings together 
 in neighborly fellowship those whom the dis- 
 crepancies of social accomplishments 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 dry, she 
 said in a melodious French accent, and she 
 had not felt so very 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, filling 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 
 
THE PRIVATE GARDEN 
 
 "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 
 
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 lively. 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 tyrants 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 enemy 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 
 abolished. 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 
 itseH 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-aU-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 
 aboUtion 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 — 
 dandehon, 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 blindness and lets them 
 flatten to the ground and scatter their seed 
 like an infantry firing-hne. Inquire of him 
 concerning any one of the few orphan shrubs 
 he has permitted you to set where he least 
 disUkes 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 mxmthly 
 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 Httle 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 
 might 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 hmitations, 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 diflPerence may 
 consist only in faults both there and here which 
 we all hope to see democracy itself one day 
 eliminate; but the diflFerence is palpable. The 
 fences mean that the dwellers behind them 
 have never accorded to each other, as neighbors, 
 that liberty-to-take-Uberties 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 embelUshment in- 
 
 174 
 
**Iii 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 division fence with front half of wire, rear 
 half of boards, both planted out with shrubs. The overhanging forest tree is the ever- 
 green magnolia (M. grandi flora). 
 
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 — Ues 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 dehghtful 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 oflFence 
 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 
 
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 dweUing's ground con- 
 tour with business precision — being a business 
 path. In fact it is only the same path we see 
 in uncrowded town Ufe everywhere in our 
 land. 
 
 But down there it shows this pecuharity, 
 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 Kne of the house, for 
 these are business lines and therefore ever so 
 properly lines of promptitude — of the shortest 
 practicable distance between two points — Hues 
 
 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 hne), 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." 
 
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 hospitahty, 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 Httle 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 like 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 Une 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 — Uke, probably, its very next 
 
 180 
 
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 fohage 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 unomamental, 
 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- 
 Hne, being of tenest 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 writer 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 althsea 
 but the H. rosasinensis of our Northern green- 
 houses), slim and tall, flaring its mallow- 
 flowers pink, orange, salmon and deep red; 
 the traiKng-lantana, covering broad trelUses of 
 ten feet in height and with its drooping masses 
 of deUcate foliage turned from green to mingled 
 hues of lilac and rose by a complete mantle of 
 
 182 
 

 O «! 
 
 c 
 3 
 
 5§ 
 >=2 
 
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, fuU of its waxen, cream- 
 tinted, inch-long flowers smeUing dehcately 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 
 camelha was there, as broad and tall as a hlac- 
 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- 
 vitse, 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 hve-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." 
 
 "... from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of Easter." 
 
 In any garden as fair as this there should he some place to sit down. This deficiency is 
 one of the commonest faults in American gardemng. 
 
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 Ufe 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 beauty of the garden's unlost configuration . . . keeping a 
 winter's share of its feminine grace and softness." 
 
 This picture was taken in the first flush of spring. The trees in blossom are the wild 
 Japanese cherry. 
 
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 hngering 
 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 
 "Why 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 embellishment 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 lines, 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 like 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 
 
 189 
 
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 
 Umited 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, steephng 
 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 — hke 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 
 affluence. 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 AUce'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 
 
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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 January, 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 
 magnolias (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, glit- 
 tering fohage stood out against the almost per- 
 petually blue and white sky. Beyond them, a 
 few yards within the place but not in a straight 
 Hne, rose even higher a number of old cedars 
 similarly treated and oflFering 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 line, 
 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 
 magnolia. 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 
 fuscata, 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, Uke 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, of tener 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 
 
 197 
 
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