Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Janet Blenkinship
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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[Illustration: "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
_Copyright, 1914, by_
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
_Published 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
ILLUSTRATIONS
"That gardening is best ... which best ministers to man's
felicity with least disturbance of nature's freedom" _Frontis_
"... that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill
River loiters through Paradise" 6
"On this green of the dryads ... lies My Own Acre" 8
"The beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full
back to the rapids just above My Own Acre" 12
"A fountain ... where one,--or two,--can sit and hear it whisper" 22
"The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of
the lawn in under the grove was one of the early tasks of My
Own Acre" 24
"Souvenir trees had from time to time been planted on the lawn
by visiting friends" 26
"How the words were said which some of the planters spoke" 28
"'Where are you going?' says the eye. 'Come and see,' says the
roaming line" 34
"The lane is open to view from end to end. It has two deep bays
on the side nearest the lawn" 36
"... until the house itself seems as naturally ... to grow up
out of the garden as the high keynote rises at the end
of a lady's song" 48
"Beautiful results may be got on smallest grounds" 52
"Muffle your architectural angles in foliage and bloom" 52
Fences masked by shrubbery 64
After the first frost annual plantings cease to be attractive 72
Shrubbery versus annuals 72
Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles. South
Hall, Williston Seminary 74
"... a line of shrubbery swinging in and out in strong, graceful
undulations" 74
"However enraptured of wild nature you may be, you do and must
require of her some subserviency about your own dwelling" 84
"Plant it where it will best enjoy itself" 86
"... climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by darkness and
breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom belong at its far
end" 94
"Some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon and lure" 96
"... tall, rectangular, three-story piles ... full of windows
all of one size, pigeon-house style" 100
"You can make gardening a concerted public movement" 112
"Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the foundation-lines
of all its buildings" 122
"Not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but to procure
its widest and most general dissemination" 122
"Having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having spiritual
wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus" 138
"One such competing garden was so beautiful last year that
strangers driving by stopped and asked leave to dismount
and enjoy a nearer view" 138
"Beauty can be called into life about the most unpretentious
domicile" 148
"Those who pay no one to die, plant or prune for them" 148
"In New Orleans the home is bounded by its fences, not by its
doors--so they clothe them with shrubberies and vines" 174
"The lawn ... lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one
shrub-and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across" 174
"There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the sward.... In a
half-day's work, the fair scene might be enhanced in lovely
dignity 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 without a hint of the stage's unreality" 182
"Back of the building-line the fences ... generally more
than head-high ... are _sure_ to be draped" 184
"... from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of
Easter" 184
"The sleeping beauty of the garden's unlost configuration ... keeping
a winter'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
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 storyteller can otherwise only dream of. For such a
garden is itself a story, one which actually and naturally occurs, yet
occurs under its master's guidance and control and with artistic effect.
Yet it was this same story-telling bent which long held me back while
from time to time I generalized 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 compared and revised." Each
year my own acre has confessed itself so full of mistranslations 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 excellent reasons why a history of their writer's own
acre should lead them. Let me, then, begin by explaining that the small
city of Northampton, 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 overlooks 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 Connecticut,
winds through a strip of woods so fair as to have been named--from a
much earlier day than when Jenny Lind called it so--"Paradise." On its
town side this wooded ground a few hundred yards wide drops suddenly a
hundred 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 humble authority as "mostly h-oak,
h-ellum, and h-ash, with a little 'ickory."
Imperfectly listed, for there one may find also the birch and the beech,
the linden, sycamore, chestnut, poplar, hemlock-spruce, butternut, and
maple overhanging such pleasant undergrowths as the hornbeam and
hop-hornbeam, willows, black-cherry and choke-cherry, dogwood and other
cornels, several viburnums, bush maples of two or three kinds, alder,
elder, sumach, hazel, witch-hazel, the shadblow and other perennial,
fair-blooming, sweet-smelling favorites, beneath which lies a leaf-mould
rife with ferns and wild flowers.
From its business quarter the town's chief 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 another, still
shorter, lying square across its foot within some seventy yards of that
suddenly falling 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 present 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.
[Illustration: " ... 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.]
On this green of the dryads, where it intercepts the "avenue" that slips
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 flattering terms of land measure. Those
seven acres of Paradise I acquired as "waste land." Nevertheless, 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 tanagers, blackbirds, bluebirds, oven-birds, cedar-birds,
veeries, vireos, song-sparrows, flycatchers, kinglets, the flicker, the
cuckoo, the nuthatch, the chickadee and the rose-breasted grosbeak, not
to mention jays or kingfishers, swallows, the little green heron or that
cock of the walk, the red squirrel.
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 sagacity 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 famous street
commissioner of New York, Colonel George E. Waring, who lost his life in
the sanitary regeneration of Havana.
[Illustration: "On this green of the dryads ... lies My Own Acre."
The two young oaks in the picture are part of the row which gives the
street its name.]
"Contour paths" was the word he gave me; paths starting from the top of
the steep broken ground and bending in and out across and around its
ridges and ravines at a uniform decline 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
natural conditions, these paths were given a winding course every step
of which was pleasing because justified by the necessities of the case,
traversing the main inequalities of the ground with the ease of level
land yet without diminishing its superior variety and charm. And so with
contour paths I began to find, right at my back door and on my own acre,
in nerve-tired hours, an outdoor relaxation which I could begin, leave
off and resume at any moment and which has never staled on me. For this
was the genesis of all I have learned or done in gardening, such as it
is.
My appliances for laying out the grades were simple enough: a
spirit-level, a stiff ten-foot rod with an eighteen-inch leg nailed
firmly on one end of it, a twelve-inch leg on the other, a hatchet, and
a basket of short stakes with which to mark the points, ten feet apart,
where the longer leg, in front on all down grades, rested when the
spirit-level, strapped on the rod, showed the rod to be exactly
horizontal. Trivial inequalities of surface were arbitrarily cut down or
built up and covered with leaves and pine-straw to disguise the fact,
and whenever a tree or anything worth preserving stood in the way here
came the loaded barrow and the barrowist, like 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 happened 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 contour paths. By a fire of my own acre's "dead and
down" I write these lines. I never buy cordwood.
Only half the grove has required these paths, the other half being down
on the flat margin of the river, traversed by a cart-road at least half
a century old, though used by wheels hardly twice a year; but in the
three acres where lie the contour paths there is now three-fifths of a
mile of them, not a rod of which is superfluous. And then I have two
examples of another kind of path: paths with steps; paths which for good
and lawful reasons cannot allow you time to go around on the "five per
cent" grade but must cut across, taking a single ravine lengthwise, to
visit its three fish-pools.
These steps, and two short retaining walls elsewhere in the grove, are
made of the field stones of the region, uncut. All are laid "dry" like
the ordinary stone fences of New England farms, and the walls are built
with a smart inward batter so that the winter frosts may heave them year
after year, heave and leave but not tumble them down. I got that idea
from a book. Everything worth while on my acre is from books except
what two or three professional 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 upstream 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.
[Illustration: "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 unsafety is being taken down at the present writing.]
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 amateur 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 landscape's natural water
supply by catching on street pavements and scores and hundreds of roofs,
lawns and walks, and carrying away in sewers, the rain and melting snows
which for ages filtered slowly through the soil. Small wonder, I think,
that, when in the square quarter-mile between my acre and Elm Street
fifty-three dwellings and three short streets took the place of an old
farm, my grove, by sheer water famine, lost several of its giant pines.
Wonder to me is that the harm seems at length to have ceased.
But about that ravine: one day the nature of its growth and soil,
especially its alders, elders, and willows and a show of clay and
gravel, forced on my notice the likelihood that here, too, had once been
a spring, if no more. I scratched at its head with a stick and out came
an imprisoned rill like a recollected word from the scratched head of a
schoolboy. Happily the spot was just at the bottom of the impassably
steep fall of ground next the edge of the lawn and was almost in the
centre of those four acres--one of sward, three of woods--which I
proposed to hold under more or less discipline, leaving the rest--a
wooded strip running up the river shore--wholly wild, as college girls,
for example, would count wildness. In both parts the wealth of foliage
on timber and underbrush almost everywhere shut the river out of view
from the lawn and kept the eye restless for a glint, if no more, of
water. And so there I thought at once to give myself what I had all my
life most absurdly wished for, a fish-pool. I had never been able to
look upon an aquarium and keep the tenth Commandment. I had never caught
a fish without wanting to take it home and legally adopt it into the
family--a tendency which once led my son to say, "Yes, he would be
pleased to go fishing with me if I would only fish in a sportsmanlike
manner." What a beautifully 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 remembered
certain restraining precepts: first, that law of art which condemns
incongruity--requires everything to be in keeping with its natural
surroundings--and which therefore, for one thing, makes an American
garden the best possible sort of garden to have in America; second,
that twin art law, against inutility, which demands that everything in
an artistic scheme serve the use it pretends to serve; third, a precept
of Colonel Waring's: "Don't fool with running water if you haven't money
to fool away"; and, fourth, that best of all gardening rules--look
before you leap.
However, on second thought, and tenth, and twentieth, one thought a day
for twenty days, I found that if water was to be impounded anywhere 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 mention. 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 ravine where at one or two
places in its upper half a contour grade would have been pettily
circuitous and uninteresting, and to cross it comfortably, 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 surface,
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 Hebrew 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. 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 ascent beginning
gradually, increasing rapidly, and concluding gently. We see it in the
face of any smooth knoll or billow. I believe the artists impute to
Praxiteles a certain ownership in this double curve. It is a living
line; it suggests 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 inaffable, 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
overflow of my first pool on a second and a third lingering place,
augmenting the water supply by new springs developed in the bottoms of
the new pools. The second pool has a surface of a thousand square feet,
the third spans nineteen hundred, and there are fish in all three,
hatched there--"pumpkin-seed" included, but also trout--among
spontaneous bulrushes, pond-lilies, flags, and dainty water-weeds; and
sometimes at night, when the reflected glory of a ten-o'clock full moon
shines up from it to the stone exedra on the lawn, I seem to have taken
my Praxitelean curves so directly from Nature that she thinks she took
them herself from me and thanks me for the suggestion.
Please observe that of great gardens, or of costly gardens whether great
or only costly, we here say nothing. Our theme is such a garden as a
householder may himself make and keep or for which, at most, he needs
professional advice only in its first planning, and for its upkeep one
gardener, with one occasional helper in pressing seasons or in
constructional work.
Constructional work. Dams, for example. In two of my dams I built cores
of concrete and thus made acquaintance with that interesting material.
Later I pressed the acquaintanceship, made garden and grove seats, a
table or two, a very modest fountain for a single jet of water in my
highest, smallest fish-pool, and even a flight of steps with a pair of
gaine-shaped pedestals--suggested by a sculptor friend--at their top.
The exedra I mentioned just now is of concrete. The stuff is a
temptation to be wary of. The ordinary gray sort--I have touched no
other--is a humble medium, and pretentious designs in humble materials
are one of the worst, and oldest, of garden incongruities. In my
ventures with concrete I have studied for grace in form but grace
subordinated to stability, and have shunned embellishment. Embellishment
for its own sake is the easiest and commonest sin against good art
wherever art becomes self-conscious. It is having a riotous time just
now in concrete. I have rarely seen a commercial concrete garden-seat
which was not more ornate than I should want it for my own acre. I
happen 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" gardening, being inexpensive, rustic, and imperishable. 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 cedar and hickory stairs and benches.
"Have none of them," was Colonel Waring's injunction; "they are forever
out of repair."
But I fear another reason is that so often our gardens are neither for
private ease nor social joy, but for public display and are planned
mainly for street exhibition. That is the way we commonly treat garden
fountains! We make a smug show of unfenced, unhedged, universal
hospitality across a sidewalk boundary which nevertheless we hold
inviolate--sometimes 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 moonlight cover it
with silent kisses? In my limited experience I have known of but two.
One is by the once favorite thought-promoting summer 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 of the things which
interlock and unify a certain garden and grove.
[Illustration: "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.]
The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of the lawn in
under the grove was one of the early tasks of my own acre. When the
house was built its lot and others backed up to a hard, straight rear
line where the old field had halted at its fence and where the woods
began on ground that fell to the river at an angle of from forty to
fifty degrees. Here my gifted friend and adviser gave me a precept got
from his earlier gifted friend and adviser, Frederick Law Olmsted: that
passing from any part of a pleasure-ground to any part next it should be
entirely safe and easy or else impossible. By the application of this
maxim I brought my lawn and grove together in one of the happiest of
marriages. For I proceeded, by filling with earth (and furnace ashes),
to carry the lawn in, practically level, beyond the old fence line and
under the chestnuts and pines sometimes six feet, sometimes twelve,
until the difficult and unsafe forty or fifty degrees of abrupt fall
were changed to an impassable sixty and seventy degrees, and 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.
Sometimes a few yards of retaining-wall, never cemented, always laid up
dry and with a strong inward batter, had to be put in to avoid
smothering the roots of some great tree; for, as everybody 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 pursued 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 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 irregularity which
has already obliterated, without molesting, the tree line of the ancient
fence.
[Illustration: "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 grove and lawn is eighty-five feet across the old
fence line that once sharply divided them.]
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 linden, and Hamilton Wright
Mabie's horse-chestnut are all about thirty-five feet high and cast a
goodly shade. Sir James M. Barrie's elm--his and Sir William Robertson
Nicoll's, who planted it with him later than the plantings
aforementioned--has, by some virtue in the soil or in its own energies,
reached a height of nearly sixty-five feet and a diameter of sixteen
inches. Other souvenirs are a horse-chestnut planted by Minnie Maddern
Fiske, a ginkgo by Alice Freeman 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 Colorado 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 undetected mouse at
its roots. Except Sir Moses, all the knights here named received the
accolade after their tree plantings, but I draw no moral.
[Illustration: "Souvenir trees had from time to time been planted on the
lawn by visiting friends."
The Beecher elm, first of the souvenir trees.]
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 live as long as this tree, but may your children's children 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 proposing
to play Rip Van Winkle, which Joseph Jefferson had finally decided to
produce no more: "Here's to your healt', undt der healt' of all your
family; may you lif long undt brosper."
We--the first person singular grows tiresome--we might have now, on our
acre, a tree planted by Joseph Jefferson had we thought in time to be
provided with a sapling, growing, in a tub. Have your prospective
souvenir tree already 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 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
unaided. 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. Besides Sir
Arthur's maple the only souvenir tree we have lost was a tulip-tree
planted by my friend of half a lifetime, the late 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
that. I write because of the countless acres as good as mine, in this
great, dear America, which might now be giving their owners all the
healthful pastime, private solace, or solitary 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.
[Illustration: "How the words were said which some of the planters
spoke."
President Seelye of Smith College planting a tree.--A majority of the
company present were Smith College students and others engaged in the
work of the People's Institute. The tree on the left is Barrie's elm.
The tree directly behind the small sapling which is being planted, and
on a line with it, is Max O'Rell's. The hemlock-spruce between them is
Felix Adler's.]
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 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 Horticulture," 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 advice 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
knowledge was Mr. E. J. Canning, late of Smith College Botanic Gardens;
a spring still far from dry.
As the books enjoin, I began my book-gardening 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
professionally from a landscape-architect, Miss Frances Bullard, of
Bridgeport, Connecticut, who had just finished plotting the grounds of
my neighbor, the college.
I tell of my own garden for another reason: that it shows, I think, how
much can be done with how little, if for the doing you take time
instead of money. All things come to the garden 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 argument 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, "Joyous 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
note a few exceptions to these ground rules, which may give the rules a
more convincing force. First of all, "don't" let any of your planting
cut or split your place in two. How many a small house-lot lawn we see
split down the middle by a row of ornamental shrubs or fruit-trees which
might as easily have been set within a few feet of the property line,
whose rigidity, moreover, would have best excused the rigidity of the
planted line. But such glaring instances aside, there are many subtler
ones quite as unfortunate; "don't" be too sure you are not unwittingly
furnishing one.
"Don't" destroy the openness of your sward by dotting it with shrubs or
pattern flower-beds. To this rule I doubt if a plausible exception could
be contrived. It is so sweeping and so primary that we might well
withhold it here were we not seeking to state its artistic reason why.
Which is, that such plantings are mere eruptions of individual
smartness, without dignity and with no part in any general unity;
chirping up like pert children in a company presumably trying to be
rational.
On the other hand, I hope my acre, despite all its unconscious or
unconfessed mistakes, shows pleasantly that the best openness of a lawn
is not to be got between unclothed, right-angled and parallel bounds.
The more its verdure-clad borders swing in and out the longer they look,
not merely because they are longer but also because they interest and
lure the eye. "Where are you going?" says the eye.
"Come and see," says the roaming line.
"Don't" plant in stiff lines except in close relation to architectural
or legal bounds. A straight horizontal line Nature scarcely knows save
in her rocks and on a vaster scale than we here have to do with. Yet
straight lines in gardening are often good and fine if only they are
lines of real need. Where, when and in what degree it is good to
subordinate utility to beauty or beauty to utility depends on time,
place and circumstance, but when in doubt "don't" pinch either to pet
the other. Oppression is never good art. Yet "don't" cry war, war, where
there is no war. A true beauty and a needed utility may bristle on first
collision but they soon 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 lines
of utility. "Don't" lay parallel lines, either straight or curved, where
Nature would not and utility need not. Yet my own acre has taught me a
modification of this rule so marked as to be almost an exception. On
each side of me next my nearest neighbor I have a turfed alley between a
continuous bed of flowering shrubs and plants next the division line,
and a similar bed whose meanderings border my lawn. At first I gave
these two alleys a sinuous course in correspondence with the windings of
the bed bordering the lawn--for they were purely ways of pleasure
among the flowers, and a loitering course seemed only reasonable. But
sinuous lines proved as disappointing 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!
[Illustration: "'Where are you going?' says the eye. 'Come and see,'
says the roaming line."
This planting conceals one of the alleys described on page 34. In the
alley a concrete bench built into a concrete wall looks across the
entire breadth of the garden and into the sunset.]
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 parallels, while the bed on
the lawn side remained between waving parallels. This gave the best
simplicity with the least artificiality. And thus 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 actually reaches
them in traversing the lane. In such a bay one should always have, I
think, some floral revelation of special charm worthy of the seclusion
and the surprise. But this thought is only one of a hundred that tell me
my garden is not a finished thing. To its true lover a garden never is.
Another sort of bay, the sort resulting from a swift retreat of a line
of shrubberies pursued by the lawn and then swinging round and returning
upon the lawn in a counter pursuit, I thought I had learned from books
and Miss Bullard and had established on my own acre, until I saw the
college gardens of Oxford, England, and the landscape work in Hyde Park,
London. On my return thence I made haste to give my own garden'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" ever plan a layout for whose free swing your
limits are cramped.
[Illustration: "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, and makes a perfect background for blooming
herbaceous perennials.]
"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 necessities 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 applicable 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 that there can be no crossing. Wire
nettings hidden by shrubberies from all but the shameless 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 exotics that was a
real garden in any good art sense; in any way, that is, lastingly
pleasing to a noble spirit. Let your garden, and let mine, be the garden
of joy. For the only way it can be that, on and on, year in, year out,
is to be so good in art and so finely human in its purposes that to have
it and daily keep it will make us more worth while to ourselves and to
mankind than to go without it.
THE AMERICAN GARDEN
Almost any good American will admit it to be a part of our national
social scheme, I think,--if we have a social scheme,--that everybody
shall aspire to all the refinements of life.
Particularly is it our theory that every one shall propose to give to
his home all the joys and graces which are anywhere associated with the
name of home. Yet until of late we have neglected 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
ownership we have a vast multitude of exactly rectilinear lawns,
extremely bare or else very badly planted; and we have hundreds of
thousands of beautiful dames and girls who "love flowers." But our home
gardens, our home gardeners, 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 architecture, stares at him
and after him with a vacant, 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.