years an annual prize competition of amateur flower-gardens. In 1913
there were over a thousand homes, 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 possibly have a tendency to help on
flower-gardening in the country at large and even to aid us in
determining 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
results particular aspects and not others.
I lately heard a lady ask an amateur gardener, "What is the garden's
foundation principle?"
There was a certain overgrown pomp in the question's form, but that is
how she very modestly 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 qualified by countless
inconveniences. The cave, tent, cabin, cottage and castle have gradually
been evolved by an orderly accumulation and combination of defences and
conveniences which secure to us a host of advantages over wild nature
and wild man. Yet rightly we are loath to lose any more of nature than
we must in order to be her masters 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 pleasant Northampton affair, we
have accepted it as our first rule of private gardening that _the house
is the climacteric note_.
This is why the garden should never be more architectural and artificial
than the house of which it is the setting, and this is why the garden
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 refinement, 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" gardening!
The right choice between these two aspects 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 garden'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 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 essential--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 as that very unsatisfying
thing, a "gardener's garden."
[Illustration: " ... 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."
On the right of this picture you may see the piers of one of the front
gates of My Own Acre standing under Henry Ward Beecher's elm. The urn
forms surmounting them are of concrete, and the urns are cast from
earlier forms in wood, which were a gift from Henry van Dyke. On the
left the tops of the arbor vitae and a magnolia are bending in the wind.]
Our ordinary American life is also too near nature for the formal garden
to come in between. Unless our formal gardening is of some inexpensive
sort our modest dwelling-houses give us an anticlimax, and there is no
inexpensive sort of formal gardening. Except in the far south our
American climate expatriates it.
A very good practical rule would be for none of us to venture upon such
gardening until he is well able to keep up an adequate greenhouse. A
formal garden without a greenhouse or two--or three--is a glorious army
on a war footing, but without a base of supplies. It is largely his
greenhouses which make the public gardener and the commercial florist so
misleading an example 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 practised 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 social
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 express the traits of our
American domestic life; our strong individuality and self-assurance, our
sense of unguarded security, our affability and unexclusiveness and our
dislike to high-walled privacy. If we would hasten its day we must make
way for it along the lines of these traits.
On the other hand, if in following these lines we can contrive to
adhere faithfully to the worldwide 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 householder's own
spirit and not merely of some hired gardener's. If one can employ a
landscape-architect, 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 Northampton cannot
undertake to counsel and direct our 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 educative 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.
[Illustration: "Beautiful results may be got on smallest grounds."
This is half of a back yard, the whole of which is equally handsome. The
place to which it belongs took a capital prize in the Carnegie Flower
Garden Competition.]
[Illustration: "Muffle your architectural 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 competing gardens being kept wholly without hired labor, of course
our constant advice to all contestants is to shun formal gardening. 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
cemeteries. By these flaring displays thousands of modest cottagers who
might easily provide, on their small scale, lovely gardens about their
dwellings at virtually no cost and with no burdensome care, get a notion
that this, and this only, is artistic gardening and hence that a home
garden for oneself would be too expensive and troublesome to be thought
of. On the other hand, a few are tempted to mimic them on a petty scale,
and so spoil their little grass-plots and amuse, without entertaining,
their not more tasteful but only less aspiring neighbors. In
Northampton, in our Carnegie prize contest--so called for a very
sufficient and pleasant reason--our counsel is to avoid all mimicry in
gardening 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-believe 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 ineffectuality of a toy is out of place in any sort of
gardening." We do not actually speak all this, but we imply it, and we
often find that the mere utterance of the one word, "toy gardening," has
a magical effect to suggest all the rest and to overwhelm with
contrition the bad taste and frivolity of many a misguided attempt at
adornment. At that word of exorcism joints of cerulean sewer-pipe
crested with scarlet geraniums, 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 oblivion.
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 a larger scale.
For of course the very thing which makes the small garden different from
the large, the rich man's from the poor man's, the Scotch or Italian
peasant's from the American mechanic's, or the public garden from the
private, is the universal and immutable oneness of the great canons of
art. One of our competitors, having honestly purged her soul of every
impulse she may ever have had to mimic the gardening of the cemeteries,
planted her dooryard 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 public gardeners to
keep much better than some of them do--the Moral Law of Gardening.
* * * * *
There is a moral law of gardening. No garden should ever tell a lie. No
garden should 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 herself 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 relic now--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 appointed 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 gardening. 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 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 determine 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 concealments, 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 exclaimed to an aspirant for the prizes, the underpinning of
whose dwelling stood out unconcealed by any sprig of floral growth,
"your house is barefooted! Nobody wants to see your house's
underpinning, any more than he wants to see your own!"
It is not good to be so brusque about non-penitentiary offences, but
skilful and lovely concealments in gardening were his hobby. To another
he whispered, "My dear sir, tell your pretty house her petticoat shows!"
and to yet another, "Take all those shrubs out of the middle of your
lawn and 'plant out' with them every feature of your house which would
be of no interest 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 gardening
sense your house makes too much noise; you can hear its right angles hit
the ground. Muffle them! Muffle your architectural angles in foliage and
bloom. Up in the air they may be ever so correct and fine, but down in
the garden and unclothed they are heinous, heinous!"
Another precept we try to inculcate in our rounds among the gardens,
another commandment 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, like the amateur photographer, sometimes ranks higher
than the professional--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 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 manners!
As to manners, our incipient American garden has already developed one
trait which distinguishes it from those beyond the Atlantic. It is a
habit which reminds one of what somebody has lately said about Americans
themselves: that, whoever they are and whatever their manners may be,
they have this to their credit, that they unfailingly desire and propose
to be polite. The thing we are hinting at is our American gardens'
excessive openness. Our people have, or until just now had, almost
abolished the fence and the hedge. A gard, yard, garth, garden, used to
mean an enclosure, a close, and implied a privacy to its owner superior
to any he enjoyed outside of it. But now that we no longer have any
military need of privacy we are tempted--are we not?--to overlook its
spiritual value. We seem to enjoy publicity better. In our American
eagerness to publish everything for everybody and to everybody, we have
published our gardens--published them in paper bindings; that is to say,
with their boundaries visible only on maps filed with the Registrar of
Deeds.
Foreigners who travel among us complain that we so overdo our
good-natured endurance of every public inconvenience that we have made
it a national misfortune and are losing our sense of our public rights.
This obliteration of private boundaries is an instance. Our public
spirit and out imperturbability are flattered by it, but our gardens,
except among the rich, have become American by ceasing to be gardens.
I have a neighbor who every year plants a garden of annuals. He has no
fence, but two of his neighbors have each a setter dog. These dogs are
rarely confined. One morning I saw him put in the seed of his lovely
annuals and leave his smoothly raked beds already a pleasant show and a
prophecy of delight while yet without 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 expected 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 beginning had
there prevailed generally, democratically, 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 privacy 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 withstand 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 community, 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 useless. 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 success. 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 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, sometimes 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, visibly 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 netting charms away these embarrassments. Your hedge
can be as loose as you care to have it, while your enclosure may be
rigidly effective yet be hidden from the eye by undulating fence-rows;
and as we now have definite bounds and corners to plant out, we do not
so often as formerly need to be reminded of Frederick Law Olmsted's
favorite maxim, "Take care of the corners, and the centres will take
care of themselves."
[Illustration: Fences masked by shrubbery.
One straight line of Williston Seminary campus, the effect of whose iron
fence before it was planted out with barberry may be seen in the two
panels of it still bare on the extreme right.]
Here there is a word to be added in the interest 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 matter how large or small the garden. The
relative stature of things, both actual and prospective; their breadth;
the breadth or slenderness, darkness or lightness, openness or density,
of their foliage; the splendor or delicacy of their flowers, 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 determining
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 effects is that they have no
particular effects to be marred, but lie side by side as undiscordantly
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.