than to inculcate the garden rules of perspective to which we have just
referred and to see the blissful complacency of those who successfully
carry them out. I have now in my mind's eye a garden to which was
awarded the capital prize of 1903. A cottage of maybe six small rooms
crowns a high 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 gardens, and all four sides are entirely without fencing.
From the front sward have been taken away a number of good shrubs which
once broke it into ineffectual bits, and these have been grouped against
the inward and outward angles of the house. The front porch is
garlanded--not smothered--with vines whose flowers are all white, pink,
blue or light purple. About the base of the porch and of all the house's
front, bloom flowers of these same delicate tints, the tallest nearest
the house, the lesser at their knees and feet. The edges of the
beds--gentle waves that never degenerate to straightness--are thickly
bordered with mignonette. Not an audacious thing, not a red blossom nor
a strong yellow one, nor one broad leaf, nor any mass of dense or dark
foliage, comes into view until one reaches a side of the dwelling. But
there at once he finds the second phase in a crescendo of floral
colors. The base of the house, and especially those empty eye-sockets,
the cellar windows, are veiled in exultant bloom, yellows predominating.
Then at the back of the place comes the full chorus, and red flowers
overmaster the yellow, though the delicate tints with which the scheme
began are still present to preserve the dignity and suavity of all--the
ladies of the feast. The paths are only one or two and they never turn
abruptly and ask you to keep off their corners; they have none. Neither
have the flower-beds. They flow wideningly around the hard turnings of
the house with the grace of a rivulet. Out on the two wider sides of the
lawn nothing breaks the smooth green but a well-situated tree or two
until the limits of the premises are reached, and there, in lines that
widen and narrow and widen again and hide the surveyor'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 garden 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,
stable, stable-yard, hen-yard, tennis or croquet-court--everything is
either a part of the garden 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 so
soon--cometh up as a flower and presently has withered.
One of our most gifted literary 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 be helped_. Therein lay the charm of that
poetic wonder and marvel of its day (1893) the Columbian Exposition's
"White City"; it was an architectural triumph and glory which we could
not have except 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 evanescence 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 took the
exquisite waxen model of some piece of goldsmithing she had commissioned
him to execute 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 reproduced 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 Carnegie 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 annual
flowers. Annuals do not sufficiently mask the hard, offensive
right-angles of the structure's corners or of the line whence it starts
up from 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 substantial look to be
good company for the solid structure they are set against. Sweetly,
modestly, 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 have seen a house,
whose mistress was too exclusively fond of annuals, stand waiting 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 annuals 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
emphatically they should never, alone, be set to mark the boundary lines
of a property."
[Illustration: After the first frost annual plantings cease to be
attractive.]
[Illustration: 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.]
It is hoped these sayings, quoted or otherwise, may seem the more in
place here because they contemplate the aspects likely to characterize
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 largeness 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 up into their rigid corners
and to their dividing lines, are naked in revolt against the earlier
fashion of spotting them over with shrubs, the easiest 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, graceful 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.
[Illustration: Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles.
South Hall, Williston Seminary. (See "Where to Plant What.")]
[Illustration: " ... a line of shrubbery swinging in and out in strong,
graceful undulations."
The straight planting on this picture's left masks the back yards of
three neighbors, and gives them a privacy as well as My Own Acre. The
curved planting shows but one of three bends. It was here that I first
made the mistake of planting a sinuous alley. (See "My Own Acre," p.
34.)]
For this he has no occasion to make himself responsible but there are
certain empty lots not 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. However, 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
shrubbery.
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
shortsighted 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 but
only as furnishment and decoration. At favorable moments you will make
whatever rearrangement 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, transplanting. 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 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 season'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 omitted to say
here, in behalf of the kind of garden we preach, that shrubs, the most
of them, require no great enrichment of the soil--an important
consideration. And we shall take much care to recommend the perusal of
books on gardening. 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 voluminous 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
amateur gardener ought to be--these books are no mean part of his
equipment; they are as necessary to his best gardening as the dictionary
to his best English.
What a daily, hourly, unfailing wonder are the modern opportunities and
facilities by which we are surrounded! If the present reader and the
present writer, and maybe a few others, will but respond to them
worthily, who knows but we may ourselves live to see, and to see as
democratically common as telephones and electric cars, the American
garden? Of course there is ever and ever so much more to be said about
it, and the present writer is not at all weary; but he hears his
reader's clock telling the hour and feels very sure it is correct.
WHERE TO PLANT WHAT
Often 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 foundations of American democracy the
imperishable maxim that "That gardening is best which gardens the
least"? My rendition of it may be more a parody than a quotation but,
whatever its inaccuracy, to me it still sounds Jeffersonian--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 which procures and preserves the noblest
happiness of the community with the least enthralment 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 therefore 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 gardening, from the standpoint of some
other equally true fraction of the whole truth. All we need here
maintain for our Jeffersonian maxim is that its wide domination in
American sentiment explains the larger part of all the merits and faults
of American government--and American gardening. It accounts for nearly
all our American 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 to man's
felicity with least disturbance of nature's freedom.
Hence the initial question--a question which every amateur gardener must
answer for himself. 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 nature'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 inclination of our American
preferences is away from that intense sort of gardening called "formal,"
and toward that rather unfairly termed "informal" 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.
Because 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 shrubbery our gardening
can be more lenient than with annuals alone, or with only herbaceous
plants and evergreens.
[Illustration: "However enraptured of wild nature you may be, you do and
must require of her _some_ subserviency about your own dwelling."
A front view of the three older buildings of Williston Seminary.]
So, then, our problem, Where to Plant What, may become for a moment,
Where to Plant Shrubbery; and the response of the free-line garden 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 dislikes, habits, manners
and accomplishments and its friendly or possibly unfriendly 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 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 (horticultural
dictionary) before inviting the poor mortified 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 modest homes and its
highly picturesque outlook upon distant hills and mountains and
intervening meadows and fields, with the Connecticut winding through.
Its architecture is in three or four instances admirable though not
extraordinary, 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.
[Illustration: "Plant it where it will best enjoy itself."
These wild roses are in two clumps with a six-foot open way between
them. They are a wild rose (_Rosa Arkansana_) not much in use but worthy
of more attention, as indeed all the wild roses are. The sunlit tree
farthest on the right is Sol Smith Russell's linden.]
As the present century was coming in, however, the opportunity, through
private flower-gardening, to double or quadruple the town's beauty and
to do it without great trouble or expense, yet with great individual
delight and social pleasure, came to the lively notice of a number of
us. It is, then, for the promotion of this object throughout all our
bounds, and not for the perfection of the art for its own sake, that we
maintain this competition and award these "Carnegie" prizes. Hence
certain features 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 element of its people for gardening
better than another, nor to promote the production of individual plants
or flowers of extraordinary splendor, 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. Consequently three prizes _must_ fall to each district every
year. Yet the best garden of all still carries 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 district 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 consecutive in the list. The second prize
cannot 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 showing much improvement over the
previous season may take a prize, as against a better garden which shows
no such improvement. Also no garden can take the capital prize twice nor
ever take a prize not higher than it has taken before. The twenty-one
prizes are for those who hire no help in their gardening; two others are
for those who reserve the liberty to employ help, and still another two
are exclusively for previous winners of the capital prize, competing
among themselves. 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, 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.