They are not in our competition, though among its most ardent
well-wishers. A friend had given one of them a bit of green, woody
growth some two feet high and half an inch thick. She had a wee square
bit of front grass-plot something larger than a table-cloth, but
certainly not large enough for a game of marbles. In the centre of this
bit of grass she planted her friend's gift. Then came our other lady,
making a call, and with her best smile of humorous commendation, saying:
"My dear, you have violated the first rule of gardening. You've planted
your bush where you wanted it."
The delighted gardener went in the strength of that witticism for forty
weeks or at least until some fiend of candor, a brother, like as not,
said:
"Yes, truly you have violated the first rule of gardening, for you have
put your willow-tree--that's what it is--where a minute's real
reflection would have told you you'd wish you hadn't."
Where to Plant What! Plant it where you--and your friends--your friends
of best gardening taste--will be glad you planted it when all your
things are planted. Please those who know best, and so best please
yourself. Nevertheless, beware! Watch yourself! Do so specially when you
think you have mastered the whole art. Watch even those who indisputably
know better than you do, for everybody makes mistakes which he never
would have dreamed he could make. Only the other day I heard an amateur
say to a distinguished professional gardener:
"Did you plant those shrubs of gorgeous flower and broad, dark leaf out
on your street front purely as a matter of artistic taste?"
"I did," he replied. "I wanted to put my best foot foremost. Wouldn't
you?"
"Why should I?" asked the amateur. "I wouldn't begin a song with my
highest note, nor a game with my strongest card, nor an address with my
most impassioned declaration, nor a sonnet with its most pregnant line.
If I should, where were my climax?"
Certainly the amateur had the best of it. A garden is a discourse. A
garden is a play. See with what care both the dramatist and the
stage-manager avoid putting the best foot foremost. See how warily they
hold back the supreme strength of the four or five act piece for the
last act but one. There is a charmingly instructive analogy between a
garden and a drama. In each you have preparation, progress, climax, and
close. And then, also, in each you must have your lesser climaxes
leading masterfully up to the supreme one, and a final quiet one to let
gratefully down from the giddy height.
In Northampton nearly all of our hundreds of gardens contesting for
prizes are plays of only one or two acts. I mean they have only one or
two buildings to garden up to and between and around and away from. Yet
it is among these one-act plays, these one-house gardens, that I find
the art truth most gracefully emphasized, that the best foot should not
go foremost. In a large garden a false start may be atoned for by better
art farther on and in; but in a small garden, for mere want of room and
the chance to forget, a bad start spoils all. No, be the garden a
prince's or a cottager's, the climaxes to be got by superiority of
stature, by darkness and breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom
belong at its far end. Even in the one-house garden I should like to see
the climaxes plural to the extent of two; one immediately at the back of
the house, the other at the extreme rear of the ground. At the far end
of the lot I would have the final storm of passion and riot of
disclosure, and then close about the rear of the house there should be
the things of supreme richness, exquisiteness and rarity.
This soft-voiced echo answering back out of the inmost heart of the
whole demesne gives genuineness of sentiment to the entire scheme. To
plant a conflagration of color against the back fence and stop there
would be worse than melodramatic. It would be to close the play with a
bang, and even a worthy one-act play does not close with a bang. The
back of the lot is not the absolute end of the garden-play. Like the
stage-play, the garden-play brings its beholder back at the very last,
by a sweet reversion, to the point from which it started. The true
garden-lover gardens not mainly for the passer-by, but rather for
himself and the friends who come to see him. Even when he treads his
garden paths alone he is a pleased and welcome visitor to himself, and
shows his garden to himself as to a visitor. Hence there is always at
last a turning back to the house or to the front entrance, and _this_ is
the play's final lines, the last grouping of the players, the relief of
all tension and the descent of the curtain.
[Illustration: " ... climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by
darkness and breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom belong at its
far end."
Everything in this photograph was planted by the amateur gardener except
the pine-trees in perspective.]
One point farther in this direction and we may give our hard-worked
analogy a respite. It is this: as those who make and present a play
take great pains that, by flashes of revelation to eye and to ear, the
secrets most unguessed by the characters in the piece shall be early
revealed to the audience and persistently pressed upon its attention, so
should the planting of a garden be; that, as if quite without the
gardener's or the garden's knowledge, always, to the eye, nostril or
ear, some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon and lure
across easy and tempting distances from nook to nook of the small
garden, or from alley to alley and from glade to glade of the large one.
Where to Plant What? Plant it as far away as, according to the force of
its character or the splendor of its charms, it can stand and beckon
back with best advantage for the whole garden.
[Illustration: "Some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon
and lure."
From a photograph taken on My Own Acre, showing how I pulled the lawn in
under the trees. The big chestnuts in the middle are on the old fence
line that stood on the very edge of the precipitously falling ground.
All the ground in sight in the picture is a fill.]
Thus we generalize. And as long as one may generalize he is
comparatively safe from humiliating criticism. It is only when he begins
to name things by name and say what is best for just where, that he
touches the naked eyeball (or the funny-bone) of others whose crotchets
are not identical with his. Yet in Northampton this is what we have to
do, and since the competitors for our prizes always have the Where
before they are moved to get and place the What, we find our
where-and-what problem easiest to handle when we lift it, so to speak,
by the tail. Then it is "What to Plant Where," and for answer we have
made a short list of familiar flowering shrubs best suited to our
immediate geographical locality. We name only fourteen and we so
describe each as to indicate clearly enough, without dictating,
whereabouts to put it. We begin:
"Azalea. Our common wild azalea is the flowering bush best known as
'swamp honeysuckle.' The two azaleas listed here, _A. mollis_ and the
Ghent varieties, are of large, beautiful and luxuriant bloom, and except
the 'swamp honeysuckle' are the only azaleas hardy in western
Massachusetts. Mollis is from two to six feet high, three to six feet
broad, and blooms in April and May. Its blossoms are yellow, orange or
pink, single or double. Its soil may be sandy or peaty, and moist, but
any good garden soil will serve; its position partly shaded or in full
sunlight. The Ghents are somewhat taller and not so broad in
proportion. They bloom from May to July, and their blossoms are white,
yellow, orange, pink, carmine, or red, single or double. Soil and
position about the same as for mollis.
"Berberis. Berberis is the barberry, so well known by its beautiful
pendent berries. It is one of the best shrubs to use where a thorny bush
is wanted. _B. vulgaris_, the common sort, and one of the most
beautiful, grows from four to eight feet high, with a breadth of from
three to six feet. _B. Thunbergii_, or Thunberg's barberry, is the
well-known Japanese variety, a dense, drooping bush from two to four
feet high and somewhat greater breadth. Its pale-yellow blossoms come in
April and May, and its small, slender, bright-red berries remain on the
spray until spring. A dry soil is the best for it, though it will grow
in any, and needs little shade or none. _B. purpurea_ is a variety of
vulgaris and is as handsome as the common. It answers to the same
description, except that its foliage is purple, which makes it very
tempting to new gardeners, but very hard to relate in good artistic
taste among the other shrubs of the garden. Few small gardens can make
good use of purple foliage.
"_Deutzia gracilis._ The gracilis is one of the most beautiful of all
the deutzias. Its delicate foliage of rather light green, its snowy
flowers and its somewhat bending form, make it one of the fairest
ornaments of the home grounds. Its height is three feet, its breadth
from two to four feet. It blooms in May and June. Its soil may be any
well-drained sort, and its position any slightly sheltered aspect."
So we hurry down the alphabet. The list is short for several good
reasons, one being that it is well to give other lists from season to
season. No doubt our inaccuracies would distress a botanist or
scientific gardener, but we convey the information, such as it is, to
our fellow citizens, and they use it. In the last ten years we have
furnished to our amateurs thousands of shrubs and plants, at the same
reduced rates for a few specimens each which we pay for them by the
hundred.
But of the really good sorts are there shrubs enough, you ask, to
afford new lists year after year? Well, for the campus of a certain
preparatory school for boys, with the planting of which the present
writer had somewhat to do a few years ago, the list of shrubs set round
the bases of four large buildings and several hundred yards of fence
numbered seventy-five kinds. To end the chapter, let us say something
about that operation. On a pictorial page or two we give ourselves the
pleasure of showing the results of this undertaking; but first, both by
pictures and by verbal description let me show where we planted what. Of
course we made sundry mistakes. Each thing we did may be vulnerable to
criticism, and our own largest hope is that our results may not fall
entirely beneath that sort of compliment.
This campus covers some five acres in the midst of a small town. Along
three of its boundaries old maples and elms, in ordinary single-file
shade-tree lines, tower and spread. On the fourth line, the rear bound,
a board fence divides the ground from the very unattractive back yards,
stables and sheds of a number of town residents. The front lies along
the main street of the place, facing the usual "shop-row." The entire
area has nearly always been grassed. Not what an Englishman would call
so, but turfed in a stuttering fashion, impetuous and abashed by turns,
and very easy to keep off; most rank up against the granite
underpinnings of the buildings, and managing somehow to writhe to all
the fences, of which those on the street fronts are of iron. Parallel
with the front fence and some fifty feet behind it, three of the
institution's buildings stand abreast and about a hundred feet apart.
All three are tall, rectangular three-story piles of old red brick, on
granite foundations, and full of windows all of one size, pigeon-house
style. The middle one has a fairly good Greek-pillared porch, of wood,
on the middle half of its front.
[Illustration: " ... tall, rectangular, three-story piles ... full of
windows all of one size, pigeon-house style."
Middle Hall, Williston Seminary, facing the main street of the town.]
Among these buildings we began our planting. We had drawn, of course, a
ground plan of the whole place, to scale, showing each ground-floor door
and window, so that we might respect its customary or projected use. A
great point, that, in Where to Plant What. I once heard of a school
whose small boys were accused of wantonly trampling down some newly set
shrubs on the playground. "Well," demanded one brave urchin, "what made
'em go and plant a lot of bushes right on first base?" And no one was
ready with an answer, for there is something morally wrong about any
garden that will rob a boy of his rights.
With this ground plan before us we decided indoors where to plant what
outdoors and calculated arithmetically the number of each sort of shrub
we should need for the particular interval we designed that sort to
fill. Our scheme of arrangement was a crescendo of foliage and flower
effects, beginning on the fronts of the buildings and rising toward
their rears, while at all points making more of foliage than of bloom,
because the bloom shows for only a month or less, while the leaf remains
for seven or more. Beginning thus with our quietest note, the interest
of any one looking in, or coming in, from the public front is steadily
quickened and progressively rewarded, while the crowning effects at the
rear of the buildings are reserved for the crowning moment when the
visitor may be said to be fully received. On the other hand, if the
approach is a returning one from the rear of the entire campus,--where
stands the institution's only other building, a large tall-towered
gymnasium, also of red brick,--these superlative effects show out across
an open grassy distance of from two hundred to three hundred feet.
Wherefore--and here at last we venture to bring names of things and
their places together--at the fronts of the northernmost and
southernmost of these three "Halls" we set favorite varieties of
white-flowering spireas (_Thunbergia, sorbifolia_, _arguta_, _Van
Houttei_), the pearl-bush (_exochorda_), pink diervillas, and
flowering-almonds. After these, on the southern side of the southernmost
building, for example, followed lilacs, white and purple, against the
masonry,--the white against the red brick, the lilac tint well away from
it,--with tamarisk and kerria outside, abreast of them, and then pink
and red spireas (_Bumaldi_ and its dwarf variety, _Anthony Waterer_). On
the other side of the same house we set deutzias (_scabra_ against the
brick-work and _Lemoynei_ and _gracilis_ outside). In a wing corner,
where melting snows crash down from a roof-valley, we placed the
purple-flowered _Lespedeza penduliflorum_, which each year dies to the
ground before the snow-slides come, yet each September blooms from three
to four feet high in drooping profusion. Then from that angle to the
rear corner we put in a mass of pink wild roses. Lastly, on the tall,
doorless, windowless rear end, we planted the crimson-rambler rose, and
under it a good hundred of the red rugosas.
In the arrangement of these plantings we found ourselves called upon to
deal with a very attractive and, to us, new phase of our question. The
rising progression from front to rear was a matter of course, but how
about the progression at right angles to it; from building to building,
that is, of these three so nearly alike in size and dignity? To the
passer-by along their Main Street front--the admiring passer-by, as we
hope--should there be no augmentation of charm in the direction of his
steps? And if there should be, then where and how ought it to show
forth so as to avoid an anticlimax to one passing along the same front
from the opposite direction? We promptly saw,--as the reader sees, no
doubt, before we can tell it,--that what we wanted was two crescendos
meeting somewhere near the middle; a crescendo passing into a diminuendo
from whichever end you moved to the other--a swell. We saw that our
loud-pedal effect should come upon "Middle Hall." So there, on its lucky
bit of Greek porch, we bestowed the purple wistaria for spring, and for
late summer that fragrant snowdrift, the clematis paniculata, so adapted
as to festoon and chaplet, but never to smother, the Greek columns. On
one of this structure's sides we planted forsythia, backed closer
against the masonry by althaeas, with the low and exquisite mahonia
(holly-leafed barberry) under its outer spread. On the other side of the
house we placed, first, loniceras (bush honeysuckles); next, azaleas, in
variety and profusion; then, toward the rear end, a mass of hardy
hydrangeas (_Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora_), and at the very back of
the pile another mass, of the flowering-quince (_Pyrus japonica_), with
the trumpet-creeper (_Tecoma radicans_), to climb out of it.
About "North Hall," the third building, we planted more quietly, and
most quietly on its outer, its northern, side where our lateral "swell"
(rising effect) begins, or ends, according to the direction of your
going, beginning with that modest but pretty bloomer the _Ligustrum
ibota_, a perfectly hardy privet more graceful than the California
(_ovalifolium_) species, which really has little business in icy New
England away from the seashore.
I might have remarked before that nearly all the walls of these three
buildings, as well as the gymnasium on the far side of the campus, were
already adorned with the "Boston ivy" (_Ampelopsis Veitchii_). With the
plantings thus described, and with the gymnasium surrounded by yet
stronger greenery; with the back fence masked by willows, elders and
red-stemmed cornus; and with a number of haphazard footpaths reduced to
an equally convenient and far more graceful few, our scheme stands
complete in its first, but only, please notice, its first, phase. The
picture is submitted to your imagination not as it looked the day we
ceased planting, but as we expected it to appear after a season or two,
and as it does look now.
At present, rather tardily, we have begun to introduce herbaceous
flowering perennials, which we ignored in the first part of our plan,
because herbaceous plants are the flesh and blood and garments of a
complete living and breathing garden; the walls, shrubs, trees, walks
and drives are its bones. When this secondary phase has been more fully
realized and we have placed bush-clumps and tree-clumps out on the open
campus, and when our hundreds of cottage gardens are shaking off the
prison irons of frost, we hope, if you cannot do us the honor to be with
us bodily, your spirit may be near, aiding us on in the conquest of this
ever beautiful Where-to-Plant-What problem, which I believe would make
us a finer and happier nation if it could be expanded to national
proportions.
THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF NORTHAMPTON
Adam and Eve, it is generally conceded, were precocious. They entered
into the cares and joys of adult life at an earlier age than any later
human prodigy. We call them the grand old gardener and his wife, but, in
fact, they were the youngest gardeners the world has ever seen, and they
really did not give entire satisfaction. How could they without tools?
Let it pass. The whole allusion is prompted only by the thought that
youth does not spontaneously garden. If it was actually necessary that
our first parents should begin life as gardeners, that fully explains
why they had to begin it also as adults. Youth enjoys the garden, yes!
but not its making or tending. Childhood, the abecedarian, may love to
plant seeds, to watch them spring, grow, and flower, and to help them do
so; but that is the merest a-b-c of gardening, and no more makes him an
amateur in the art than spelling words of one letter makes him a poet.
One may raise or love flowers for a lifetime, yet never in any art sense
become a gardener.
In front of the main building of a public institution which we must
presently mention again there is a sloping strip of sward a hundred feet
long and some fifteen wide. A florist of fully half a century's
experience one day halted beside it and exclaimed to the present writer,
"Only say the word, and I'll set out the 'ole len'th o' that strip in
foliage-plants a-spellin' o' the name: 'People's Hinstitute!'" Yet that
gentle enthusiast advertised himself as a landscape-gardener and got
clients. For who was there to tell them or him that he was not one?
Not only must we confess that youth does not spontaneously garden, but
that our whole American civilization is still so lingeringly in its
non-gardening youth that only now and then, here and there, does it
realize that a florist, whether professional or amateur, or even a
nurseryman, is not necessarily a constructive gardener, or that
artistic gardening, however informal, is nine-tenths constructive.
Yet particularly because such gardening is so, and because some of its
finest rewards are so slow-coming and long-abiding, there is no stage of
life in which it is so reasonable for man or woman to love and practise
the art as when youth is in its first full stature and may garden for
itself and not merely for posterity. "John," said his aged father to one
of our living poets, "I know now how to transplant full-grown trees
successfully. Do it a long time ago." Let the stripling plant the
sapling.
Youth, however, and especially our American youth, has his or her
excuses, such as they are. Of the garden or the place to be gardened,
"It's not mine," he or she warmly says; "it's only my father's," or "my
mother's."
Young man! Young maiden! True, the place, so pathetically begging to be
gardened, may not be your future home, may never be your property, and
it is right enough that a feeling for ownership should begin to shape
your daily life. But let it not misshape it. You know that ownership is
not all of life nor the better half of it, and it is quite as good for
you to give the fact due recognition by gardening early in life as it
was for Adam and Eve.
It is better, for you can do so in a much more fortunate manner, having
tools and the first pair's warning example. It is better also because
you can do what to them was impossible; you can make gardening a
concerted public movement.
That is what we have made it in Northampton, Massachusetts, whose
curving streets and ancient elms you may have heard of as making it very
garden-like in its mere layout; many of whose windows, piazzas, and
hillside lawns look on across the beautiful Connecticut, winding broadly
among its farmed meadows and vanishing southward through the towering
gateway made for or by it millenniums ago between Mounts Tom and
Holyoke.
There Smith College is, as well as that "People's Institute"
aforementioned, and it is through that institute, one of whose several
branches of work is carried on wholly by Smith College students, that
we, the Northampton townspeople, established and maintain another
branch, our concerted gardening.
[Illustration: "You can make gardening a concerted public movement."
A gathering on My Own Acre in the interest of the Flower Garden
Competition.]
One evening in September a company of several hundred persons gathered
in the main hall of the institute's "Carnegie House" to witness and
receive the prize awards of their twelfth annual flower-garden
competition.
The place was filled. A strong majority of those present were men and
women who earn their daily bread with their hands. The whole population
of Northampton is but twenty thousand or so, and the entire number of
its voters hardly exceeds four thousand, yet there were one thousand and
thirteen gardens in the competition, the gardens of that many homes; and
although children had taken part in the care of many of them, and now
were present to see the prizes go to their winners, not one was
separately a child's garden. By a rule of the contest, each garden had
been required to comprise the entire home lot, with the dwelling for its
dominating feature and the family its spiritual unit.