remains, among the loveliest in Northampton. Its house stands perhaps
seventy feet back from the public way and so nearly at one edge of its
broad lot that all its exits and entrances are away from that side and
toward the garden. A lawn and front bordered on side by loose hedges of
Regel's privet and Thunberg's barberry and with only one or two slim
trees of delicate foliage near its street line, rises slightly from the
sidewalk to the house in a smooth half wave that never sinks below any
level it has attained and yet consists of two curves. (It takes two
curves, let us say once more, to make even half of the gentlest wave
that can be made, if you take it from the middle of the crest to the
middle of the trough, and in our American gardening thousands of lawns,
especially small front lawns, are spoiled in their first layout by being
sloped in a single curve instead of in two curves bending opposite
ways.) Along a side of this greensward farthest from the boundary to
which the house is so closely set are the drive and walk, in one, and on
the farther side of these, next the sun, is the main flower-garden, half
surrounding another and smaller piece of lawn. The dwelling stands
endwise to the street and broadside to this expanse of bloom. Against
its front foundations lies a bed of flowering shrubs which at the corner
farthest from the drive swings away along that side's boundary line and
borders it with shrubbery down to the street, the main feature of the
group being a luxuriant flowering quince as large as ten ordinary ones
and in every springtime a red splendor.
But the focus of the gardening scheme is at the southeasterly side
entrance of the house. To this the drive comes on unrigorous lines from
the street. The walk curves away a few steps earlier to go to the front
door but the drive, passing on, swings in under the rear corner windows
and to the kitchen steps, veers around by the carriage-house door and so
loops back into itself. In this loop, and all about the bases of the
dwelling and carriage-house the flowers rise in dense abundance, related
to one another with clever taste and with a happy care for a procession
of bloom uninterrupted throughout the season. Straightaway from the side
door, leaving the drive at a right angle, runs a short arbor of vines.
Four or five steps to the left of this bower a clump of shrubbery veils
the view from the street and in between shrubs and arbor lies a small
pool of water flowers and goldfish. On the arbor's right, in charming
privacy, masked by hollyhocks, dahlias and other tall-maidenly things,
lie beds of strawberries and lettuce and all the prim ranks and orders
of the kitchen garden.
Words are poor things to paint with; I wish I could set forth all in
one clear picture: lawn, drive, house, loop, lily pond, bower,
rose-bordered drive again (as the eye comes back) and flowers crowding
before, behind and beside you, some following clear out to the street
and beseeching you not to go so soon. Such is the garden, kept without
hired labor, of two soft-handed women; not beyond criticism in any of
its aspects but bearing witness to their love of nature, of beauty and
of home and of their wisdom and skill to exalt and refine them.
This competitor early won, I say, a leading prize, and in later seasons
easily held--still holds--a fine pre-eminence. Yet the later prizes fell
to others, because, while this one had been a beautiful garden for years
before the competition began, they, rising from much newer and humbler
beginnings, sometimes from very chaos, showed between one season and the
next far greater advances _toward_ artistic excellence. In the very next
year a high prize fell to a garden in full sight of this one, a garden
whose makers had caught their inspiration from this one, and, copying
its art, had brought forth a charming result out of what our judges
described as "particularly forlorn conditions."
Does this seem hardly fair to the first garden? But to spread the
gardening contagion and to instigate a wise copying after the right
gardeners--these are what our prizes and honors are for. Progress first,
perfection afterward, is our maxim. We value and reward originality,
nevertheless, and only count it a stronger necessity to see not merely
that no talented or happily circumstanced few, but that not even any one
or two fortunate neighborhoods, shall presently be capturing all the
prizes. Hence the rules already cited, which a prompt discovery of this
tendency forced upon us.
About this copying: no art is more inoffensively imitated than gardening
but unluckily none is more easily, or more absurdly, miscopied. A safe
way is to copy the gardener rather than the garden. To copy any
performance in a way to do it honor we must discern and adapt its art
without mimicking its act. To miscopy is far easier--we have only to
mimic the act and murder the art. I once heard a man ask an architect
if it would not answer to give his plan to the contractor and let him
work it out without the architect's supervision.
"My dear sir," the architect replied, "you wouldn't know the corpse."
I suppose one reason why even the miscopying of gardens provokes so
little offence is that the acts it mimics have no art it can murder.
Mrs. Budd sets out her one little "high geraingia" in the middle of her
tiny grass-plat (probably trimming it to look like a ballet-dancer on
one leg). Whereupon Mrs. Mudd, the situation of whose house and grounds
is not in the least like her neighbor's, plants and trims hers the same
way and feels sure it has the same effect, for--why shouldn't it?
The prize-winning copyist I am telling of copied principles only. To
have copied mere performance would have been particularly unlucky, for
though his garden stands within fifty yards of the one from which it
drew its inspiration the two are so differently located that the same
art principles demand of them very different performances. An old-time
lover of gardens whom I have to quote at second-hand mentions in
contrast "gardens to look in upon" and "gardens to look out from." The
garden I have described at length is planned to be looked in upon; most
town gardens must be, of course; but its competitor across the street,
of which I am about to give account, is an exception. The lot has a very
broad front and very little depth--at one side almost none, at the other
barely enough for a small house and a few feet of front yard. Why there
should be a drive I cannot say, but it is so well taken into the general
scheme that to call it to account would be ungenerous. It enters at the
narrowest part of the ground, farthest from the house, makes a long
parabola, and turns again into the street close beside the dwelling. In
the bit of lawn thus marked off, shrubs have place near the street,
three or four old apple-trees range down the middle, and along the drive
runs a gay border of annual flowers. Along the rear side of the drive
lies but a narrow strip of turf beyond which the ground drops all at
once to another level some thirty feet below. On the right this fall is
so abrupt that the only way down to it is by a steep rustic stair. On
the left, behind the house, the face of the bluff is broken into narrow
terraces, from top to bottom of which, and well out on the lower level,
the entire space is mantled with the richly burdened trellises of a
small vineyard. At the right on this lower ground is a kitchen garden;
beyond it stretch fair meadows too low to build on, but fruitful in hay
and grain; farther away, on higher ground, the town again shows its
gables and steeples among its great maples and elms, and still beyond,
some three miles distant, the green domes and brown precipices of the
Mount Holyoke Range stand across the sky in sharp billows of forest and
rock. It seems at times a pity that Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom cannot
themselves know how many modest gardens they are a component part
of--the high violin note of: gardens, like this one, "to look out from."
It stops one's pen for one to find himself using the same phrases for
these New England cottage gardens that famous travellers have used in
telling of the gardens of Italian princes; yet why should we not, when
the one nature and the one art are mother and godmother of them all? It
is a laughing wonder what beauty can be called into life about the most
unpretentious domicile, out of what ugliness such beauty can be evoked
and at how trivial a cost in money. Three years before this "garden to
look out from" won its Carnegie prize it was for the most part a rubbish
heap. Let me now tell of one other, that sprang from conditions still
more unlovely because cramped and shut in.
It was on the other side of the town from those I have been telling of.
The house stood broadside to the street and flush with the sidewalk. The
front of the lot was only broad enough for the house and an alley hardly
four feet wide between the house's end and a high, tight board fence.
The alley led into a small, square back yard one of whose bounds was the
back fence of the house. On a second side was a low, mossy,
picturesquely old wing-building set at right angles to the larger house,
its doors and windows letting into the yard. A third boundary was the
side of one well weathered barn and the back of another, with a scanty
glimpse between them of meadows stretching down to the Connecticut
River. The fourth was an open fence marking off a field of riotous
weeds. When the tenant mistress of this unpromising spot began to occupy
it the yard and alley were a free range for the poultry of the
neighborhood, and its only greenery was two or three haphazard patches
of weedy turf. One-fourth of the ground, in the angle made by the open
fence and one of the barns, had been a hen-yard and was still inclosed
within a high wire-netting; but outside that space every plant she set
out had to be protected from the grubbing fowls by four stakes driven
down with a hammer. Three years afterward she bore off our capital prize
in a competition of one hundred gardens. Let me tell what the judges
found.
[Illustration: "Beauty can be called into life about the most
unpretentious domicile."
One of a great number of competing cottages whose gardens are handsomer
in the rear and out of sight than on the street-front, though well kept
there also.]
[Illustration: "Those who pay no one to dig, plant or prune for them."
The aged owner of this place has hired no help for twenty years. Behind
her honey-locust hedge a highly kept and handsome flower and shrubbery
garden fills the whole house lot. She is a capital prize-winner.]
Out in the street, at the off side of the alley-gate, between a rude
fence and an electric-railway siding, in about as much space as would
give standing room to one horse and cart, bloomed--not by right of
lease, but by permission of the railway company--a wealth of annual
flowers, the lowest (pansies and such like) at the outer edge, the
tallest against the unsightly fence. This was the prelude. In the alley
the fence was clothed with vines; the windows--of which there were
two--were decked with boxes of plumbago--pink, violet, white and blue,
and of lady-ferns and maiden-hair. The back yard was a soft, smooth turf
wherever there were not flowers. Along the back doors and windows of the
house and the low-roofed wing a rough arbor was covered with a vine
whose countless blossoms scented the air and feasted the bees, while its
luminous canopy sheltered a rare assemblage of such flowers as bloom and
thrive only for those whom they know and trust. But the crowning
transformation was out in the open sunlight, in the space which had been
the hen-yard. Within it was a holiday throng of the gardening world's
best-known and loved gentles and commons, from roses down to
forget-me-nots. Its screen of poultry-netting had been kept in place,
and no feature on the premises more charmingly showed that this floral
profusion came of no mere greed for abundance or diversity, but of a
true art instinct recognizing the limits of its resources. The garden
had to be made a "garden to look in upon," a veritable imprisoned
garden; the question of expense required it to be chiefly of annuals,
and all the structural features of the place called for concealment.
These wire nettings did so; on their outside, next the grass, two
complete groups of herbaceous things were so disposed as to keep them
veiled in bloom throughout the whole warm half of the year. Close
against them and overpeering their tops were hollyhocks and dahlias;
against these stood at lesser height sweet peas, asters, zinnias,
coreopsis and others of like stature; in front of these were poppies for
summer, marigolds for autumn; beneath these again were verbenas,
candytuft--all this is sketched from memory, and I recall the winsome
effect rather than species and names; and still below nestled portulaca
and periwinkle. I fear the enumeration gives but a harlequin effect; but
the fault of that is surely mine, for the result was delightful.
I have ventured to make report of these two or three gardens, not as in
themselves worthy of a great public's consideration and praise but as
happy instances of a fruitage we are gathering among hundreds of homes
in a little city where it is proposed to give every home, if possible,
its utmost value. Many other pleasing examples could be cited if further
turnings of the kaleidoscope were a real need, but this slender
discourse is as long now as it should be. It seems droll to call grave
attention to such humble things in a world so rightly preoccupied with
great sciences and high arts, vast industries, shining discoveries and
international rivalries, strifes and projects; yet what are all these
for, at last, but the simple citizen, his family and his home, and for
him and them in the cottage as well as in the palace? The poor man's
home may shine dimly but it is one of the stars by which civilization
must guide its onward course.
It may well be supposed that those whose office it is to award the
twenty-one prizes of our garden competition among our eleven hundred
competitors have an intricate task. Yet some of its intricacies add to
the pleasure of it.
One of these pleasing complications arises from our division of the
field of contest into seven parts, in each of which prizes must be given
to three contestants. Another comes from our rule that not alone the
competitors who show the best gardening are to be rewarded, but also
those who have made the most earnest effort and largest progress toward
the best gardening. Under this plan one whose work shows a patient and
signal progress in the face of many disadvantages may outrank on our
prize list a rival whose superior artistic result has been got easily
under favoring conditions and reveals no marked advance beyond the
season before.
After the manner of Dunfermline again, our rules are that no gardener by
trade and no one who hires help in his garden may compete. Any friend
may help his friend, and any one may use all the advice he can get from
amateur or professional. Children may help in the care of the gardens,
and many do; but children may not themselves put gardens into the
competition.
"If the head of the house is the gardener-in-chief," shrewdly argued one
of our committee, "the children, oftener than otherwise, will garden
with him, or will catch the gardening spirit as they grow up; but if the
children are head-gardeners we shall get only children's gardening. We
want to dispel the notion that flower-gardening is only woman's work and
child's play."
Our rule against hired labor sets naturally a maximum limit to the
extent of ground a garden may cover. Our minimum is but fifty square
yards, including turf, beds, and walks, and it may be of any shape
whatever if only it does not leave out any part of the dooryard, front
or rear, and give it up to neglect and disorder. To the ear even fifty
square yards seems extensive, but really it is very small. It had so
formidable a sound when we first named it that one of our most esteemed
friends, pastor of a Catholic church in that very pretty and thrifty
part of Northampton called for its silk mills Florence, generously added
two supplementary prizes for gardens under the limit of size. This
happy thought had a good effect, for, although in the first and second
years Father Gallon's people took prizes for gardens above the minimum
limit in size, while his own two prizes fell to contestants not in his
flock, yet only in the third year did it become to all of us quite as
plain as a pikestaff that fifty square yards are only the one-fiftieth
part of fifty yards square, and that whoever in Northampton had a
dooryard at all had fifty square yards. In 1903 more than two hundred
and fifty gardens were already in the contest but every one was large
enough to compete for the Carnegie prizes, and the kind bestower of the
extra ones (withdrawn as superfluous), unselfishly ignoring his own
large share of credit, wrote:
"Your gardens have altered the aspect of my parish."
Such praise is high wages. It is better than to have achieved the very
perfection of gardening about any one home. We are not trying to raise
the world's standard of the gardening art. Our work is for the home and
its indwellers; for the home and the town. Our ideal is a town of homes
all taking pleasant care of one another. We want to make all neighbors
and all homes esthetically interesting to one another, believing that
this will relate them humanely, morally and politically. We began with
those who pay no one to dig, plant or prune for them, but soon we went
further and ventured to open to gardens kept with hired service an
allied competition for a separate list of prizes. In this way we put
into motion, between two elements of our people which there are always
more than enough influences to hold sufficiently apart, a joint pursuit
of the same refining delight and so promoted the fellowship of an
unconflicting common interest. In degree some of us who use hired help
had already obtained this effect. Last season:
"Come," I often heard one of our judges say on his rounds, "see my own
garden some afternoon; I'll show you all the mistakes I've made!" And
some came, and exchanged seeds and plants with him.
"A high civilization," said an old soldier to me only a few days ago,
"must always produce great social inequalities. They are needed mainly
by and for those who see no need of them."
I admitted that the need is as real, though not so stern, as the need of
inequalities in military rank.
"But," I said, "in the military relation you must also vividly keep up,
across all inequalities of rank, a splendid sentiment of common interest
and devotion, mutual confidence and affection, or your army will be but
a broken weapon, a sword without a hilt."
"Yes," he agreed, "and so in civilization; if it would be of the highest
it must draw across its lines of social cleavage the bonds of civic
fellowship."
It was what I had intended to say myself. Social selection raises walls
between us which we all help to build, but they need not be Chinese
walls. They need not be so high that civic fellowship, even at its most
feminine stature, may not look over them every now and then to ask:
"How does my neighbor's garden grow?"
It is with this end in view as well as for practical convenience that we
have divided our field into seven districts and from our "women's
council" have appointed residents of each to visit, animate and counsel
the contestants of that district. The plan works well.
On the other hand, to prevent the movement, in any district, from
shrinking into village isolation; in order to keep the whole town
comprised, and, as nearly as may be, to win the whole town's sympathy
and participation, we have made a rule that in whatever district the
capital prize is awarded, the second prize must go to some other
district. If we have said this before you may slip it here; a certain
repetitiousness is one part of our policy. A competitor in the district
where the capital prize is awarded may take the third prize, but no one
may take the third in the district where the second has been awarded. He
may, however, be given the fourth. In a word, no two consecutive prizes
can be won in the same district. Also, not more than three prizes of the
fifteen may in one season be awarded in any one district. So each
district has three prize-winners each year, and each year the prizes go
all over town. Again, no garden may take the same prize two years in
succession; it must take a higher one or else wait over.
"This prize-garden business is just all right!" said one of the
competitors to our general secretary. "It gives us good things to say to
one another's face instead of bad things at one another's back, it
does!"
That is a merit we claim for it; that it operates, in the most
inexpensive way that can be, to restore the social bond. Hard poverty
minus village neighborship drives the social relation out of the home
and starves out of its victims their spiritual powers to interest and
entertain one another, or even themselves. If something could keep alive
the good aspects of village neighborship without disturbing what is good
in that more energetic social assortment which follows the expansion of
the village into the town or city, we should have better and fairer
towns and cities and a sounder and safer civilization. But it must be
something which will give entirely differing social elements "good
things to say to one another's face instead of bad things at one
another's back."
We believe our Northampton garden competition tends to do this. It
brings together in neighborly fellowship those whom the discrepancies of
social accomplishments would forever hold asunder and it brings them
together without forced equality or awkward condescension, civic
partners in that common weal to neglect which is one of the "dangers and
temptations of the home."
Two of our committee called one day at a house whose garden seemed to
have fallen into its ill condition after a very happy start. Its
mistress came to the door wearing a heart-weary look. The weather had
been very dry, she said in a melodious French accent, and she had not
felt so very well, and so she had not cared to struggle for a garden,
much less for a prize.
"But the weather," suggested her visitors, "had been quite as dry for
her competitors, and few of them had made so fair a beginning. To say
nothing of prizes, was not the garden itself its own reward?"
She shook her head drearily; she did not know that she should ever care
to garden any more.
"Why?" exclaimed one questioner persuasively, "you didn't talk so when I
was here last month!"
"No," was the reply, "but since three weeks ago--" and all at once up
came the stifled tears, filling her great black eyes and coursing down
her cheeks unhindered, "I los' my baby."
The abashed visitors stammered such apologies as they could. "They would
not have come on this untimely errand could they have known." They
begged forgiveness for their slowness to perceive.
"Yet do not wholly," they presently ventured to urge, "give up your
garden. The day may come when the thought that is now so bitter will, as
a memory, yield some sweetness as well, and then it may be that the
least of bitterness and the most of sweetness will come to you when you
are busy among your flowers."
"It may be," she sighed, but with an unconvinced shrug. And still,
before the summer was gone, the garden sedately, yet very sweetly,
smiled again and even the visitors ventured back.
That was nearly three years ago. Only a few weeks since those two were
in the company of an accomplished man who by some chance--being a
Frenchman--had met and talked with this mother and her husband.
"We made a sad bungle there," said the visitors.
"Do not think it!" he protested. "They are your devoted friends. They
speak of you with the tenderest regard. Moreover, I think they told me
that last year--"
"Yes," rejoined one of the visitors, "last year their garden took one of
the prizes."
THE MIDWINTER GARDENS OF NEW ORLEANS