meet their reader not in the trolley-car or on the suburban train, but
in his own home, comfortably seated. For in order to justify the
eulogistic tone of the descriptions which must presently occupy them
their first word must be a conciliatory protest against hurry. One
reason we Americans garden so little is that we are so perpetually in
haste. The art of gardening is primarily a leisurely and gentle one.
And gentility still has some rights. Our Louisiana Creoles know this,
and at times maintain it far beyond the pales of their evergreen
gardens.
"'Step lively'?" one of them is said to have amazedly retorted in a New
York street-car. "No, the lady shall not step lively. At yo' leisure,
madame, entrez!" In New Orleans the conductors do not cry "Step lively!"
Right or wrong, the cars there are not absolutely democratic. Gentility
really enjoys in them a certain right to be treated gently.
If democracy could know its own tyrants it would know that one of them
is haste--the haste, the hurry of the crowd; that hurry whose cracking
whip makes every one a compulsory sharer in it. The street-car
conductor, poor lad, is not to blame. The fault is ours, many of us
being in such a scramble to buy democracy at any price that, as if we
were belatedly buying railway tickets, we forget to wait for our change.
Now one of this tyrant's human forms is a man a part of whose tyranny is
to call himself a gardener, though he knows he is not one, and the
symbol of whose oppression is nothing more or less than that germ enemy
of good gardening, the lawn-mower. You, if you know the gardening of our
average American home almost anywhere else, would see, yourself, how
true this is, were you in New Orleans. But you see it beautifully proved
not by the presence but by the absence of the tyranny. The lawn-mower
is there, of course; no one is going to propose that the lawn-mower
anywhere be abolished. It is one of our modern marvels of convenience, a
blessed release of countless human backs from countless hours of
crouching, sickle-shaped, over the sickle. It is not the tyrant, but
only like so many other instruments of beneficent democratic
emancipation, the tyrant's opportunity. A large part of its convenience
is expedition, and expedition is the easiest thing in the world to
become vulgarized; vulgarized it becomes haste, and haste is the tyrant.
Such arguing would sound absurdly subtle aimed against the uncloaked,
barefaced tyranny of the street-car conductor, but the tyranny of the
man with the lawn-mower is itself subtle, masked, and requires subtlety
to unmask it.
See how it operates. For so we shall be the better prepared for a
generous appreciation of those far Southern gardens whose beauty has
singled them out for our admiration. We know, of course, that the
"formal garden," by reason of its initial and continuing costliness,
is, and must remain, the garden of the wealthy few, and that the
gardening for the great democracy of our land, the kind that will make
the country at large a gardened land, is "informal," freehand,
ungeometrical gardening. In this sort, on whatever scale, whether of the
capitalist or of the cottager, the supreme feature is the lawn; the
lawn-mower puts this feature within the reach of all, and pretty nearly
every American householder has, such as it is, his bit of Eden.
But just in that happy moment the Tempter gets in. The garden's mistress
or master is beguiled to believe that one may have a garden without the
expense of a gardener and at the same time without any gardening
knowledge. The stable-boy, or the man-of-all-work, or the cook, or the
cottager himself, pushes the lawn-mower, and except for green grass, or
changeable brown and green, their bit of Eden is naked and is not
ashamed.
Or if ashamed, certain other beguilements, other masked democratic
tyrannies, entering, reassure it; bliss of publicity, contempt of
skill, and joy in machinery and machine results. An itinerant ignoramus
comes round with his own lawn-mower, the pushing of which he now makes
his sole occupation for the green half of the year, and the entire
length, breadth and thickness of whose wisdom is a wisdom not of the
lawn but only of the lawn-mower; how to keep its bearings oiled and its
knives chewing fine; and the lawn becomes staringly a factory product.
Then tyranny turns the screw again, and in the bliss of publicity and a
very reasonable desire to make the small home lot look as large as
possible, down come the fences, side and front, and the applauding
specialist of the lawn-mower begs that those obstructions may never be
set up again, because now the householder can have his lawn mowed so
much _quicker_, and he, the pusher, can serve more customers. Were he
truly a gardener he might know somewhat of the sweet, sunlit, zephyrous,
fragrant outdoor privacies possible to a real garden, and more or less
of that benign art which, by skilful shrubbery plantings, can make a
small place look much larger--as well as incomparably more
interesting--than can any mere abolition of fences, and particularly of
the street fence. But he has not so much as one eye of a genuine
gardener or he would know that he is not keeping your lawn but only
keeping it shaven. He is not even a good garden laborer. You might as
well ask him how to know the wild flowers as how to know the lawn
pests--dandelion, chickweed, summer-grass, heal-all, moneywort and the
like--with which you must reckon wearily by and by because he only mows
them in his blindness and lets them flatten to the ground and scatter
their seed like an infantry firing-line. Inquire of him concerning any
one of the few orphan shrubs he has permitted you to set where he least
dislikes them, and which he has trimmed clear of the sod--put into short
skirts--so that he may run his whirling razors under (and now and then
against) them at full speed. Will he know the smallest fact about it or
yield any echo of your interest in it?
There is a late story of an aged mother, in a darkened room, saying
falteringly to the kind son who has brought in some flowers which she
caresses with her soft touch, "I was wishing to-day--We used to have
them in the yard--before the lawn-mower--" and saying no more. I know it
for a fact, that in a certain cemetery the "Sons of the American
Revolution" have for years been prevented from setting up their modest
marks of commemoration upon the graves of Revolutionary heroes, because
they would be in the way of the sexton's lawn-mower.
Now in New Orleans the case is so different that really the amateur
gardener elsewhere has not all his rights until he knows why it is so
different. Let us, therefore, look into it. In that city one day the
present writer accosted an Irishman who stood, pruning-shears in hand,
at the foot of Clay's statue, Lafayette Square. It was the first week of
January, but beside him bloomed abundantly that lovely drooping jasmine
called in the books _jasminum multiflorum_.
"Can you tell me what shrub this is?"
"That, sor, is the _monthly flora!_ Thim as don't know the but-hanical
nayum sometimes calls it the stare jismin, but the but-hanical nayum is
the _monthly flora_."
The inquirer spoke his thanks and passed on, but an eager footfall
overtook him, his elbow felt a touch, and the high title came a third
time: "The but-hanical nayum is the _monthly flora_."
The querist passed on, warmed by a grateful esteem for one who, though
doubtless a skilled and frequent tinkler of the lawn-mower within its
just limitations, was no mere dragoon of it, but kept a regard for
things higher than the bare sod, things of grace in form, in bloom, in
odor, and worthy of "but-hanical nayum." No mere chauffeur he, of the
little two-wheeled machine whose cult, throughout the most of our land,
has all but exterminated ornamental gardening.
In New Orleans, where it has not conquered, there is no crowding for
room. A ten-story building is called there a sky-scraper. The town has
not a dozen in all, and not one of that stature is an apartment or
tenement house. Having felled her surrounding forests of cypress and
drained the swamps in which they stood, she has at command an open plain
capable of housing a population seven times her present three hundred
and fifty thousand, if ever she chooses to build skyward as other cities
do.
But this explains only why New Orleans _might_ have gardens, not why she
chooses to have them, and has them by thousands, when hundreds of other
towns that have the room--and the lawns--choose not to have the
shrubberies, vines and flowers, or have them without arrangement. Why
should New Orleans so exceptionally choose to garden, and garden with
such exceptional grace? Her house-lots are extraordinarily numerous in
proportion to the numbers of her people, and that is a beginning of the
explanation; but it is only a beginning. Individually the most of those
lots are no roomier than lots elsewhere. Thousands of them, prettily
planted, are extremely small.
The explanation lies mainly in certain peculiar limitations, already
hinted, of her--democracy! That is to say, it lies in her fences. Her
fences remain, her democracy is different from the Northern variety. The
difference may consist only in faults both there and here which we all
hope to see democracy itself one day eliminate; but the difference is
palpable. The fences mean that the dwellers behind them have never
accorded to each other, as neighbors, that liberty-to-take-liberties of
which Northern householders and garden-holders, after a
quarter-century's disappointing experiment, are a bit weary.
In New Orleans virtually every home, be it ever so proud or poor, has a
fence on each of its four sides. As a result the home is bounded by its
fences, not by its doors. Unpleasant necessities these barriers are
admitted to be, and those who have them are quite right in not liking
them in their bare anatomy. So they clothe them with shrubberies and
vines and thus on the home's true corporate bound the garden's profile,
countenance and character are established in the best way possible;
without, that is, any impulse toward embellishment _insulated_ from
utility. Compelled by the common frailties of all human nature (even in
a democracy) to maintain fortifications, the householder has veiled the
militant aspect of his defences in the flowered robes and garlandries of
nature's diplomacy and hospitality. Thus reassured, his own inner
hospitality can freely overflow into the fragrant open air and out upon
the lawn--a lawn whose dimensions are enlarged to both eye and mind,
inasmuch as every step around its edges--around its meandering shrubbery
borders--is made affable and entertaining by Flora's versatilities.
[Illustration: "In New Orleans the home is bounded by its fences, not by
its doors--so they clothe them with shrubberies and vines."
It is pleasant to notice how entirely the evergreen-vine-covered wall
preserves the general air of spaciousness. The forest tree at the front
and right (evergreen magnolia) is covered with an evergreen vine from
the turf to its branches.]
[Illustration: "The lawn ... lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from
one shrub-and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across."
A common garden feature in New Orleans is the division fence with front
half of wire, rear half of boards, both planted out with shrubs. The
overhanging forest tree is the evergreen magnolia (_M. grandiflora_).]
At the same time, let us note in passing, this enlargement is partly
because the lawn--not always but very much oftener than where lawns go
unenclosed--lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one
shrub-and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across; free of
bush, statue, urn, fountain, sun-dial or pattern-bed, an uninterrupted
sward. Even where there are lapses from this delightful excellence they
often do not spoil, but only discount, more or less, the beauty of the
general scheme, as may be noted--if without offence we may offer it the
homage of criticism--in one of the gardens we have photographed [page
176] to illustrate these argumentations. There eight distinct
encumbrances narrow the sward without in the least adding to the
garden's abounding charm. The smallest effort of the reader's eye will
show how largely, in a short half-day's work, the fair scene might be
enhanced in lovely dignity simply by the elimination of these slight
excesses, or by their withdrawal toward the lawn's margins and into
closer company with the tall trees.
In New Orleans, where, even when there are basements, of which there are
many, the domains of the cook and butler are somewhere else, a nearly
universal feature of every sort of dwelling--the banker's on two or
three lots, the laborer's on half a one--is a paved walk along one side
of the house, between the house and the lawn, from a front gate to the
kitchen. Generally there is but the one front gate, facing the front
door, with a short walk leading directly up to this door. In such case
the rear walk, beginning at the front door-steps, turns squarely
along the house's front, then at its corner turns again as squarely to
the rear as a drill-sergeant and follows the dwelling's ground contour
with business precision--being a business path. In fact it is only the
same path we see in uncrowded town life everywhere in our land.
[Illustration: "There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the sward....
In a half-day's work, the fair scene might be enhanced in lovely dignity
by the elimination of these excesses."
The sky-line of this beautiful garden becomes a part of the garden
itself, a fact of frequent occurrence in New Orleans. The happy contrast
of rearmost oak and palm is also worthy of notice.]
But down there it shows this peculiarity, that it is altogether likely
to be well bordered with blooming shrubs and plants along all that side
of it next the lawn. Of course it is a fault that this shrubbery
border--and all the more so because it is very apt to be, as in three of
our illustrations [pages 174,178, 180], a rose border--should, so
often as it is, be pinched in between parallel edges. "No pinching" is
as good a rule for the garden as for the kindergarten. Manifestly, on
the side next the house the edge between the walk and the planted border
should run parallel with the base line of the house, for these are
business lines and therefore ever so properly lines of promptitude--of
the shortest practicable distance between two points--lines of supply
and demand, lines of need. For lines of need, business speed!
But for lines of pleasure, grace and leisure. It is the tactful office
of this shrubbery border to veil the business path from the lawn--from
the pleasure-ground. Therefore its _outside_, lawn-side edge should be a
line of pleasure, hence a line of grace, hence not a straight line (dead
line), nor yet a line of but one lethargic curve, but a line of suavity
and tranquil ongoing, a leisurely undulating line.
[Illustration: "The rear walk ... follows the dwelling's ground contour
with business precision--being a business path."]
Not to have it so is an error, but the error is an inoffensive one
easily corrected and the merit is that the dwelling's business path is
greenly, bloomingly screened from its pleasure-ground by a lovely
natural drapery which at the same time furnishes, as far as the path
goes, the house's robes of modesty. Indeed they are furnished farther
than the path goes; for no good work gathers momentum more readily than
does good gardening, and the householder, having begun so rightly, has
now nothing to do to complete the main fabric of his garden but to carry
this flow of natural draperies on round the domicile's back and
farther side and forward to its front again. Thus may he wonderfully
extenuate, even above its reach and where it does not conceal, the
house's architectural faults, thus winsomely enhance all its
architectural charm; like a sweet human mistress of the place, putting
into generous shadow all the ill, and into open sunshine all the best,
of a husband's strong character. (See both right and left foreground of
illustration on page 178, and right foreground on page 180.)
And now if this New Orleans idea--that enough private enclosure to
secure good home gardening is not incompatible with public freedom,
green lawns, good neighborship, sense of room and fulness of
hospitality, and that a house-lot which is a picture is worth more to
everybody (and therefore is even more democratic) than one which is
little else than a map--if this idea, we say, finds any credence among
sister cities and towns that may be able to teach the Creole city much
in other realms of art and criticism, let us cast away chalk and
charcoal for palette and brush and show in floral, arborescent, redolent
detail what is the actual pictorial excellence of these New Orleans
gardens.
For notwithstanding all their shut-in state, neither their virtues nor
their faults are hid from the passing eye. The street fence, oftenest of
iron, is rarely more than breast-high and is always an open fence.
Against its inner side frequently runs an evergreen hedge never taller
than the fence's top. Commonly it is not so tall, is always well clipped
and is so civil to strangers that one would wish to see its like on
every street front, though he might prefer to find it not so invariably
of the one sort of growth--a small, handsome privet, that is, which
nevertheless fulfils its office with the perfection of a solid line of
palace sentries. Unluckily there still prevails a very old-fashioned
tendency to treat the front fence as in itself ornamental and to
forget two things: First, that its nakedness is no part of its
ornamental value; that it would be much handsomer lightly
clothed--underclothed--like, probably, its very next neighbor;
clothed with a hedge, either close or loose, and generously kept below
the passer's line of sight. And, second, that from the householder's
point of view, looking streetward from his garden's inner depth, its
fence, when unplanted, is a blank interruption to his whole fair scheme
of meandering foliage and bloom which on the other three sides frames in
the lawn; as though the garden were a lovely stage scene with the fence
for footlights, and some one had left the footlights unlit.
[Illustration: "Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even ... where it
does not conceal, the house's architectural faults."]
A lovely stage scene, we say, without a hint of the stage's unreality;
for the side and rear fences and walls, being frankly unornamental, call
for more careful management than the front and are often charmingly
treated. (Page 174.) (See, for an example of a side fence with front
half of wire and rear half of boards, page 174, and for solid walls,
pages 180 and 184.) Where they separate neighbors' front lawns they
may be low and open, but back of the building-line, being oftenest tight
and generally more than head-high, they are sure to be draped with such
climbing floral fineries as honeysuckles, ivies, jasmines white and
yellow, lantanas, roses or the Madeira vine. More frequently than not
they are planted also, in strong masses, with ever so many beautiful
sorts of firmer-stemmed growths, herbaceous next the sod, woody behind,
assembled according to stature, from one to twelve feet high, swinging
in and out around the lawn until all stiffness of boundaries is waved
and smiled away.
[Illustration: " ... a lovely stage scene without a hint of the stage's
unreality."
The beauty of this spot could be enhanced in ten minutes by taking away
the planted urns which stand like gazing children in the middle
of the background.]
In that first week of January already mentioned the present writer saw
at every turn, in such borders and in leaf and blossom, the delicate
blue-flowered plumbago; two or three kinds of white jasmine, also in
bloom; and the broad bush-form of the yellow jasmine, beginning to
flower. With them were blooming roses of a dozen kinds; the hibiscus
(not althaea but the _H. rosasinensis_ of our Northern greenhouses), slim
and tall, flaring its mallow-flowers pink, orange, salmon and deep red;
the trailing-lantana, covering broad trellises of ten feet in height and
with its drooping masses of delicate foliage turned from green to
mingled hues of lilac and rose by a complete mantle of their
blossoms. He saw the low, sweet-scented geraniums of lemon, rose and
nutmeg odors, persisting through the winter unblighted, and the
round-leaved, "zonal" sorts surprisingly large of growth--in one case,
on a division fence, trained to the width and height of six feet. There,
too, was the poinsettia still bending in its Christmas red, taller than
the tallest man's reach, often set too forthpushingly at the front, but
at times, with truer art, glowing like a red constellation from the
remoter bays of the lawn; and there, taller yet, the evergreen _Magnolia
fuscata_, full of its waxen, cream-tinted, inch-long flowers smelling
delicately like the banana. He found the sweet olive, of refined leaf
and minute axillary flowers yielding their ravishing tonic odor with the
reserve of the violet; the pittosporum; the box; the myrtle; the
camphor-tree with its neat foliage answering fragrantly the grasp of the
hand. The dark camellia was there, as broad and tall as a lilac-bush,
its firm, glossy leaves of the deepest green and its splendid red
flowers covering it from tip to sod, one specimen showing by count a
thousand blossoms open at once and the sod beneath innumerably starred
with others already fallen. The night jasmine, in full green, was not
yet in blossom but it was visibly thinking of the spring. The Chinese
privet, of twenty feet stature, in perennial leaf, was saving its
flowers for May. The sea-green oleander, fifteen feet high and wide (see
extreme left foreground, page 176), drooped to the sward on four sides
but hoarded its floral cascade for June. The evergreen loquat (locally
miscalled the mespilus plum) was already faltering into bloom; also the
orange, with its flower-buds among its polished leaves, whitening for
their own wedding; while high over them towered the date and other
palms, spired the cedar and arborvitae, and with majestic infrequency,
where grounds were ample, spread the lofty green, scintillating boughs
of the magnolia grandiflora (see left foregrounds on pages 174, 182
and 184), the giant, winter-bare pecan and the wide, mossy arms of the
vast live-oak.
[Illustration: "Back of the building-line the fences ... generally more
than head-high ... are sure to be draped."]
[Illustration: " ... from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer
side of Easter."
In any garden as fair as this there should be some place to sit down.
This deficiency is one of the commonest faults in American gardening.]
Now while the time of year in which these conditions are visible
heightens their lovely wonder, their practical value to Northern
home-lovers is not the marvel and delight of something inimitable but
their inspiring suggestion of what may be done with ordinary Northern
home grounds, to the end that the floral pageantry of the Southern
January may be fully rivalled by the glory of the Northern June.
For of course the Flora of the North, who in the winter of long white
nights puts off all her jewelry and nearly all her robes and "lies down
to pleasant dreams," is the blonde sister of, and equal heiress with,
this darker one who, in undivested greenery and flowered trappings,
persists in open-air revelry through all the months from the autumn side
of Christmas to the summer side of Easter. Wherefore it seems to me the
Northern householder's first step should be to lay hold upon this New
Orleans idea in gardening--which is merely by adoption a New Orleans
idea, while through and through, except where now and then its votaries
stoop to folly, it is by book a Northern voice, the garden gospel of
Frederick Law Olmsted.