asking--if we will but ask ourselves instead of the lawn-mower man--an
effect of home, of comfort, cheer and grace, of summer and autumn
reminiscences and of spring's anticipations, immeasurably better than
any ordinary eye or fancy can extort from the rectangular and
stiffened-out nakedness of unplanted boundaries; immeasurably better
than the month-by-month daily death-stare of shroud-like snow around
houses standing barefooted on the frozen ground. It may be by hearty
choice that we abide where we must forego outdoor roses in Christmas
week and broad-leaved evergreens blooming at New Year's, Twelfth-night
or Carnival. Well and good! But we can have even in mid-January, and
ought to allow ourselves, the lawn-garden's surviving form and tranced
life rather than the shrubless lawn's unmarked grave flattened beneath
the void of the snow. We ought to retain the sleeping beauty of the
ordered garden's unlost configuration, with the warm house for its
bosom, with all its remoter contours--alleys, bays, bushy networks
and sky-line--keeping a winter share of their feminine grace and
softness. We ought to retain the "frozen music" of its myriad gray, red
and yellow stems and twigs and lingering blue and scarlet berries
stirring, though leaflessly, for the kiss of spring. And we ought to
retain the invincible green of cedars, junipers and box, cypress,
laurel, hemlock spruce and cloaking ivy, darkling amid and above these,
receiving from and giving to them a cheer which neither could have in
their frostbound Eden without mutual contrast.
[Illustration: "The sleeping beauty of the garden's unlost configuration
... keeping a winter's share of its feminine grace and softness."
This picture was taken in the first flush of spring. The trees in
blossom are the wild Japanese cherry.]
Eden! If I so recklessly ignore latitude as to borrow the name of the
first gardener's garden for such a shivering garden as this it is
because I see this one in a dream of hope--a diffident, interrogating
hope--really to behold, some day, this dream-garden of Northern winters
as I have never with actual open eyes found one kept by any merely
well-to-do American citizen. If I describe it I must preface with all
the disclaimers of a self-conscious amateur whose most venturesome
argument goes no farther than "Why not?" yet whom the evergreen gardens
of New Orleans revisited in January impel to protest against every
needless submission to the tyrannies of frost and of a gardening art--or
non-art, a submission which only in the outdoor embellishment of the
home takes winter supinely, abjectly.
This garden of a hope's dream covers but three ordinary town lots. Often
it shrinks to but one without asking for any notable change of plan.
Following all the lines, the hard, law lines, that divide it from its
neighbors and the street, there runs, waist-high on its street front,
shoulder-high on its side bounds, a close evergreen hedge of hemlock
spruce. In its young way this hedge has been handsome from infancy;
though still but a few years old it gives, the twelvemonth round, a note
both virile and refined in color, texture and form, and if the art that
planted it and the care that keeps it do not decay neither need the
hedge for a century to come. Against the intensest cold this side of
Labrador it is perfectly hardy, is trimmed with a sloping top to shed
snows whose weight might mutilate it, and can be kept in repair from
generation to generation, like the house's plumbing or roof, or like
some green-uniformed pet regiment with ranks yet full after the last of
its first members has perished.
Furthermore, along the inner side of this green hedge (sometimes close
against it, sometimes with a turfed alley between), as well as all round
about the house, extend borders of deciduous shrubs, with such
meandering boundaries next the broad white lawn as the present writer,
for this time, has probably extolled enough. These bare, gray shrub
masses are not wholly bare or gray and have other and most pleasingly
visible advantages over unplanted, pallid vacancy, others besides the
mere lace-work of their twigs and the occasional tenderness of a last
summer's bird's nest. Here and there, breaking the cold monotone, a bush
of moose maple shows the white-streaked green of its bare stems and
sprays, or cornus or willow gives a soft glow of red, purple or yellow.
Only here and there, insists my dream, lest when winter at length gives
way to the "rosy time of the year" their large and rustic gentleness
mar the nuptial revels of summer's returned aristocracy. Because,
moreover, there is a far stronger effect of life, home and cheer from
the broad-leaved evergreens which, in duly limited numbers, assemble
with and behind these, and from the lither sorts of conifers that spire
out of the network and haze of living things in winter sleep. The
plantings at the garden's and dwelling's front being properly, of
course, lower than those farther back, I see among them, in this dream,
the evergreen box and several kinds of evergreen ferns. I see two or
three species of evergreen barberries, not to speak of Thunberg's
leafless one warm red with its all-winter berries, the winter garden's
rubric. I see two varieties of euonymus; various low junipers; two sorts
of laurel; two of andromeda, and the high-clambering evergreen ivy.
Beginning with these in front, infrequent there but multiplying toward
the place's rear, are bush and tree forms of evergreen holly, native
rhododendrons, the many sorts of foreign cedars and our native ones
white and red, their skyward lines modified as the square or pointed
architecture of the house may call for contrasts in pointed or
broad-topped arborescence. If, at times, I dream behind all this a
grove, with now and then one of its broad, steepling or columnar trees
pushed forward upon the lawn, it is only there that I see anything so
stalwart as a pine or so rigid as a spruce.
Such is the vision, and if I never see it with open eyes and in real
sunlight, even as a dream it is--like certain other things of less
dignity--grateful, comforting. I warrant there are mistakes in it, but
you will find mistakes wherever you find achievement, and there is no
law against them--in well-meant dreams. Observe, if you please, this
vision lays no drawback on the garden's summer beauty and affluence.
Twelve months of the year it enhances its dignity and elegance. Both the
numerical proportions of evergreens to other greens, and the scheme of
their distribution, are quite as correct and effective for contrast and
background to the transient foliage and countless flowers of July as
amid the bare ramage of January. Summer and winter alike, the gravest
items among them all, the conifers, retain their values even in those
New Orleans gardens. When we remember that in New England and on all its
isotherm it is winter all that half of the year when most of us are at
home, why should we not seek to realize this snow-garden dream? Even a
partial or faulty achievement of it will surely look lovelier than the
naked house left out on its naked white lawn like an unclaimed trunk on
a way-station platform. I would not, for anything, offend the reader's
dignity, but I must think that this midwinter garden may be made at
least as much lovelier than no garden as Alice's Cheshire cat was
lovelier--with or without its grin--than the grin without the cat.
[Illustration: "It is only there that I see anything so stalwart as a
pine or so rigid as a spruce."
The blossoming trees in this picture are a Chinese crab blooming ten
days later than the Japanese wild cherry (see illustration facing
p. 186), which is now in full leaf at their back.]
Shall we summarize? Our gist is this: that those gardens of New Orleans
are as they are, not by mere advantage of climate but for several other
reasons. Their bounds of ownership and privacy are enclosed in hedges,
tight or loose, or in vine-clad fences or walls. The lawn is regarded as
a ruling feature of the home's visage, but not as its whole
countenance--one flat feature never yet made a lovely face. This lawn
feature is beautified and magnified by keeping it open from shrub border
to shrub border, saving it, above all things, from the gaudy barbarism
of pattern-bedding; and by giving it swing and sweep of graceful
contours. And lastly, all ground lines of the house are clothed with
shrubberies whose deciduous growths are companioned with broad-leafed
evergreens and varied conifers, in whatever proportions will secure the
best midwinter effects without such abatement to those of summer as
would diminish the total of the whole year's joy.
These are things that can be done anywhere in our land, and wherever
done with due regard to soil as well as to climate will give us gardens
worthy to be named with those of New Orleans, if not, in some aspects
and at particular times of the year, excelling them. As long as mistakes
are made in the architecture of houses they will be made in the
architecture of gardening, and New Orleans herself, by a little more
care for the fundamentals of art, of all art, could easily surpass her
present floral charm. Yet in her gardens there is one further point
calling for approval and imitation: the _very_ high trimming of the
stems of lofty trees. Here many a reader will feel a start of
resentment; but in the name of the exceptional beauty one may there see
resulting from the practice let us allow the idea a moment's
entertainment, put argument aside and consider a concrete instance whose
description shall be our closing word.
Across the street in which, that January, we sojourned (we were two),
there was a piece of ground of an ordinary town square's length and
somewhat less breadth. It had been a private garden. Its owner had given
it to the city. Along its broad side, which our windows looked out upon,
stood perfectly straight and upright across the sky to the south of them
a row of magnolias (grandiflora) at least sixty feet high, with their
boles, as smooth as the beach, trimmed bare for two-thirds of their
stature. The really decorative marks of the trimming had been so many
years, so many decades, healed as to show that no harm had come of it or
would come. The soaring, dark-green, glittering foliage stood out
against the almost perpetually blue and white sky. Beyond them, a few
yards within the place but not in a straight line, rose even higher a
number of old cedars similarly treated and offering a pleasing contrast
to the magnolias by the feathery texture of their dense sprays and the
very different cast of their lack-lustre green. Overtopping all, on the
farther line of the grounds, southern line, several pecan-trees of
nearly a hundred feet in height, leafless, with a multitude of
broad-spreading boughs all high in air by natural habit, gave an effect
strongly like that of winter elms, though much enlivened by the near
company of the evergreen masses of cedar and magnolia. These made the
upper-air half of the garden, the other half being assembled below. For
the lofty trim of the wintergreen-trees--the beauty of which may have
been learned from the palms--allowed and invited another planting
beneath them. Magnolias, when permitted to branch low, are, to
undergrowth, among the most inhospitable of trees, but in this garden,
where the sunlight and the breezes passed abundantly under such
high-lifted arms and among such clean, bare stems, a congregation of
shrubs, undershrubs and plants of every stature and breadth, arose,
flourished and flowered without stint. Yonder the wind-split,
fathom-long leaves of the banana, brightening the background, arched
upward, drooped again and faintly oscillated to the air's caress. Here
bloomed and smelled the delicate magnolia fuscata, and here, redder with
flowers than green with shining leaves, shone the camellia. Here spread
the dark oleander, the pittosporum and the Chinese privet; and here were
the camphor-tree and the slender sweet olive--we have named them all
before and our steps should not take us over the same ground twice in
one circuit; that would be bad gardening. But there they were, under
those ordinarily so intolerant trees, prospering and singing praises
with them, some in full blossom and perfume, some waiting their turn,
like parts of a choir. In the midst of all, where a broad path eddied
quite round an irregular open space, and that tender quaintness of decay
appeared which is the unfailing New Orleans touch, the space was filled
with roses. This spot was lovely enough by day and not less so for being
a haunt of toddling babes and their nurses; but at night--! Regularly at
evening there comes into the New Orleans air, from Heaven knows whither,
not a mist, not a fog nor a dampness, but a soft, transparent, poetical
dimness that in no wise shortens the range of vision--a counterpart of
that condition which so many thousands of favored travellers in other
longitudes know as the "Atlantic haze." One night--oh, oftener than
that, but let us say one for the value of understatement--returning to
our quarters some time before midnight, we stepped out upon the balcony
to gaze across into that garden. The sky was clear, the neighborhood
silent. A wind stirred, but the shrubberies stood motionless. The moon,
nearly full, swung directly before us, pouring its gracious light
through the tenuous cross-hatchings of the pecans, nestling it in the
dense tops of the cedars and magnolias and sprinkling it to the ground
among the lower growths and between their green-black shadows. When in a
certain impotence of rapture we cast about in our minds for an adequate
comparison--where description in words seemed impossible--the only
parallel we could find was the art of Corot and such masters from the
lands where the wonderful pictorial value of trees trimmed high has been
known for centuries and is still cherished. For without those trees so
disciplined the ravishing picture of that garden would have been
impossible.
Of course our Northern gardens cannot smile like that in winter. But
they need not perish, as tens of thousands of lawn-mower, pattern-bed,
so-called gardens do. They should but hibernate, as snugly as the bear,
the squirrel, the bee; and who that ever in full health of mind and body
saw spring come back to a Northern garden of blossoming trees, shrubs
and undershrubs has not rejoiced in a year of four clear-cut seasons? Or
who that ever saw mating birds, greening swards, starting violets and
all the early flowers loved of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Bryant and
Tennyson, has not felt that the resurrection of landscape and garden
owes at least half its glory to the long trance of winter, and wished
that dwellers in Creole lands might see New England's First of June? For
what says the brave old song-couplet of New England's mothers? That--
"Spring would be but wintry weather
If we had nothing else but spring."
Every year, even in Massachusetts--even in Michigan--spring, summer, and
autumn are sure to come overladen with their gifts and make us a good,
long, merry visit. All the other enlightened and well-to-do nations of
the world entertain them with the gardening art and its joys and so make
fairer, richer and stronger than can be made indoors alone the
individual soul, the family, the social, the civic, the national life.
In this small matter we Americans are at the wrong end of the
procession. What shall we do about it?