[Gutenberg 19408] • The Amateur Garden by Cable, George Washington -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

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That gardening is best ... which best ministers to man's felicity with least disturbance of nature's freedom."

This is my study. The tree in the middle of the picture is Barrie's elm. I once lifted it between my thumb and finger, but I was younger and the tree was smaller. The dark tree in the foreground on the right is Felix Adler's hemlock. [Page 82]

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

BY GEORGE W. CABLE

ILLUSTRATED

CONTENTS ILLUSTRATIONS MY OWN ACRE

" ... that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill River loiters through Paradise."

A strong wire fence (invisible in the picture) here divides the grove from the old river road. "On this green of the dryads ... lies My Own Acre." The two young oaks in the picture are part of the row which gives the street its name. "The beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full back to the rapids just above My Own Acre." This is the "Hoe Shop." The tower was ruined by fire many years ago, and because of its unsafety is being taken down at the present writing. "A fountain ... where one,—or two,—can sit and hear it whisper." The ravine of the three fish pools. There is a drop of thirty feet between the upper and the lowermost pool. "The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of the lawn in under the grove was one of the early tasks of My Own Acre." At the point where the party is drinking tea (the site of the Indian mound) the overlap of grove and lawn is eighty-five feet across the old fence line that once sharply divided them. "Souvenir trees had from time to time been planted on the lawn by visiting friends." The Beecher elm, first of the souvenir trees. "How the words were said which some of the planters spoke." President Seelye of Smith College planting a tree.—A majority of the company present were Smith College students and others engaged in the work of the People's Institute. The tree on the left is Barrie's elm. The tree directly behind the small sapling which is being planted, and on a line with it, is Max O'Rell's. The hemlock-spruce between them is Felix Adler's. "'Where are you going?' says the eye. 'Come and see,' says the roaming line." This planting conceals one of the alleys described on page 34. In the alley a concrete bench built into a concrete wall looks across the entire breadth of the garden and into the sunset. "The lane is open to view from end to end. It has two deep bays on the side nearest the lawn." The straight line of high growth conceals in the midst of its foliage a wire division fence, and makes a perfect background for blooming herbaceous perennials.

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

" ... until the house itself seems as naturally ... to grow up out of the garden as the high keynote rises at the end of a lady's song."

On the right of this picture you may see the piers of one of the front gates of My Own Acre standing under Henry Ward Beecher's elm. The urn forms surmounting them are of concrete, and the urns are cast from earlier forms in wood, which were a gift from Henry van Dyke. On the left the tops of the arbor vitæ and a magnolia are bending in the wind. "Beautiful results may be got on smallest grounds." This is half of a back yard, the whole of which is equally handsome. The place to which it belongs took a capital prize in the Carnegie Flower Garden Competition. "Muffle your architectural angles in foliage and bloom." An invisible fault of this planting is that it was set too close to the building and tended to give an impression, probably groundless, of promoting dampness. Also it was an inconvenience to mechanics in painting or repairing. Fences masked by shrubbery. One straight line of Williston Seminary campus, the effect of whose iron fence before it was planted out with barberry may be seen in the two panels of it still bare on the extreme right. After the first frost annual plantings cease to be attractive. 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. Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles. South Hall, Williston Seminary. (See "Where to Plant What.") " ... 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.)

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

"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. "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. " ... 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. "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. " ... 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.

THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF NORTHAMPTON

"You can make gardening a concerted public movement."

A gathering on My Own Acre in the interest of the Flower Garden Competition. "Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the foundation-lines of all its buildings." A secluded back corner of a prize-winner's garden which shows how slight a planting may redeem the homeliness of an old fence. "Not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but to procure its widest and most general dissemination." A cheap apartment row whose landlord had its planting done by the People's Institute.

THE PRIVATE GARDEN'S PUBLIC VALUE

"Having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having spiritual wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus."

The owner of this cottage, who stands on the lawn, spaded and graded it and grassed it herself, and by shrubbery plantings about the house's foundation and on the outer boundaries of the grass has so transformed it since this picture was taken as to win one of the highest prizes awarded among more than a thousand competitors. "One such competing garden was so beautiful last year that strangers driving by stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy a nearer view." A capital prize-winner's back yard which was a sand bank when he entered the competition. His front yard is still handsomer. "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. "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.

THE MIDWINTER GARDENS OF NEW ORLEANS

"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. "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). "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. "The rear walk ... follows the dwelling's ground contour with business precision—being a business path." "Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even ... where it does not conceal, the house's architectural faults." " ... 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. "Back of the building-line the fences ... generally more than head-high ... are sure to be draped." " ... 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. "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. "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.

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