The Amateur Garden Part 3

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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.]

It is hoped these sayings, quoted or otherwise, may seem the more in place here because they contemplate the aspects likely to characterize the American garden whenever that garden fully arrives. We like largeness. There are many other qualities to desire, and to desire even more; but if we give them also the liking we truly owe them it is right for us to like largeness. Certainly it is better to like largeness even for itself, rather than smallness for itself. Especially is it right that we should like our gardens to look as large as we can make them appear. Our countless lawns, naked clear up into their rigid corners and to their dividing lines, are naked in revolt against the earlier fashion of spotting them over with shrubs, the easiest as well as the worst way of making a place look small. But a naked lawn does not make the premises look as large, nor does it look as large itself, as it will if planted in the manner we venture to commend to our Northampton prize-seekers. Between any two points a line of shrubbery swinging in and out in strong, graceful undulations appears much longer than a straight one, because it is longer. But, over and above this, it makes the distance between the two points seem greater. Everybody knows the old boast of the landscape-architects--that they can make one piece of ground look twice as large as another of the same measure, however small, by merely grading and planting the two on contrary schemes. The present writer knows one small street in his town, a street of fair dwellings, on which every lawn is diminished to the eye by faulty grading.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles.

South Hall, Williston Seminary. (See "Where to Plant What.")]

[Ill.u.s.tration: " ... 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.)]

For this he has no occasion to make himself responsible but there are certain empty lots not far from him for whose aspect he is answerable, having graded them himself (before he knew how). He has repeatedly heard their depth estimated at ninety feet, never at more. In fact it is one hundred and thirty-nine. However, he has somewhat to do also with a garden whose grading was quite as bad--identical, indeed--whose fault has been covered up and its depth made to seem actually greater than it is, entirely by a corrective planting of its shrubbery.

One of the happiest things about gardening is that when it is bad you can always--you and time--you and year after next--make it good. It is very easy to think of the plants, beds and paths of a garden as things which, being once placed, must stay where they are; but it is shortsighted and it is fatal to effective gardening. We should look upon the arrangement of things in our garden very much as a housekeeper looks on the arrangement of the furniture in her house. Except buildings, pavements and great trees--and not always excepting the trees--we should regard nothing in it as permanent architecture but only as furnishment and decoration. At favorable moments you will make whatever rearrangement may seem to you good. A shrub's mere being in a certain place is no final reason that it should stay there; a shrub or a dozen shrubs--next spring or fall you may transplant them. A shrub, or even a tree, may belong where it is this season, and the next and the next; and yet in the fourth year, because of its excessive growth, of the more desired growth of something else, or of some rearrangement of other things, that spot may be no longer the best place for it.

Very few shrubs are injured by careful and seasonable, even though repeated, transplanting. Many are benefited by one or another effect of the process: by the root pruning they get, by the "division," by the change of soil, by change of exposure or even by backset in growth.

Transplanting is part of a garden's good discipline. It is almost as necessary to the best results as pruning--on which grave subject there is no room to speak here. The owner even of an American garden should rule his garden, not be ruled by it. Yet he should rule without oppression, and it will not be truly American if it fails to show at a glance that it is not overgardened.

Thus do we propose to exhort our next season's compet.i.tors as this fall and winter they gather at our projected indoor garden-talks, or as we go among them to offer counsel concerning their grounds plans for next spring. And we hope not to omit to say, as we had almost omitted to say here, in behalf of the kind of garden we preach, that shrubs, the most of them, require no great enrichment of the soil--an important consideration. And we shall take much care to recommend the perusal of books on gardening. Once this gentle art was largely kept a close secret of craftsmen; but now all that can be put into books is in books, and the books are non-technical, brief and inexpensive; or if voluminous and costly, as some of the best needs must be, are in the public libraries.

In their pages are a host of facts (indexed!) which once had to be burdensomely remembered. For one preoccupied with other cares--as every amateur gardener ought to be--these books are no mean part of his equipment; they are as necessary to his best gardening as the dictionary to his best English.

What a daily, hourly, unfailing wonder are the modern opportunities and facilities by which we are surrounded! If the present reader and the present writer, and maybe a few others, will but respond to them worthily, who knows but we may ourselves live to see, and to see as democratically common as telephones and electric cars, the American garden? Of course there is ever and ever so much more to be said about it, and the present writer is not at all weary; but he hears his reader's clock telling the hour and feels very sure it is correct.

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT

Often one's hands are too heavily veneered with garden loam for him to go to his books to verify a quotation. It was the great Jefferson, was it not, who laid into the foundations of American democracy the imperishable maxim that "That gardening is best which gardens the least"? My rendition of it may be more a parody than a quotation but, whatever its inaccuracy, to me it still sounds Jeffersonian--Joseph Jeffersonian.

Whether we read it "garden" or "govern," it has this fine mark of a masterful utterance, that it makes no perceptible effort to protect itself against the caviller or the simpleton; from men, for instance, who would interpret it as meaning that the only perfect government, or gardening, is none at all. Speaking from the point of view of a garden-lover, I suppose the true signification is that the best government is the government which procures and preserves the n.o.blest happiness of the community with the least enthralment of the individual.

Now, I hope that as world-citizens and even as Americans we may bear in mind that, while this maxim may be wholly true, it is not therefore the whole truth. What maxim is? Let us ever keep a sweet, self-respecting modesty with which to confront and consort with those who see the science of government, or art of gardening, from the standpoint of some other equally true fraction of the whole truth. All we need here maintain for our Jeffersonian maxim is that its wide domination in American sentiment explains the larger part of all the merits and faults of American government--and American gardening. It accounts for nearly all our American laws and ordinances, manners, customs, and whims, and in the great discussion of Where to Plant What (in America) no one need hope to prevail who does not recognize that this high principle of American democracy is the best rule for American gardening. That gardening is best, for most Americans, which best ministers to man's felicity with least disturbance of nature's freedom.

Hence the initial question--a question which every amateur gardener must answer for himself. How much subserviency of nature to art and utility is really necessary to my own and my friends' and neighbors' best delight? For--be not deceived--however enraptured of wild nature you may be, you do and must require of her _some_ subserviency close about your own dwelling. You cannot there persistently enjoy the wolf and the panther, the muskrat, buzzard, gopher, rattlesnake, poison-ivy and skunk in full swing, as it were. How much, then, of nature's subserviency does the range of your tastes demand? Also, how much will your purse allow?

For it is as true in gardening as in statecraft that, your government being once genuinely established, the more of it you have, the more you must pay for it. In gardening, as in government, the cost of the scheme is not in proportion to the goodness or badness of its art, but to its intensity.

This is why the general and very sane inclination of our American preferences is away from that intense sort of gardening called "formal,"

and toward that rather unfairly termed "informal" method which here, at least, I should like to distinguish as "free-line" gardening. A free people who govern leniently will garden leniently. Their gardening will not be a vexing tax upon themselves, upon others, or upon the garden.

Whatever freedom it takes away from themselves or others or the garden will be no more than is required for the n.o.blest delight; and whatever freedom remains untaken, such gardening will help everybody to exercise and enjoy.

The garden of free lines, provided only it be a real garden under a real government, is, to my eye, an angel's protest against every species and degree of tyranny and oppression, and such a garden, however small or extensive, will contain a large proportion of flowering shrubbery.

Because a garden should not, any more than my lady's face, have all its features--nose, eyes, ears, lips--of one size? No, that is true of all gardening alike; but because with flowering shrubbery our gardening can be more lenient than with annuals alone, or with only herbaceous plants and evergreens.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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.]

So, then, our problem, Where to Plant What, may become for a moment, Where to Plant Shrubbery; and the response of the free-line garden will be, of course, "Remember, concerning each separate shrub, that he or she--or it, if you really _prefer_ the neuter--is your guest, and plant him or her or it where it will best enjoy itself, while promoting the whole company's joy." Before it has arrived in the garden, therefore, learn--and carefully consider--its likes and dislikes, habits, manners and accomplishments and its friendly or possibly unfriendly relations with your other guests. This done, determine between whom and whom you will seat it; between what and what you will plant it, that is, so as to "draw it out," as we say of diffident or reticent persons; or to use it for drawing out others of less social address. But how many a lovely shrub has arrived where it was urgently invited, and found that its host or hostess, or both, had actually forgotten its name! Did not know how to introduce it to any fellow guest, or whether it loved sun or shade, loam, peat, clay, leaf-mould or sand, wetness or dryness; and yet should have found all that out in the proper blue-book (horticultural dictionary) before inviting the poor mortified guest at all.

"Oh, pray be seated--anywhere. Plant yourself alone in the middle. This is Liberty Garden."

"It is no such thing," says the tear-bedewed beauty to herself; "it's Anarchy Garden." Yet, like the lady she is, she stays where she is put, and gets along surprisingly well.

New England calls Northampton one of her most beautiful towns. But its beauty lies in the natural landscape in and around it, in the rise, fall, and swing of the seat on which it sits, the graceful curving of its streets, the n.o.ble spread of its great elms and maples, the green and blue openness of grounds everywhere about its modest homes and its highly picturesque outlook upon distant hills and mountains and intervening meadows and fields, with the Connecticut winding through.

Its architecture is in three or four instances admirable though not extraordinary, and, as in almost every town in our vast America, there are hardly five householders in it who are really skilled flower-gardeners, either professional or amateur.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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.]

As the present century was coming in, however, the opportunity, through private flower-gardening, to double or quadruple the town's beauty and to do it without great trouble or expense, yet with great individual delight and social pleasure, came to the lively notice of a number of us. It is, then, for the promotion of this object throughout all our bounds, and not for the perfection of the art for its own sake, that we maintain this compet.i.tion and award these "Carnegie" prizes. Hence certain features of our method the value and necessity of which might not be clear to the casual inquirer without this explanation.

May I repeat it? Not to reward two or three persons yearly for reaching some dizzy peak of art unattainable by ordinary taste and skill, nor to reward one part of the town or one element of its people for gardening better than another, nor to promote the production of individual plants or flowers of extraordinary splendor, nor even to incite children to raise patches of flowers, is our design; but to make the modest and democratic art of Where to Plant What (an art, nevertheless, quite beyond the grasp of children) so well known and so valued that its practical adoption shall overrun the whole town.

To this end we have divided our field into seven districts, in each of which the number of gardens is about the same. In each of these seven districts only three prizes (out of twenty-one) may be taken in any one season. Consequently three prizes _must_ fall to each district every year. Yet the best garden of all still carries off the capital prize, the second-best may win the second, and cannot take a lower than the third, and the lowest awards go into the district showing the poorest results. Even this plan is so modified as further to stimulate those who strive against odds of location or conditions, for no district is allowed to receive two prizes consecutive in the list. The second prize cannot be bestowed in the same district in which the first is being awarded, though the third can. The third cannot go into the same district as the second, though the fourth may. And so on to the twenty-first. Moreover, a garden showing much improvement over the previous season may take a prize, as against a better garden which shows no such improvement. Also no garden can take the capital prize twice nor ever take a prize not higher than it has taken before. The twenty-one prizes are for those who hire no help in their gardening; two others are for those who reserve the liberty to employ help, and still another two are exclusively for previous winners of the capital prize, competing among themselves. In each of the five districts a committee of ladies visits the competing gardens, inspecting, advising, encouraging, sometimes learning more than they teach, and reporting to headquarters, the People's Inst.i.tute. At these headquarters, on two acres of ground in the heart of the city, we have brought gradually into shape, on a plan furnished by Frederick Law Olmsted's Sons, Landscape Architects, of Boston (Brookline), a remarkably handsome garden of flowers and shrubbery designed as a model for the guidance of those in the compet.i.tion who seek to combine artistic beauty with inexpensiveness.

From time to time we have given at these headquarters winter courses of lectures on practical flower-gardening.

As a result we have improved, and are still improving, the aspect of entire streets and are interesting the whole city.

But to return to our discussion. Here is a short story of two ladies.

They are not in our compet.i.tion, 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 gra.s.s-plot something larger than a table-cloth, but certainly not large enough for a game of marbles. In the centre of this bit of gra.s.s 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 impa.s.sioned 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 a.n.a.logy 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.ser-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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: " ... climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by darkness and breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom belong at its far end."