Manual of Gardening | Page 4

gardens are moodish, particularly with the novice. If plants grow and thrive,

he should be happy; and if the plants that thrive chance not to be the ones that he planted,
they are plants nevertheless, and nature is satisfied with them.
We are wont to covet the things that we cannot have; but we are happier when we love
the things that grow because they must. A patch of lusty pigweeds, growing and
crowding in luxuriant abandon, may be a better and more worthy object of affection than
a bed of coleuses in which every spark of life and spirit and individuality has been
sheared out and suppressed. The man who worries morning and night about the
dandelions in the lawn will find great relief in loving the dandelions. Each blossom is
worth more than a gold coin, as it shines in the exuberant sunlight of the growing spring,
and attracts the insects to its bosom. Little children like the dandelions: why may not we?
Love the things nearest at hand; and love intensely. If I were to write a motto over the
gate of a garden, I should choose the remark that Socrates is said to have made as he saw
the luxuries in the market, "How much there is in the world that I do not want!"
I verily believe that this paragraph I have just written is worth more than all the advice
with which I intend to cram the succeeding pages, notwithstanding the fact that I have
most assiduously extracted this advice from various worthy but, happily, long-forgotten
authors. Happiness is a quality of a person, not of a plant or a garden; and the anticipation
of joy in the writing of a book may be the reason why so many books on garden-making
have been written. Of course, all these books have been good and useful. It would be
ungrateful, at the least, for the present writer to say otherwise; but books grow old, and
the advice becomes too familiar. The sentences need to be transposed and the order of the
chapters varied, now and then, or interest lags. Or, to speak plainly, a new book of advice
on handicraft is needed in every decade, or perhaps oftener in these days of many
publishers. There has been a long and worthy procession of these handbooks,--Gardiner
& Hepburn, M'Mahon, Cobbett--original, pungent, versatile Cobbett!--Fessenden, Squibb,
Bridgeman, Sayers, Buist, and a dozen more, each one a little richer because the others
had been written. But even the fact that all books pass into oblivion does not deter
another hand from making still another venture.
[Illustration: Fig. 1. The ornamental burdock]
I expect, then, that every person who reads this book will make a garden, or will try to
make one; but if only tares grow where roses are desired, I must remind the reader that at
the outset I advised pigweeds. The book, therefore, will suit everybody,--the experienced
gardener, because it will be a repetition of what he already knows; and the novice,
because it will apply as well to a garden of burdocks as of onions.
* * * * *
_What a garden is._
A garden is the personal part of an estate, the area that is most intimately associated with
the private life of the home. Originally, the garden was the area inside the inclosure or
lines of fortification, in distinction from the unprotected area or fields that lay beyond;
and this latter area was the particular domain of agriculture. This book understands the

garden to be that part of the personal or home premises devoted to ornament, and to the
growing of vegetables and fruits. The garden, therefore, is an ill-defined demesne; but the
reader must not make the mistake of defining it by dimensions, for one may have a
garden in a flower-pot or on a thousand acres. In other words, this book declares that
every bit of land that is not used for buildings, walks, drives, and fences, should be
planted. What we shall plant--whether sward, lilacs, thistles, cabbages, pears,
chrysanthemums, or tomatoes--we shall talk about as we proceed.
The only way to keep land perfectly unproductive is to keep it moving. The moment the
owner lets it alone, the planting has begun. In my own garden, this first planting is of
pigweeds. These may be followed, the next year, by ragweeds, then by docks and thistles,
with here and there a start of clover and grass; and it all ends in June-grass and
dandelions.
Nature does not allow the land to remain bare and idle. Even the banks where plaster and
lath were dumped two or three years ago are now luxuriant with burdocks and sweet
clover; and yet persons who pass those dumps every day say that they can grow nothing
in