The Amateur Garden | Page 2

architectural faults" 180
"... a lovely stage scene without a hint of the stage's unreality" 182
"Back of the building-line the fences ... generally more than
head-high ... are sure to be draped" 184
"... from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of Easter"
184
"The sleeping beauty of the garden's unlost configuration ... keeping a
winter's share of its feminine grace and softness" 186
"It is only there that I see anything so stalwart as a pine or so rigid as a
spruce" 192

MY OWN ACRE

A lifelong habit of story-telling has much to do with the production of
these pages.
All the more does it move me because it has always included, as
perhaps it does in most story-tellers, a keen preference for true stories,
stories of actual occurrence.
A flower-garden trying to be beautiful is a charming instance of
something which a storyteller can otherwise only dream of. For such a
garden is itself a story, one which actually and naturally occurs, yet
occurs under its master's guidance and control and with artistic effect.
Yet it was this same story-telling bent which long held me back while
from time to time I generalized on gardening and on gardens other than
my own. A well-designed garden is not only a true story happening
artistically but it is one that passes through a new revision each year,
"with the former translations diligently compared and revised." Each
year my own acre has confessed itself so full of mistranslations of the
true text of gardening, has promised, each season, so much fairer a
show in its next edition, and has been kept so prolongedly busy
teaching and reteaching its master where to plant what, while as to
money outlays compelled to live so much more like a poet than like a
prince, that the bent for story-telling itself could not help but say wait.
Now, however, the company to which this chapter logically belongs is
actually showing excellent reasons why a history of their writer's own
acre should lead them. Let me, then, begin by explaining that the small
city of Northampton, Massachusetts, where I have lived all the latter
three-fifths of my adult years, sits on the first rise of ground which
from the west overlooks the alluvial meadows of the Connecticut, nine
miles above South Hadley Falls. Close at its back a small stream, Mill
River, coming out of the Hampshire hills on its way to the Connecticut,
winds through a strip of woods so fair as to have been named--from a
much earlier day than when Jenny Lind called it so--"Paradise." On its
town side this wooded ground a few hundred yards wide drops
suddenly a hundred feet or so to the mill stream and is cut into many
transverse ravines.

In its timber growth, conspicuous by their number, tower white-pines,
while among them stand only less loftily a remarkable variety of forest
trees imperfectly listed by a certain humble authority as "mostly h-oak,
h-ellum, and h-ash, with a little 'ickory."
Imperfectly listed, for there one may find also the birch and the beech,
the linden, sycamore, chestnut, poplar, hemlock-spruce, butternut, and
maple overhanging such pleasant undergrowths as the hornbeam and
hop-hornbeam, willows, black-cherry and choke-cherry, dogwood and
other cornels, several viburnums, bush maples of two or three kinds,
alder, elder, sumach, hazel, witch-hazel, the shadblow and other
perennial, fair-blooming, sweet-smelling favorites, beneath which lies a
leaf-mould rife with ferns and wild flowers.
From its business quarter the town's chief street of residence, Elm
Street, begins a gently winding westerly ascent to become an open
high-road from one to another of the several farming and
manufacturing villages that use the water-power of Mill River. But
while it is still a street there runs from it southerly at a right angle a
straight bit of avenue some three hundred yards long--an exceptional
length of unbent street for Northampton. This short avenue ends at
another, still shorter, lying square across its foot within some seventy
yards of that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill
River loiters through Paradise. The strip of land between the woods and
this last street is taken up by half a dozen dwellings of modest dignity,
whose front shade-trees, being on the southerly side, have been placed
not on the sidewalk's roadside edge but on the side next the dwellings
and close within their line of private ownership: red, white and
post-oaks set there by the present writer when he named the street
"Dryads' Green." They are now twenty-one years old and give a good
shade which actually falls where it is wanted--upon the sidewalk.
[Illustration: " ... that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground
where Mill River loiters through Paradise."
A strong wire fence (invisible in the picture) here divides