The Amateur Garden | Page 3

the grove
from the old river road.]

On this green of the dryads, where it intercepts the "avenue" that slips
over from the Elm Street trolley-cars, lies, such as it is, my own acre;
house, lawn, shrubberies and, at the rear, in the edge of the pines, the
study. Back there by the study--which sometimes in irony we call the
power-house--the lawn merges into my seven other acres, in Paradise.
Really the whole possession is a much humbler one than I find myself
able to make it appear in the flattering terms of land measure. Those
seven acres of Paradise I acquired as "waste land." Nevertheless, if I
were selling that "waste," that "hole in the ground," it would not hurt
my conscience, such as it is, to declare that the birds on it alone are
worth more than it cost: wood-thrushes and robins, golden orioles,
scarlet tanagers, blackbirds, bluebirds, oven-birds, cedar-birds, veeries,
vireos, song-sparrows, flycatchers, kinglets, the flicker, the cuckoo, the
nuthatch, the chickadee and the rose-breasted grosbeak, not to mention
jays or kingfishers, swallows, the little green heron or that cock of the
walk, the red squirrel.
Speaking of walks, it was with them--and one drive--in this grove, that
I made my first venture toward the artistic enhancement of my
acre,--acre this time in the old sense that ignores feet and rods. I was
quite willing to make it a matter of as many years as necessary when
pursued as play, not work, on the least possible money outlay and
having for its end a garden of joy, not of care. By no inborn sagacity
did I discover this to be the true first step, but by the trained eye of an
honored and dear friend, that distinguished engineer and famous street
commissioner of New York, Colonel George E. Waring, who lost his
life in the sanitary regeneration of Havana.
[Illustration: "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.]
"Contour paths" was the word he gave me; paths starting from the top
of the steep broken ground and bending in and out across and around
its ridges and ravines at a uniform decline of, say, six inches to every
ten feet, until the desired terminus is reached below; much as, in its
larger way, a railway or aqueduct might, or as cattle do when they roam

in the hills. Thus, by the slightest possible interference with natural
conditions, these paths were given a winding course every step of
which was pleasing because justified by the necessities of the case,
traversing the main inequalities of the ground with the ease of level
land yet without diminishing its superior variety and charm. And so
with contour paths I began to find, right at my back door and on my
own acre, in nerve-tired hours, an outdoor relaxation which I could
begin, leave off and resume at any moment and which has never staled
on me. For this was the genesis of all I have learned or done in
gardening, such as it is.
My appliances for laying out the grades were simple enough: a
spirit-level, a stiff ten-foot rod with an eighteen-inch leg nailed firmly
on one end of it, a twelve-inch leg on the other, a hatchet, and a basket
of short stakes with which to mark the points, ten feet apart, where the
longer leg, in front on all down grades, rested when the spirit-level,
strapped on the rod, showed the rod to be exactly horizontal. Trivial
inequalities of surface were arbitrarily cut down or built up and covered
with leaves and pine-straw to disguise the fact, and whenever a tree or
anything worth preserving stood in the way here came the loaded
barrow and the barrowist, like a piece of artillery sweeping into action,
and a fill undistinguishable from nature soon brought the path around
the obstacle on what had been its lower side, to meander on at its
unvarying rate of rise or fall as though nothing--except the trees and
wild flowers--had happened since the vast freshets of the post-glacial
period built the landscape. I made the drive first, of steeper grade than
the paths; but every new length of way built, whether walk or road,
made the next easier to build, by making easier going for the artillery,
the construction train. Also each new path has made it easier to bring
up, for the lawn garden, sand, clay, or leaf-mould, or for hearth
consumption all the wood which the grove's natural mortality each year
requires to be disposed of. There is a superior spiritual quality in the
warmth of a fire of h-oak, h-ash, and even h-ellum gathered from your
own acre, especially if the acre