The Amateur Garden | Page 4

is very small and has contour paths. By
a fire of my own acre's "dead and down" I write these lines. I never buy
cordwood.

Only half the grove has required these paths, the other half being down
on the flat margin of the river, traversed by a cart-road at least half a
century old, though used by wheels hardly twice a year; but in the three
acres where lie the contour paths there is now three-fifths of a mile of
them, not a rod of which is superfluous. And then I have two examples
of another kind of path: paths with steps; paths which for good and
lawful reasons cannot allow you time to go around on the "five per
cent" grade but must cut across, taking a single ravine lengthwise, to
visit its three fish-pools.
These steps, and two short retaining walls elsewhere in the grove, are
made of the field stones of the region, uncut. All are laid "dry" like the
ordinary stone fences of New England farms, and the walls are built
with a smart inward batter so that the winter frosts may heave them
year after year, heave and leave but not tumble them down. I got that
idea from a book. Everything worth while on my acre is from books
except what two or three professional friends have from time to time
dropped into my hungry ear. Both my ears have good appetites--for
garden lore.
About half a mile from me, down Mill River, stands the factory of a
prized friend who more than any other man helps by personal daily care
to promote Northampton's "People's Institute," of whose home-garden
work I have much to say in the chapters that follow this one. For forty
years or more this factory has been known far and wide as the "Hoe
Shop" because it makes shovels. It has never made hoes. It uses
water-power, and the beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the
river full back to the rapids just above my own acre. In winter this is
the favorite skating-pond of the town and of Smith College. In the
greener seasons of college terms the girls constantly pass upstream and
down in their pretty rowboats and canoes, making a charming effect as
seen from my lawn's rear edge at the head of the pine and oak shaded
ravine whose fish-pools are gay by turns with elder, wild sunflower,
sumach, iris, water-lilies, and forget-me-not.
[Illustration: "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.]
This ravine, the middle one of the grove's three, is about a hundred feet
wide. When I first began to venture the human touch in it, it afforded
no open spot level enough to hold a camp-stool. From the lawn above
to the river road below, the distance is three hundred and thirty feet,
and the fall, of fifty-five feet, is mostly at the upper end, which is
therefore too steep, as well as too full of varied undergrowth, for any
going but climbing. In the next ravine on its left there was a clear, cold
spring and in the one on its right ran a natural rivulet that trickled even
in August; but this middle ravine was dry or merely moist.
Here let me say to any who would try an amateur landscape art on their
own acre at the edge of a growing town, that the town's growth tends
steadily to diminish the amount of their landscape's natural water
supply by catching on street pavements and scores and hundreds of
roofs, lawns and walks, and carrying away in sewers, the rain and
melting snows which for ages filtered slowly through the soil. Small
wonder, I think, that, when in the square quarter-mile between my acre
and Elm Street fifty-three dwellings and three short streets took the
place of an old farm, my grove, by sheer water famine, lost several of
its giant pines. Wonder to me is that the harm seems at length to have
ceased.
But about that ravine: one day the nature of its growth and soil,
especially its alders, elders, and willows and a show of clay and gravel,
forced on my notice the likelihood that here, too, had once been a
spring, if no more. I scratched at its head with a stick and out came an
imprisoned rill like a recollected word from the scratched head of a
schoolboy. Happily the spot was just at the bottom of the impassably
steep fall of ground next the edge of the lawn and was almost in the
centre of those