The Amateur Garden | Page 5

four acres--one of sward, three of woods--which I
proposed to hold under more or less discipline, leaving the rest--a
wooded strip running up the river shore--wholly wild, as college girls,
for example, would count wildness. In both parts the wealth of foliage
on timber and underbrush almost everywhere shut the river out of view

from the lawn and kept the eye restless for a glint, if no more, of water.
And so there I thought at once to give myself what I had all my life
most absurdly wished for, a fish-pool. I had never been able to look
upon an aquarium and keep the tenth Commandment. I had never
caught a fish without wanting to take it home and legally adopt it into
the family--a tendency which once led my son to say, "Yes, he would
be pleased to go fishing with me if I would only fish in a sportsmanlike
manner." What a beautifully marked fish is the sun-perch! Once, in
boyhood, I kept six of those "pumpkin-seed" in a cistern, and my smile
has never been the same since I lost them--one of my war losses.
I resolved to impound the waters of my spring in the ravine and keep
fish at last--without salt--to my heart's content. Yet I remembered
certain restraining precepts: first, that law of art which condemns
incongruity--requires everything to be in keeping with its natural
surroundings--and which therefore, for one thing, makes an American
garden the best possible sort of garden to have in America; second, that
twin art law, against inutility, which demands that everything in an
artistic scheme serve the use it pretends to serve; third, a precept of
Colonel Waring's: "Don't fool with running water if you haven't money
to fool away"; and, fourth, that best of all gardening rules--look before
you leap.
However, on second thought, and tenth, and twentieth, one thought a
day for twenty days, I found that if water was to be impounded
anywhere on my acre here was the strategic point. Down this ravine, as
I have said, was the lawn's one good glimpse of the river, and a kindred
gleam intervening would tend, in effect, to draw those farther waters in
under the trees and into the picture.
Such relationships are very rewarding to find to whoever would garden
well. Hence this mention. One's garden has to do with whatever is in
sight from it, fair or otherwise, and it is as feasible and important to
plant in the fair as to plant out the otherwise. Also, in making my grove
paths, I had noticed that to cross this ravine where at one or two places
in its upper half a contour grade would have been pettily circuitous and
uninteresting, and to cross it comfortably, there should be either a

bridge or a dam; and a dam with water behind it seemed pleasanter
every way--showed less incongruity and less inutility--than a bridge
with no water under it.
As to "fooling with running water," the mere trickle here in question
had to be dragged out of its cradle to make it run at all. It remained for
me to find out by experience that even that weakling, imprisoned and
grown to a pool, though of only three hundred square feet in surface,
when aided and abetted by New England frosts and exposed on a
southern slope to winter noonday suns, could give its amateur captor as
much trouble--proportionately--as any Hebrew babe drawn from the
bulrushes of the Nile is said to have given his.
Now if there is any value in recording these experiences it can be only
in the art principles they reveal. To me in the present small instance the
principle illustrated was that of the true profile line for ascent or
descent in a garden. You may go into any American town where there
is any inequality of ground and in half an hour find a hundred or two
private lawns graded--from the house to each boundary line--on a
single falling curve, or, in plain English, a hump. The best reason why
this curve is not artistic, not pleasing, but stupid, is that it is not natural
and gains nothing by being unnatural. All gardening is a certain
conquest of Nature, and even when "formal" should interfere with her
own manner and custom as slightly as is required by the necessities of
the case--the needs of that particular spot's human use and joy. The
right profile and surface for a lawn of falling grade, the surface which
will permanently best beguile both eye and foot, should follow a double
curve, an ogee line. For, more or less emphasized, that is Nature's line
in all her affable moods on land or water: a descent or ascent beginning
gradually, increasing rapidly, and concluding gently. We see