The Amateur Garden | Page 6

it in the
face of any smooth knoll or billow. I believe the artists impute to
Praxiteles a certain ownership in this double curve. It is a living line; it
suggests Nature conscious and astir as no single curve or straight line
can.
I admit that even among amateurs this is rather small talk, but it brings
me to this point: in the passage of water down a ravine of its own

making, this line of Nature astir may repeat itself again and again but is
commonly too inaffable, abrupt, angular, to suggest the ogee. In that
middle part of it where the descent is swift it may be more or less of a
plunge, and after the plunge the water is likely to pause on the third
turn, in a natural pool, before resuming its triple action again. And so,
in my ravine, some seasons later, I ventured to detain the overflow of
my first pool on a second and a third lingering place, augmenting the
water supply by new springs developed in the bottoms of the new pools.
The second pool has a surface of a thousand square feet, the third spans
nineteen hundred, and there are fish in all three, hatched
there--"pumpkin-seed" included, but also trout--among spontaneous
bulrushes, pond-lilies, flags, and dainty water-weeds; and sometimes at
night, when the reflected glory of a ten-o'clock full moon shines up
from it to the stone exedra on the lawn, I seem to have taken my
Praxitelean curves so directly from Nature that she thinks she took
them herself from me and thanks me for the suggestion.
Please observe that of great gardens, or of costly gardens whether great
or only costly, we here say nothing. Our theme is such a garden as a
householder may himself make and keep or for which, at most, he
needs professional advice only in its first planning, and for its upkeep
one gardener, with one occasional helper in pressing seasons or in
constructional work.
Constructional work. Dams, for example. In two of my dams I built
cores of concrete and thus made acquaintance with that interesting
material. Later I pressed the acquaintanceship, made garden and grove
seats, a table or two, a very modest fountain for a single jet of water in
my highest, smallest fish-pool, and even a flight of steps with a pair of
gaîne-shaped pedestals--suggested by a sculptor friend--at their top.
The exedra I mentioned just now is of concrete. The stuff is a
temptation to be wary of. The ordinary gray sort--I have touched no
other--is a humble medium, and pretentious designs in humble
materials are one of the worst, and oldest, of garden incongruities. In
my ventures with concrete I have studied for grace in form but grace
subordinated to stability, and have shunned embellishment.
Embellishment for its own sake is the easiest and commonest sin

against good art wherever art becomes self-conscious. It is having a
riotous time just now in concrete. I have rarely seen a commercial
concrete garden-seat which was not more ornate than I should want it
for my own acre. I happen to have two or three articles in my garden
which are a trifle elaborate but they are of terra-cotta, are not
home-made and would be plainer could I have found them so.
A garden needs furniture only less than a house, and concrete is a boon
to "natural" gardening, being inexpensive, rustic, and imperishable. I
fancy a chief reason why there is such inconsiderate dearth of seats and
steps in our American amateur gardens is the old fashion--so well got
rid of at any cost--of rustic cedar and hickory stairs and benches. "Have
none of them," was Colonel Waring's injunction; "they are forever out
of repair."
But I fear another reason is that so often our gardens are neither for
private ease nor social joy, but for public display and are planned
mainly for street exhibition. That is the way we commonly treat garden
fountains! We make a smug show of unfenced, unhedged, universal
hospitality across a sidewalk boundary which nevertheless we hold
inviolate--sometimes by means of a painted sign or gas-pipe--and never
say "Have a seat" to the dearest friend in any secluded nook of our
shrubberies, if there is such a nook. How many of us know a fountain
beside an embowered seat where one,--or two,--with or without the
book of verses, can sit and hear it whisper or watch the moonlight
cover it with silent kisses? In my limited experience I have known of
but two. One is by the once favorite thought-promoting summer seat of
Augustus Saint-Gaudens on his own home acre in Vermont; the other I
need not particularize further than to say that it is one of the things
which interlock and unify a certain garden and