The Amateur Garden | Page 7

grove.
[Illustration: "A fountain ... where one,--or two,--can sit and hear it
whisper."
The ravine of the three fish pools. There is a drop of thirty feet between
the upper and the lowermost pool.]
The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of the lawn

in under the grove was one of the early tasks of my own acre. When the
house was built its lot and others backed up to a hard, straight rear line
where the old field had halted at its fence and where the woods began
on ground that fell to the river at an angle of from forty to fifty degrees.
Here my gifted friend and adviser gave me a precept got from his
earlier gifted friend and adviser, Frederick Law Olmsted: that passing
from any part of a pleasure-ground to any part next it should be entirely
safe and easy or else impossible. By the application of this maxim I
brought my lawn and grove together in one of the happiest of marriages.
For I proceeded, by filling with earth (and furnace ashes), to carry the
lawn in, practically level, beyond the old fence line and under the
chestnuts and pines sometimes six feet, sometimes twelve, until the
difficult and unsafe forty or fifty degrees of abrupt fall were changed to
an impassable sixty and seventy degrees, and every one's instinctive
choice of way was the contour paths.
At the same time this has preserved, and even enhanced, the place's
wildness, especially the wild flowers and the low-nesting birds.
Sometimes a few yards of retaining-wall, never cemented, always laid
up dry and with a strong inward batter, had to be put in to avoid
smothering the roots of some great tree; for, as everybody knows and
nearly everybody forgets, roots, like fishes, must have air. In one place,
across the filled head of a ravine, the wall, though but a scant yard high,
is fifty feet long, and there is another place where there should be one
like it. In this work no tree was sacrificed save one noble oak done to
death by a youth who knew but forgot that roots must have air.
Not to make the work expensive it was pursued slowly, through many
successive seasons; yet before even its easy, first half was done the
lawn was in under the grove on an apparently natural, irregular crest
line. Moreover the grove was out on the lawn with an even more
natural haphazard bordering line; for another operation had been
carried on meantime. Trees, souvenir trees, had from time to time been
planted on the lawn by visiting friends. Most of them are set close
enough to the grove to become a part of it, standing in a careful
irregularity which has already obliterated, without molesting, the tree
line of the ancient fence.

[Illustration: "The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the
pushing of the lawn in under the grove was one of the early tasks of My
Own Acre."
At the point where the party is drinking tea (the site of the Indian
mound) the overlap of grove and lawn is eighty-five feet across the old
fence line that once sharply divided them.]
Young senators among their seniors, they still have much growth to
make before they can enter into their full forest dignity, yet Henry
Ward Beecher's elm is nearly two feet through and has a spread of fifty;
Max O'Rell's white-ash is a foot in diameter and fifty feet high; Edward
Atkinson's is something more, and Felix Adler's hemlock-spruce, the
maple of Anthony Hope Hawkins, L. Clark Seelye's English ash, Henry
van Dyke's white-ash, Sol Smith Russell's linden, and Hamilton Wright
Mabie's horse-chestnut are all about thirty-five feet high and cast a
goodly shade. Sir James M. Barrie's elm--his and Sir William
Robertson Nicoll's, who planted it with him later than the plantings
aforementioned--has, by some virtue in the soil or in its own energies,
reached a height of nearly sixty-five feet and a diameter of sixteen
inches. Other souvenirs are a horse-chestnut planted by Minnie
Maddern Fiske, a ginkgo by Alice Freeman Palmer, a beech by Paul
van Dyke, a horse-chestnut by Anna Hempstead Branch, another by Sir
Sidney Lee, yet another by Mary E. Burt, a catalpa by Madelaine
Wynne, a Colorado blue spruce--fitly placed after much labor of
mind--by Sir Moses Ezekiel, and a Kentucky coffee-tree by Gerald
Stanley Lee and Jennette Lee, of our own town. Among these should
also stand the maple of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but it was killed in its
second winter by an undetected mouse at its roots. Except Sir Moses,
all the knights here named received the accolade after their tree
plantings, but I draw no moral.
[Illustration: "Souvenir trees had from time