The Amateur Garden | Page 8

to time been planted on the
lawn by visiting friends."
The Beecher elm, first of the souvenir trees.]
Would it were practicable to transmit to those who may know these

trees in later days the scenes of their setting out and to tell just how the
words were said which some of the planters spoke. Mr. Beecher, lover
of young trees and young children, straightened up after pressing the
soil about the roots with hands as well as feet and said: "I cannot wish
you to live as long as this tree, but may your children's children and
their children sit under its shade." Said Felix Adler to his
hemlock-spruce, "Vivat, crescat, floreat"; and a sentiment much like it
was implied in Sol Smith Russell's words to the grove's master as they
finished putting in his linden together--for he was just then proposing
to play Rip Van Winkle, which Joseph Jefferson had finally decided to
produce no more: "Here's to your healt', undt der healt' of all your
family; may you lif long undt brosper."
We--the first person singular grows tiresome--we might have now, on
our acre, a tree planted by Joseph Jefferson had we thought in time to
be provided with a sapling, growing, in a tub. Have your prospective
souvenir tree already tubbed and waiting. This idea I got from Andrew
Carnegie, with whom I had the honor to plant an oak at Skibo Castle
and from whom I, like so many others, have had other things almost as
good as ideas. Have your prospective souvenir tree tubbed and the tub
sunk in the ground, of course, to its rim. Then the dear friend can plant
it at any time that he may chance along between March and December.
But let no souvenir tree, however planted, be treated, after planting, as
other than a living thing if you would be just to it, to your friend, or to
yourself. Cultivate it; coax it on; and it will grow two or three or four
times as fast as if left to fight its daily battle for life unaided. And do
not forbear to plant trees because they grow so slowly. They need not.
They do not. With a little attention they grow so swiftly! Before you
know it you are sitting in their shade. Besides Sir Arthur's maple the
only souvenir tree we have lost was a tulip-tree planted by my friend of
half a lifetime, the late Franklin H. Head.
So much for my grove. I write of it not in self-complacency. My many
blunders, some of them yet to be made, are a good insurance against
that. I write because of the countless acres as good as mine, in this great,
dear America, which might now be giving their owners all the healthful
pastime, private solace, or solitary or social delights which this one

yields, yet which are only "waste lands" or "holes in the ground"
because unavailable for house lots or tillage.
[Illustration: "How the words were said which some of the planters
spoke."
President Seelye of Smith College planting a tree.--A majority of the
company present were Smith College students and others engaged in
the work of the People's Institute. The tree on the left is Barrie's elm.
The tree directly behind the small sapling which is being planted, and
on a line with it, is Max O'Rell's. The hemlock-spruce between them is
Felix Adler's.]
And now as to the single acre by measure, of lawn, shrubs, and plants,
close around my house; for the reason that it was and is my school of
gardening. There was no garden here--I write this in the midst of
it--when I began. Ten steps from where I sit there had been a small
Indian mound which some one had carefully excavated. I found stone
arrow chips on the spot, and one whole arrow-head. So here no one
else's earlier skill was in evidence to point my course or impede it. This
was my clean new slate and at that time I had never "done a sum" in
gardening and got anything like a right answer.
It is emphatically an amateur garden and a book garden: a garden
which to me, as to most of us, would have been impossible in any but
these days when the whole art of gardening has been printed in books
and no amateur is excusable for trying to garden without reading them,
or for saying after having read them that he has planned and worked
without professional advice. The books are the professional advice,
with few drawbacks and with the great advantage that they are ours
truly and do not even have to be "'phoned." I should rather have in my
library my Bailey's "American Cyclopedia of Horticulture," than any
two garden periodicals once a