The Amateur Garden | Page 9

month. These, too, I value, but, for me,
they are over-apt to carry too much deckload of the advice and gentle
vauntings of other amateurs. I have an amateur's abhorrence of
amateurs! The Cyclopedia knows, and will always send me to the right
books if it cannot thresh a matter out with me itself. Before Bailey my
fount of knowledge was Mr. E. J. Canning, late of Smith College

Botanic Gardens; a spring still far from dry.
As the books enjoin, I began my book-gardening with a plan on paper;
not the elaborate thing one pays for when he can give his garden more
money than time, but a light sketch, a mere fundamental suggestion.
This came professionally from a landscape-architect, Miss Frances
Bullard, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who had just finished plotting the
grounds of my neighbor, the college.
I tell of my own garden for another reason: that it shows, I think, how
much can be done with how little, if for the doing you take time instead
of money. All things come to the garden that knows how to wait. Mine
has acquired at leisure a group of effects which would have cost from
ten to twenty times as much if got in a hurry. Garden for ten-year
results and get them for next to nothing, and at the same time you may
quicken speed whenever your exchequer smiles broadly enough. Of
course this argument is chiefly for those who have the time and not the
money; for by time we mean play time, time which is money lost if you
don't play. The garden that gives the most joy, "Joyous Gard," as Sir
Launcelot named his, is not to be bought, like a Circassian slave; it
must be brought up, like a daughter. How much of life they can miss
who can buy whatever they want whenever they want it!
But I tell first of my own garden also because I believe it summarizes
to the eye a number of primary book-rules, authoritative "don'ts," by
the observance of which a multitude of amateur gardeners may get
better results than it yet shows. Nevertheless, I will hardly do more than
note a few exceptions to these ground rules, which may give the rules a
more convincing force. First of all, "don't" let any of your planting cut
or split your place in two. How many a small house-lot lawn we see
split down the middle by a row of ornamental shrubs or fruit-trees
which might as easily have been set within a few feet of the property
line, whose rigidity, moreover, would have best excused the rigidity of
the planted line. But such glaring instances aside, there are many
subtler ones quite as unfortunate; "don't" be too sure you are not
unwittingly furnishing one.
"Don't" destroy the openness of your sward by dotting it with shrubs or

pattern flower-beds. To this rule I doubt if a plausible exception could
be contrived. It is so sweeping and so primary that we might well
withhold it here were we not seeking to state its artistic reason why.
Which is, that such plantings are mere eruptions of individual
smartness, without dignity and with no part in any general unity;
chirping up like pert children in a company presumably trying to be
rational.
On the other hand, I hope my acre, despite all its unconscious or
unconfessed mistakes, shows pleasantly that the best openness of a
lawn is not to be got between unclothed, right-angled and parallel
bounds. The more its verdure-clad borders swing in and out the longer
they look, not merely because they are longer but also because they
interest and lure the eye. "Where are you going?" says the eye.
"Come and see," says the roaming line.
"Don't" plant in stiff lines except in close relation to architectural or
legal bounds. A straight horizontal line Nature scarcely knows save in
her rocks and on a vaster scale than we here have to do with. Yet
straight lines in gardening are often good and fine if only they are lines
of real need. Where, when and in what degree it is good to subordinate
utility to beauty or beauty to utility depends on time, place and
circumstance, but when in doubt "don't" pinch either to pet the other.
Oppression is never good art. Yet "don't" cry war, war, where there is
no war. A true beauty and a needed utility may bristle on first collision
but they soon make friends. Was it not Ruskin himself who wanted to
butt the railway-train off the track and paw up the rails--something like
that? But even between them and the landscape there is now an entente
cordiale. I have seen the hand of Joseph Pennell make beautiful peace
with billboards and telegraph-poles and wires.
The