The Amateur Garden

Part 1

Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Janet Blenkinship and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

This is my study. The tree in the middle of the picture is Barrie's elm. I once lifted it between my thumb and finger, but I was younger and the tree was smaller. The dark tree in the foreground on the right is Felix Adler's hemlock. [Page 82]]

THE AMATEUR GARDEN

GEORGE W. CABLE

ILLUSTRATED

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

NEW YORK: MCMXIV

Copyright, 1914, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published October, 1914

CONTENTS

PAGE

MY OWN ACRE 1

THE AMERICAN GARDEN 41

WHERE TO PLANT WHAT 79

THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF NORTHAMPTON 107

THE PRIVATE GARDEN'S PUBLIC VALUE 129

THE MIDWINTER GARDENS OF NEW ORLEANS 163

ILLUSTRATIONS

"That gardening is best ... which best ministers to man's felicity with least disturbance of nature's freedom" Frontis

"... that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill River loiters through Paradise" 6

"On this green of the dryads ... lies My Own Acre" 8

"The beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full back to the rapids just above My Own Acre" 12

"A fountain ... where one,--or two,--can sit and hear it whisper" 22

"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" 24

"Souvenir trees had from time to time been planted on the lawn by visiting friends" 26

"How the words were said which some of the planters spoke" 28

"'Where are you going?' says the eye. 'Come and see,' says the roaming line" 34

Part 2

"The lane is open to view from end to end. It has two deep bays on the side nearest the lawn" 36

"... until the house itself seems as naturally ... to grow up out of the garden as the high keynote rises at the end of a lady's song" 48

"Beautiful results may be got on smallest grounds" 52

"Muffle your architectural angles in foliage and bloom" 52

Fences masked by shrubbery 64

After the first frost annual plantings cease to be attractive 72

Shrubbery versus annuals 72

Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles. South Hall, Williston Seminary 74

"... a line of shrubbery swinging in and out in strong, graceful undulations" 74

"However enraptured of wild nature you may be, you do and must require of her some subserviency about your own dwelling" 84

"Plant it where it will best enjoy itself" 86

"... climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by darkness and breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom belong at its far end" 94

"Some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon and lure" 96

"... tall, rectangular, three-story piles ... full of windows all of one size, pigeon-house style" 100

"You can make gardening a concerted public movement" 112

"Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the foundation-lines of all its buildings" 122

"Not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but to procure its widest and most general dissemination" 122

"Having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having spiritual wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus" 138

"One such competing garden was so beautiful last year that strangers driving by stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy a nearer view" 138

"Beauty can be called into life about the most unpretentious domicile" 148

"Those who pay no one to die, plant or prune for them" 148

"In New Orleans the home is bounded by its fences, not by its doors--so they clothe them with shrubberies and vines" 174

"The lawn ... lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one shrub-and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across" 174

"There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the sward.... In a half-day's work, the fair scene might be enhanced in lovely dignity by the elimination of these excesses" 176

"The rear walk ... follows the dwelling's ground contour with business precision--being a business path" 178

"Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even ... where it does not conceal, the house's architectural faults" 180

"... a lovely stage scene without a hint of the stage's unreality" 182

"Back of the building-line the fences ... generally more than head-high ... are sure to be draped" 184

Part 3

"... from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of Easter" 184

"The sleeping beauty of the garden's unlost configuration ... keeping a winter's share of its feminine grace and softness" 186

"It is only there that I see anything so stalwart as a pine or so rigid as a spruce" 192

MY OWN ACRE

A lifelong habit of story-telling has much to do with the production of these pages.

All the more does it move me because it has always included, as perhaps it does in most story-tellers, a keen preference for true stories, stories of actual occurrence.

A flower-garden trying to be beautiful is a charming instance of something which a storyteller can otherwise only dream of. For such a garden is itself a story, one which actually and naturally occurs, yet occurs under its master's guidance and control and with artistic effect.

Yet it was this same story-telling bent which long held me back while from time to time I generalized on gardening and on gardens other than my own. A well-designed garden is not only a true story happening artistically but it is one that passes through a new revision each year, "with the former translations diligently compared and revised." Each year my own acre has confessed itself so full of mistranslations of the true text of gardening, has promised, each season, so much fairer a show in its next edition, and has been kept so prolongedly busy teaching and reteaching its master where to plant what, while as to money outlays compelled to live so much more like a poet than like a prince, that the bent for story-telling itself could not help but say wait.

Now, however, the company to which this chapter logically belongs is actually showing excellent reasons why a history of their writer's own acre should lead them. Let me, then, begin by explaining that the small city of Northampton, Massachusetts, where I have lived all the latter three-fifths of my adult years, sits on the first rise of ground which from the west overlooks the alluvial meadows of the Connecticut, nine miles above South Hadley Falls. Close at its back a small stream, Mill River, coming out of the Hampshire hills on its way to the Connecticut, winds through a strip of woods so fair as to have been named--from a much earlier day than when Jenny Lind called it so--"Paradise." On its town side this wooded ground a few hundred yards wide drops suddenly a hundred feet or so to the mill stream and is cut into many transverse ravines.

In its timber growth, conspicuous by their number, tower white-pines, while among them stand only less loftily a remarkable variety of forest trees imperfectly listed by a certain humble authority as "mostly h-oak, h-ellum, and h-ash, with a little 'ickory."

Imperfectly listed, for there one may find also the birch and the beech, the linden, sycamore, chestnut, poplar, hemlock-spruce, butternut, and maple overhanging such pleasant undergrowths as the hornbeam and hop-hornbeam, willows, black-cherry and choke-cherry, dogwood and other cornels, several viburnums, bush maples of two or three kinds, alder, elder, sumach, hazel, witch-hazel, the shadblow and other perennial, fair-blooming, sweet-smelling favorites, beneath which lies a leaf-mould rife with ferns and wild flowers.

From its business quarter the town's chief street of residence, Elm Street, begins a gently winding westerly ascent to become an open high-road from one to another of the several farming and manufacturing villages that use the water-power of Mill River. But while it is still a street there runs from it southerly at a right angle a straight bit of avenue some three hundred yards long--an exceptional length of unbent street for Northampton. This short avenue ends at another, still shorter, lying square across its foot within some seventy yards of that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill River loiters through Paradise. The strip of land between the woods and this last street is taken up by half a dozen dwellings of modest dignity, whose front shade-trees, being on the southerly side, have been placed not on the sidewalk's roadside edge but on the side next the dwellings and close within their line of private ownership: red, white and post-oaks set there by the present writer when he named the street "Dryads' Green." They are now twenty-one years old and give a good shade which actually falls where it is wanted--upon the sidewalk.

A strong wire fence (invisible in the picture) here divides the grove from the old river road.]

On this green of the dryads, where it intercepts the "avenue" that slips over from the Elm Street trolley-cars, lies, such as it is, my own acre; house, lawn, shrubberies and, at the rear, in the edge of the pines, the study. Back there by the study--which sometimes in irony we call the power-house--the lawn merges into my seven other acres, in Paradise. Really the whole possession is a much humbler one than I find myself able to make it appear in the flattering terms of land measure. Those seven acres of Paradise I acquired as "waste land." Nevertheless, if I were selling that "waste," that "hole in the ground," it would not hurt my conscience, such as it is, to declare that the birds on it alone are worth more than it cost: wood-thrushes and robins, golden orioles, scarlet tanagers, blackbirds, bluebirds, oven-birds, cedar-birds, veeries, vireos, song-sparrows, flycatchers, kinglets, the flicker, the cuckoo, the nuthatch, the chickadee and the rose-breasted grosbeak, not to mention jays or kingfishers, swallows, the little green heron or that cock of the walk, the red squirrel.

Continue reading The Amateur Garden free in the Wunder reader →