Part 14

Now in New Orleans the case is so different that really the amateur gardener elsewhere has not all his rights until he knows why it is so different. Let us, therefore, look into it. In that city one day the present writer accosted an Irishman who stood, pruning-shears in hand, at the foot of Clay's statue, Lafayette Square. It was the first week of January, but beside him bloomed abundantly that lovely drooping jasmine called in the books jasminum multiflorum.

"Can you tell me what shrub this is?"

"That, sor, is the monthly flora! Thim as don't know the but-hanical nayum sometimes calls it the stare jismin, but the but-hanical nayum is the monthly flora."

The inquirer spoke his thanks and passed on, but an eager footfall overtook him, his elbow felt a touch, and the high title came a third time: "The but-hanical nayum is the monthly flora."

The querist passed on, warmed by a grateful esteem for one who, though doubtless a skilled and frequent tinkler of the lawn-mower within its just limitations, was no mere dragoon of it, but kept a regard for things higher than the bare sod, things of grace in form, in bloom, in odor, and worthy of "but-hanical nayum." No mere chauffeur he, of the little two-wheeled machine whose cult, throughout the most of our land, has all but exterminated ornamental gardening.

In New Orleans, where it has not conquered, there is no crowding for room. A ten-story building is called there a sky-scraper. The town has not a dozen in all, and not one of that stature is an apartment or tenement house. Having felled her surrounding forests of cypress and drained the swamps in which they stood, she has at command an open plain capable of housing a population seven times her present three hundred and fifty thousand, if ever she chooses to build skyward as other cities do.

But this explains only why New Orleans might have gardens, not why she chooses to have them, and has them by thousands, when hundreds of other towns that have the room--and the lawns--choose not to have the shrubberies, vines and flowers, or have them without arrangement. Why should New Orleans so exceptionally choose to garden, and garden with such exceptional grace? Her house-lots are extraordinarily numerous in proportion to the numbers of her people, and that is a beginning of the explanation; but it is only a beginning. Individually the most of those lots are no roomier than lots elsewhere. Thousands of them, prettily planted, are extremely small.

The explanation lies mainly in certain peculiar limitations, already hinted, of her--democracy! That is to say, it lies in her fences. Her fences remain, her democracy is different from the Northern variety. The difference may consist only in faults both there and here which we all hope to see democracy itself one day eliminate; but the difference is palpable. The fences mean that the dwellers behind them have never accorded to each other, as neighbors, that liberty-to-take-liberties of which Northern householders and garden-holders, after a quarter-century's disappointing experiment, are a bit weary.

In New Orleans virtually every home, be it ever so proud or poor, has a fence on each of its four sides. As a result the home is bounded by its fences, not by its doors. Unpleasant necessities these barriers are admitted to be, and those who have them are quite right in not liking them in their bare anatomy. So they clothe them with shrubberies and vines and thus on the home's true corporate bound the garden's profile, countenance and character are established in the best way possible; without, that is, any impulse toward embellishment insulated from utility. Compelled by the common frailties of all human nature (even in a democracy) to maintain fortifications, the householder has veiled the militant aspect of his defences in the flowered robes and garlandries of nature's diplomacy and hospitality. Thus reassured, his own inner hospitality can freely overflow into the fragrant open air and out upon the lawn--a lawn whose dimensions are enlarged to both eye and mind, inasmuch as every step around its edges--around its meandering shrubbery borders--is made affable and entertaining by Flora's versatilities.

It is pleasant to notice how entirely the evergreen-vine-covered wall preserves the general air of spaciousness. The forest tree at the front and right (evergreen magnolia) is covered with an evergreen vine from the turf to its branches.]

A common garden feature in New Orleans is the division fence with front half of wire, rear half of boards, both planted out with shrubs. The overhanging forest tree is the evergreen magnolia (M. grandiflora).]

At the same time, let us note in passing, this enlargement is partly because the lawn--not always but very much oftener than where lawns go unenclosed--lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one shrub-and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across; free of bush, statue, urn, fountain, sun-dial or pattern-bed, an uninterrupted sward. Even where there are lapses from this delightful excellence they often do not spoil, but only discount, more or less, the beauty of the general scheme, as may be noted--if without offence we may offer it the homage of criticism--in one of the gardens we have photographed [page 176] to illustrate these argumentations. There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the sward without in the least adding to the garden's abounding charm. The smallest effort of the reader's eye will show how largely, in a short half-day's work, the fair scene might be enhanced in lovely dignity simply by the elimination of these slight excesses, or by their withdrawal toward the lawn's margins and into closer company with the tall trees.

In New Orleans, where, even when there are basements, of which there are many, the domains of the cook and butler are somewhere else, a nearly universal feature of every sort of dwelling--the banker's on two or three lots, the laborer's on half a one--is a paved walk along one side of the house, between the house and the lawn, from a front gate to the kitchen. Generally there is but the one front gate, facing the front door, with a short walk leading directly up to this door. In such case the rear walk, beginning at the front door-steps, turns squarely along the house's front, then at its corner turns again as squarely to the rear as a drill-sergeant and follows the dwelling's ground contour with business precision--being a business path. In fact it is only the same path we see in uncrowded town life everywhere in our land.

The sky-line of this beautiful garden becomes a part of the garden itself, a fact of frequent occurrence in New Orleans. The happy contrast of rearmost oak and palm is also worthy of notice.]

But down there it shows this peculiarity, that it is altogether likely to be well bordered with blooming shrubs and plants along all that side of it next the lawn. Of course it is a fault that this shrubbery border--and all the more so because it is very apt to be, as in three of our illustrations [pages 174,178, 180], a rose border--should, so often as it is, be pinched in between parallel edges. "No pinching" is as good a rule for the garden as for the kindergarten. Manifestly, on the side next the house the edge between the walk and the planted border should run parallel with the base line of the house, for these are business lines and therefore ever so properly lines of promptitude--of the shortest practicable distance between two points--lines of supply and demand, lines of need. For lines of need, business speed!

But for lines of pleasure, grace and leisure. It is the tactful office of this shrubbery border to veil the business path from the lawn--from the pleasure-ground. Therefore its outside, lawn-side edge should be a line of pleasure, hence a line of grace, hence not a straight line (dead line), nor yet a line of but one lethargic curve, but a line of suavity and tranquil ongoing, a leisurely undulating line.

Not to have it so is an error, but the error is an inoffensive one easily corrected and the merit is that the dwelling's business path is greenly, bloomingly screened from its pleasure-ground by a lovely natural drapery which at the same time furnishes, as far as the path goes, the house's robes of modesty. Indeed they are furnished farther than the path goes; for no good work gathers momentum more readily than does good gardening, and the householder, having begun so rightly, has now nothing to do to complete the main fabric of his garden but to carry this flow of natural draperies on round the domicile's back and farther side and forward to its front again. Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even above its reach and where it does not conceal, the house's architectural faults, thus winsomely enhance all its architectural charm; like a sweet human mistress of the place, putting into generous shadow all the ill, and into open sunshine all the best, of a husband's strong character. (See both right and left foreground of illustration on page 178, and right foreground on page 180.)

And now if this New Orleans idea--that enough private enclosure to secure good home gardening is not incompatible with public freedom, green lawns, good neighborship, sense of room and fulness of hospitality, and that a house-lot which is a picture is worth more to everybody (and therefore is even more democratic) than one which is little else than a map--if this idea, we say, finds any credence among sister cities and towns that may be able to teach the Creole city much in other realms of art and criticism, let us cast away chalk and charcoal for palette and brush and show in floral, arborescent, redolent detail what is the actual pictorial excellence of these New Orleans gardens.

For notwithstanding all their shut-in state, neither their virtues nor their faults are hid from the passing eye. The street fence, oftenest of iron, is rarely more than breast-high and is always an open fence. Against its inner side frequently runs an evergreen hedge never taller than the fence's top. Commonly it is not so tall, is always well clipped and is so civil to strangers that one would wish to see its like on every street front, though he might prefer to find it not so invariably of the one sort of growth--a small, handsome privet, that is, which nevertheless fulfils its office with the perfection of a solid line of palace sentries. Unluckily there still prevails a very old-fashioned tendency to treat the front fence as in itself ornamental and to forget two things: First, that its nakedness is no part of its ornamental value; that it would be much handsomer lightly clothed--underclothed--like, probably, its very next neighbor; clothed with a hedge, either close or loose, and generously kept below the passer's line of sight. And, second, that from the householder's point of view, looking streetward from his garden's inner depth, its fence, when unplanted, is a blank interruption to his whole fair scheme of meandering foliage and bloom which on the other three sides frames in the lawn; as though the garden were a lovely stage scene with the fence for footlights, and some one had left the footlights unlit.

A lovely stage scene, we say, without a hint of the stage's unreality; for the side and rear fences and walls, being frankly unornamental, call for more careful management than the front and are often charmingly treated. (Page 174.) (See, for an example of a side fence with front half of wire and rear half of boards, page 174, and for solid walls, pages 180 and 184.) Where they separate neighbors' front lawns they may be low and open, but back of the building-line, being oftenest tight and generally more than head-high, they are sure to be draped with such climbing floral fineries as honeysuckles, ivies, jasmines white and yellow, lantanas, roses or the Madeira vine. More frequently than not they are planted also, in strong masses, with ever so many beautiful sorts of firmer-stemmed growths, herbaceous next the sod, woody behind, assembled according to stature, from one to twelve feet high, swinging in and out around the lawn until all stiffness of boundaries is waved and smiled away.

The beauty of this spot could be enhanced in ten minutes by taking away the planted urns which stand like gazing children in the middle of the background.]

In that first week of January already mentioned the present writer saw at every turn, in such borders and in leaf and blossom, the delicate blue-flowered plumbago; two or three kinds of white jasmine, also in bloom; and the broad bush-form of the yellow jasmine, beginning to flower. With them were blooming roses of a dozen kinds; the hibiscus (not althaea but the H. rosasinensis of our Northern greenhouses), slim and tall, flaring its mallow-flowers pink, orange, salmon and deep red; the trailing-lantana, covering broad trellises of ten feet in height and with its drooping masses of delicate foliage turned from green to mingled hues of lilac and rose by a complete mantle of their blossoms. He saw the low, sweet-scented geraniums of lemon, rose and nutmeg odors, persisting through the winter unblighted, and the round-leaved, "zonal" sorts surprisingly large of growth--in one case, on a division fence, trained to the width and height of six feet. There, too, was the poinsettia still bending in its Christmas red, taller than the tallest man's reach, often set too forthpushingly at the front, but at times, with truer art, glowing like a red constellation from the remoter bays of the lawn; and there, taller yet, the evergreen Magnolia fuscata, full of its waxen, cream-tinted, inch-long flowers smelling delicately like the banana. He found the sweet olive, of refined leaf and minute axillary flowers yielding their ravishing tonic odor with the reserve of the violet; the pittosporum; the box; the myrtle; the camphor-tree with its neat foliage answering fragrantly the grasp of the hand. The dark camellia was there, as broad and tall as a lilac-bush, its firm, glossy leaves of the deepest green and its splendid red flowers covering it from tip to sod, one specimen showing by count a thousand blossoms open at once and the sod beneath innumerably starred with others already fallen. The night jasmine, in full green, was not yet in blossom but it was visibly thinking of the spring. The Chinese privet, of twenty feet stature, in perennial leaf, was saving its flowers for May. The sea-green oleander, fifteen feet high and wide (see extreme left foreground, page 176), drooped to the sward on four sides but hoarded its floral cascade for June. The evergreen loquat (locally miscalled the mespilus plum) was already faltering into bloom; also the orange, with its flower-buds among its polished leaves, whitening for their own wedding; while high over them towered the date and other palms, spired the cedar and arborvitae, and with majestic infrequency, where grounds were ample, spread the lofty green, scintillating boughs of the magnolia grandiflora (see left foregrounds on pages 174, 182 and 184), the giant, winter-bare pecan and the wide, mossy arms of the vast live-oak.

In any garden as fair as this there should be some place to sit down. This deficiency is one of the commonest faults in American gardening.]

Now while the time of year in which these conditions are visible heightens their lovely wonder, their practical value to Northern home-lovers is not the marvel and delight of something inimitable but their inspiring suggestion of what may be done with ordinary Northern home grounds, to the end that the floral pageantry of the Southern January may be fully rivalled by the glory of the Northern June.

For of course the Flora of the North, who in the winter of long white nights puts off all her jewelry and nearly all her robes and "lies down to pleasant dreams," is the blonde sister of, and equal heiress with, this darker one who, in undivested greenery and flowered trappings, persists in open-air revelry through all the months from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of Easter. Wherefore it seems to me the Northern householder's first step should be to lay hold upon this New Orleans idea in gardening--which is merely by adoption a New Orleans idea, while through and through, except where now and then its votaries stoop to folly, it is by book a Northern voice, the garden gospel of Frederick Law Olmsted.

Wherever American homes are assembled we may have, all winter, for the asking--if we will but ask ourselves instead of the lawn-mower man--an effect of home, of comfort, cheer and grace, of summer and autumn reminiscences and of spring's anticipations, immeasurably better than any ordinary eye or fancy can extort from the rectangular and stiffened-out nakedness of unplanted boundaries; immeasurably better than the month-by-month daily death-stare of shroud-like snow around houses standing barefooted on the frozen ground. It may be by hearty choice that we abide where we must forego outdoor roses in Christmas week and broad-leaved evergreens blooming at New Year's, Twelfth-night or Carnival. Well and good! But we can have even in mid-January, and ought to allow ourselves, the lawn-garden's surviving form and tranced life rather than the shrubless lawn's unmarked grave flattened beneath the void of the snow. We ought to retain the sleeping beauty of the ordered garden's unlost configuration, with the warm house for its bosom, with all its remoter contours--alleys, bays, bushy networks and sky-line--keeping a winter share of their feminine grace and softness. We ought to retain the "frozen music" of its myriad gray, red and yellow stems and twigs and lingering blue and scarlet berries stirring, though leaflessly, for the kiss of spring. And we ought to retain the invincible green of cedars, junipers and box, cypress, laurel, hemlock spruce and cloaking ivy, darkling amid and above these, receiving from and giving to them a cheer which neither could have in their frostbound Eden without mutual contrast.

This picture was taken in the first flush of spring. The trees in blossom are the wild Japanese cherry.]

Eden! If I so recklessly ignore latitude as to borrow the name of the first gardener's garden for such a shivering garden as this it is because I see this one in a dream of hope--a diffident, interrogating hope--really to behold, some day, this dream-garden of Northern winters as I have never with actual open eyes found one kept by any merely well-to-do American citizen. If I describe it I must preface with all the disclaimers of a self-conscious amateur whose most venturesome argument goes no farther than "Why not?" yet whom the evergreen gardens of New Orleans revisited in January impel to protest against every needless submission to the tyrannies of frost and of a gardening art--or non-art, a submission which only in the outdoor embellishment of the home takes winter supinely, abjectly.