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

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

BY

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

  "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

  "... 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.

[Illustration: "... that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground
where Mill River loiters through Paradise."

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.

Speaking of walks, it was with them--and one drive--in this grove, that
I made my first venture toward the artistic enhancement of my
acre,--acre this time in the old sense that ignores feet and rods. I was
quite willing to make it a matter of as many years as necessary when
pursued as play, not work, on the least possible money outlay and having
for its end a garden of joy, not of care. By no inborn sagacity did I
discover this to be the true first step, but by the trained eye of an
honored and dear friend, that distinguished engineer and famous street
commissioner of New York, Colonel George E. Waring, who lost his life in
the sanitary regeneration of Havana.

[Illustration: "On this green of the dryads... lies My Own Acre."

The two young oaks in the picture are part of the row which gives the
street its name.]

"Contour paths" was the word he gave me; paths starting from the top of
the steep broken ground and bending in and out across and around its
ridges and ravines at a uniform decline of, say, six inches to every ten
feet, until the desired terminus is reached below; much as, in its
larger way, a railway or aqueduct might, or as cattle do when they roam
in the hills. Thus, by the slightest possible interference with
natural conditions, these paths were given a winding course every step
of which was pleasing because justified by the necessities of the case,
traversing the main inequalities of the ground with the ease of level
land yet without diminishing its superior variety and charm. And so with
contour paths I began to find, right at my back door and on my own acre,
in nerve-tired hours, an outdoor relaxation which I could begin, leave
off and resume at any moment and which has never staled on me. For this
was the genesis of all I have learned or done in gardening, such as it
is.

My appliances for laying out the grades were simple enough: a
spirit-level, a stiff ten-foot rod with an eighteen-inch leg nailed
firmly on one end of it, a twelve-inch leg on the other, a hatchet, and
a basket of short stakes with which to mark the points, ten feet apart,
where the longer leg, in front on all down grades, rested when the
spirit-level, strapped on the rod, showed the rod to be exactly
horizontal. Trivial inequalities of surface were arbitrarily cut down or
built up and covered with leaves and pine-straw to disguise the fact,
and whenever a tree or anything worth preserving stood in the way here
came the loaded barrow and the barrowist, like a piece of artillery
sweeping into action, and a fill undistinguishable from nature soon
brought the path around the obstacle on what had been its lower side, to
meander on at its unvarying rate of rise or fall as though
nothing--except the trees and wild flowers--had happened since the vast
freshets of the post-glacial period built the landscape. I made the
drive first, of steeper grade than the paths; but every new length of
way built, whether walk or road, made the next easier to build, by
making easier going for the artillery, the construction train. Also each
new path has made it easier to bring up, for the lawn garden, sand,
clay, or leaf-mould, or for hearth consumption all the wood which the
grove's natural mortality each year requires to be disposed of. There is
a superior spiritual quality in the warmth of a fire of h-oak, h-ash,
and even h-ellum gathered from your own acre, especially if the acre is
very small and has contour paths. By a fire of my own acre's "dead and
down" I write these lines. I never buy cordwood.

Only half the grove has required these paths, the other half being down
on the flat margin of the river, traversed by a cart-road at least half
a century old, though used by wheels hardly twice a year; but in the
three acres where lie the contour paths there is now three-fifths of a
mile of them, not a rod of which is superfluous. And then I have two
examples of another kind of path: paths with steps; paths which for good
and lawful reasons cannot allow you time to go around on the "five per
cent" grade but must cut across, taking a single ravine lengthwise, to
visit its three fish-pools.

These steps, and two short retaining walls elsewhere in the grove, are
made of the field stones of the region, uncut. All are laid "dry" like
the ordinary stone fences of New England farms, and the walls are built
with a smart inward batter so that the winter frosts may heave them year
after year, heave and leave but not tumble them down. I got that idea
from a book. Everything worth while on my acre is from books except
what two or three professional friends have from time to time dropped
into my hungry ear. Both my ears have good appetites--for garden lore.

About half a mile from me, down Mill River, stands the factory of a
prized friend who more than any other man helps by personal daily care
to promote Northampton's "People's Institute," of whose home-garden work
I have much to say in the chapters that follow this one. For forty years
or more this factory has been known far and wide as the "Hoe Shop"
because it makes shovels. It has never made hoes. It uses water-power,
and the beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full
back to the rapids just above my own acre. In winter this is the
favorite skating-pond of the town and of Smith College. In the greener
seasons of college terms the girls constantly pass upstream and down in
their pretty rowboats and canoes, making a charming effect as seen from
my lawn's rear edge at the head of the pine and oak shaded ravine whose
fish-pools are gay by turns with elder, wild sunflower, sumach, iris,
water-lilies, and forget-me-not.

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

This is the "Hoe Shop." The tower was ruined by fire many years ago, and
because of its unsafety is being taken down at the present writing.]

This ravine, the middle one of the grove's three, is about a hundred
feet wide. When I first began to venture the human touch in it, it
afforded no open spot level enough to hold a camp-stool. From the lawn
above to the river road below, the distance is three hundred and thirty
feet, and the fall, of fifty-five feet, is mostly at the upper end,
which is therefore too steep, as well as too full of varied undergrowth,
for any going but climbing. In the next ravine on its left there was a
clear, cold spring and in the one on its right ran a natural rivulet
that trickled even in August; but this middle ravine was dry or merely
moist.

Here let me say to any who would try an amateur landscape art on their
own acre at the edge of a growing town, that the town's growth tends
steadily to diminish the amount of their landscape's natural water
supply by catching on street pavements and scores and hundreds of roofs,
lawns and walks, and carrying away in sewers, the rain and melting snows
which for ages filtered slowly through the soil. Small wonder, I think,
that, when in the square quarter-mile between my acre and Elm Street
fifty-three dwellings and three short streets took the place of an old
farm, my grove, by sheer water famine, lost several of its giant pines.
Wonder to me is that the harm seems at length to have ceased.

But about that ravine: one day the nature of its growth and soil,
especially its alders, elders, and willows and a show of clay and
gravel, forced on my notice the likelihood that here, too, had once been
a spring, if no more. I scratched at its head with a stick and out came
an imprisoned rill like a recollected word from the scratched head of a
schoolboy. Happily the spot was just at the bottom of the impassably
steep fall of ground next the edge of the lawn and was almost in the
centre of those four acres--one of sward, three of woods--which I
proposed to hold under more or less discipline, leaving the rest--a
wooded strip running up the river shore--wholly wild, as college girls,
for example, would count wildness. In both parts the wealth of foliage
on timber and underbrush almost everywhere shut the river out of view
from the lawn and kept the eye restless for a glint, if no more, of
water. And so there I thought at once to give myself what I had all my
life most absurdly wished for, a fish-pool. I had never been able to
look upon an aquarium and keep the tenth Commandment. I had never caught
a fish without wanting to take it home and legally adopt it into the
family--a tendency which once led my son to say, "Yes, he would be
pleased to go fishing with me if I would only fish in a sportsmanlike
manner." What a beautifully marked fish is the sun-perch! Once, in
boyhood, I kept six of those "pumpkin-seed" in a cistern, and my smile
has never been the same since I lost them--one of my war losses.

I resolved to impound the waters of my spring in the ravine and keep
fish at last--without salt--to my heart's content. Yet I remembered
certain restraining precepts: first, that law of art which condemns
incongruity--requires everything to be in keeping with its natural
surroundings--and which therefore, for one thing, makes an American
garden the best possible sort of garden to have in America; second,
that twin art law, against inutility, which demands that everything in
an artistic scheme serve the use it pretends to serve; third, a precept
of Colonel Waring's: "Don't fool with running water if you haven't money
to fool away"; and, fourth, that best of all gardening rules--look
before you leap.

However, on second thought, and tenth, and twentieth, one thought a day
for twenty days, I found that if water was to be impounded anywhere on
my acre here was the strategic point. Down this ravine, as I have said,
was the lawn's one good glimpse of the river, and a kindred gleam
intervening would tend, in effect, to draw those farther waters in under
the trees and into the picture.

Such relationships are very rewarding to find to whoever would garden
well. Hence this mention. One's garden has to do with whatever is in
sight from it, fair or otherwise, and it is as feasible and important to
plant in the fair as to plant out the otherwise. Also, in making my
grove paths, I had noticed that to cross this ravine where at one or two
places in its upper half a contour grade would have been pettily
circuitous and uninteresting, and to cross it comfortably, there should
be either a bridge or a dam; and a dam with water behind it seemed
pleasanter every way--showed less incongruity and less inutility--than a
bridge with no water under it.

As to "fooling with running water," the mere trickle here in question
had to be dragged out of its cradle to make it run at all. It remained
for me to find out by experience that even that weakling, imprisoned and
grown to a pool, though of only three hundred square feet in surface,
when aided and abetted by New England frosts and exposed on a southern
<DW72> to winter noonday suns, could give its amateur captor as much
trouble--proportionately--as any Hebrew babe drawn from the bulrushes of
the Nile is said to have given his.

Now if there is any value in recording these experiences it can be only
in the art principles they reveal. To me in the present small instance
the principle illustrated was that of the true profile line for ascent
or descent in a garden. You may go into any American town where there
is any inequality of ground and in half an hour find a hundred or two
private lawns graded--from the house to each boundary line--on a single
falling curve, or, in plain English, a hump. The best reason why this
curve is not artistic, not pleasing, but stupid, is that it is not
natural and gains nothing by being unnatural. All gardening is a certain
conquest of Nature, and even when "formal" should interfere with her own
manner and custom as slightly as is required by the necessities of the
case--the needs of that particular spot's human use and joy. The right
profile and surface for a lawn of falling grade, the surface which will
permanently best beguile both eye and foot, should follow a double
curve, an ogee line. For, more or less emphasized, that is Nature's line
in all her affable moods on land or water: a descent or ascent beginning
gradually, increasing rapidly, and concluding gently. We see it in the
face of any smooth knoll or billow. I believe the artists impute to
Praxiteles