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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