The Amateur Garden

by George Washington Cable

This competitor early won, I say, a leading prize, and in later seasons easily held—still holds—a fine pre-eminence. Yet the later prizes fell to others, because, while this one had been a beautiful garden for years before the competition began, they, rising from much newer and humbler beginnings, sometimes from very chaos, showed between one season and the next far greater advances toward artistic excellence. In the very next year a high prize fell to a garden in full sight of this one, a garden whose makers had caught their inspiration from this one, and, copying its art, had brought forth a charming result out of what our judges described as "particularly forlorn conditions."

Does this seem hardly fair to the first garden? But to spread the gardening contagion and to instigate a wise copying after the right gardeners—these are what our prizes and honors are for. Progress first, perfection afterward, is our maxim. We value and reward originality, nevertheless, and only count it a stronger necessity to see not merely that no talented or happily circumstanced few, but that not even any one or two fortunate neighborhoods, shall presently be capturing all the prizes. Hence the rules already cited, which a prompt discovery of this tendency forced upon us.

About this copying: no art is more inoffensively imitated than gardening but unluckily none is more easily, or more absurdly, miscopied. A safe way is to copy the gardener rather than the garden. To copy any performance in a way to do it honor we must discern and adapt its art without mimicking its act. To miscopy is far easier—we have only to mimic the act and murder the art. I once heard a man ask an architect if it would not answer to give his plan to the contractor and let him work it out without the architect's supervision.

"My dear sir," the architect replied, "you wouldn't know the corpse."

I suppose one reason why even the miscopying of gardens provokes so little offence is that the acts it mimics have no art it can murder. Mrs. Budd sets out her one little "high geraingia" in the middle of her tiny grass-plat (probably trimming it to look like a ballet-dancer on one leg). Whereupon Mrs. Mudd, the situation of whose house and grounds is not in the least like her neighbor's, plants and trims hers the same way and feels sure it has the same effect, for—why shouldn't it?

The prize-winning copyist I am telling of copied principles only. To have copied mere performance would have been particularly unlucky, for though his garden stands within fifty yards of the one from which it drew its inspiration the two are so differently located that the same art principles demand of them very different performances. An old-time lover of gardens whom I have to quote at second-hand mentions in contrast "gardens to look in upon" and "gardens to look out from." The garden I have described at length is planned to be looked in upon; most town gardens must be, of course; but its competitor across the street, of which I am about to give account, is an exception. The lot has a very broad front and very little depth—at one side almost none, at the other barely enough for a small house and a few feet of front yard. Why there should be a drive I cannot say, but it is so well taken into the general scheme that to call it to account would be ungenerous. It enters at the narrowest part of the ground, farthest from the house, makes a long parabola, and turns again into the street close beside the dwelling. In the bit of lawn thus marked off, shrubs have place near the street, three or four old apple-trees range down the middle, and along the drive runs a gay border of annual flowers. Along the rear side of the drive lies but a narrow strip of turf beyond which the ground drops all at once to another level some thirty feet below. On the right this fall is so abrupt that the only way down to it is by a steep rustic stair. On the left, behind the house, the face of the bluff is broken into narrow terraces, from top to bottom of which, and well out on the lower level, the entire space is mantled with the richly burdened trellises of a small vineyard. At the right on this lower ground is a kitchen garden; beyond it stretch fair meadows too low to build on, but fruitful in hay and grain; farther away, on higher ground, the town again shows its gables and steeples among its great maples and elms, and still beyond, some three miles distant, the green domes and brown precipices of the Mount Holyoke Range stand across the sky in sharp billows of forest and rock. It seems at times a pity that Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom cannot themselves know how many modest gardens they are a component part of—the high violin note of: gardens, like this one, "to look out from."

It stops one's pen for one to find himself using the same phrases for these New England cottage gardens that famous travellers have used in telling of the gardens of Italian princes; yet why should we not, when the one nature and the one art are mother and godmother of them all? It is a laughing wonder what beauty can be called into life about the most unpretentious domicile, out of what ugliness such beauty can be evoked and at how trivial a cost in money. Three years before this "garden to look out from" won its Carnegie prize it was for the most part a rubbish heap. Let me now tell of one other, that sprang from conditions still more unlovely because cramped and shut in.

It was on the other side of the town from those I have been telling of. The house stood broadside to the street and flush with the sidewalk. The front of the lot was only broad enough for the house and an alley hardly four feet wide between the house's end and a high, tight board fence. The alley led into a small, square back yard one of whose bounds was the back fence of the house. On a second side was a low, mossy, picturesquely old wing-building set at right angles to the larger house, its doors and windows letting into the yard. A third boundary was the side of one well weathered barn and the back of another, with a scanty glimpse between them of meadows stretching down to the Connecticut River. The fourth was an open fence marking off a field of riotous weeds. When the tenant mistress of this unpromising spot began to occupy it the yard and alley were a free range for the poultry of the neighborhood, and its only greenery was two or three haphazard patches of weedy turf. One-fourth of the ground, in the angle made by the open fence and one of the barns, had been a hen-yard and was still inclosed within a high wire-netting; but outside that space every plant she set out had to be protected from the grubbing fowls by four stakes driven down with a hammer. Three years afterward she bore off our capital prize in a competition of one hundred gardens. Let me tell what the judges found.

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

One of a great number of competing cottages whose gardens are handsomer in the rear and out of sight than on the street-front, though well kept there also.