The Garden, You, and I

by Mabel Osgood Wright

Bart, who had left the buggy and was walking beside it with The Man, who had dismounted and led his nag, turned and looked backward, but did not answer.

"It is the evergreens that give it the quality," said The Man, "even though they are only those stiff little Noah's-ark cedars. I notice it far and wide, wherever I go; a landscape is never monotonous so long as there is a pine, spruce, hemlock, or bit of a cedar to bind it together. I believe that is why I am never content for long in the land of palms!"

"I love evergreens in winter, but I've never thought much about them in the growing leafy season; they seem unimportant then," I said.

"Unimportant or not, they are still there. Look at that wall of trees rising across the river! Every conceivable tint of green is there, besides shades of pink and lavender in leaf case and catkin, but what dominates and translates the whole? The great hemlocks on the crest and the dark pointed cedars off on the horizon where the woodland thins toward the pastures. Whether you separate them or not, they are there. People are only just beginning to understand the value of evergreens in their home gardens, both as windbreaks and backgrounds. No, I don't mean stark, isolated specimens, stiff as Christmas trees. You have a magnificent chance to use them on that knoll of yours that you are going to restore!"

As he was speaking I thought Bart paid very scant attention, but following his pointing finger I at once saw what had absorbed him. On the opposite side of the river, extending into the brush lots, was a knoll the size and counterpart of ours, even in the way that it lay by the compass, only this was untouched, as nature planned it, and the model for our restoration.

"Do you clear the land as far back as this?" Bart asked of The Man, eagerly.

"Yes, not for the sake of the land, but for the boulders and loose rock on those ledges; all the rock hereabout will be little enough for our masonry!"

"Then," said Bart, "I'm going to transplant the growth on this knoll, root and branch, herb and shrub, moss and fern, to our own, if it takes me until Christmas! It isn't often that a man finds an illustrated plan with all the materials for carrying it out under his hand for merely the taking. There are enough young hemlocks up there to windbreak our whole garden. The thing I'm not sure about is just when it will do to begin the transplanting. Meanwhile I'll make a list of the plants we know that we can add to as others develop and blossom."

So he set to work on his list then and there, The Man from Everywhere helping, because he can name a plant from its leaves or even the twigs.