The Garden, You, and I

A Seaside Garden (see p. 243)	[Frontispiece]
"The magnolias below at the road-bend"	[8]
English Larkspur Seven Feet High	[32]
Fraxinella—German Iris and Candy-tuft	[44]
Longfellow's Garden	[81]
The Summer Garden—Verbenas	[86]
Asters	[90]
The Pictorial Value of Evergreens	[102]
"My roses are scattered here, there, and everywhere"	[119]
Madame Plantier at Van Cortland Manor	[128]
A Convenient Rose-bed	[138]
"The last of the old orchard"	[156]
The Screen of White Birches	[166]
"An endless shelter for every sort of wild thing"	[184]
Speciosum Lilies in the Shade	[270]
The Poet's Narcissus	[278]
A Bed of Japan Pinks	[296]
Single and Double Pinks	[314]
"The silver maple by the lane gate"	[326]
"A curtain to the side porch"	[328]
An Iris Hedge	[358]
Daphne Cneorum	[360]
A Terrible Example	[362]
"The low snow-covered meadow"	[372]
"Punch ... has a cache under the syringa bushes"	[374]

I

THE WAYS OF THE WIND

"Out of the veins of the world comes the blood of me;
The heart that beats in my side is the heart of the sea;
The hills have known me of old, and they do not forget;
Long ago was I friends with the wind; I am friends with it yet."
—Gerald Gould."

Whenever a piece of the land is to be set apart for a garden, two mighty rulers must be consulted as to the boundaries. When this earth child is born and flower garnished for the christening, the same two must be also bidden as sponsors. These rulers are the Sun and the Wind. The sun, if the matter in hand is once fairly spread before him and put in his charge, is a faithful guardian, meeting frankness frankly and sending his penetrating and vitalizing messengers through well-nigh inviolable shade. But of the wind, who shall answer for it or trust it? Do we really ever learn all of its vagaries and impossible possibilities?

If frankness best suits the sun, diplomacy must be our shield of defence windward, for the wind is not one but a composite of many moods, and to lure one on, and skilfully but not insultingly bar out another, is our portion. To shut out the wind of summer, the bearer of vitality, the uplifter of stifling vapours, the disperser of moulds, would indeed be an error; therefore, the great art of the planters of a garden is to learn the ways of the wind and to make friends with it. If the soil is sodden and sour, it may be drained and sweetened; if it is poor, it may be nourished; but when all this is done, if the garden lies where the winds of winter and spring in passing swiftly to and fro whet their steel-edged tempers upon it, what avails?