THE AMATEUR GARDEN 



I could set forth all in one clear picture: lawn, 

 drive, house, loop, lily pond, bower, rose-bordered 

 drive again (as the eye comes back) and flowers 

 crowding before, behind and beside you, some 

 following clear out to the street and beseeching 

 you not to go so soon. Such is the garden, 

 kept without hired labor, of two soft-handed 

 women; not beyond criticism in any of its 

 aspects but bearing witness to their love of 

 nature, of beauty and of home and of their 

 wisdom and skill to exalt and refine them. 



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 ex- 

 cellence. 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 



142 



