54 THE GARDEN, YOU, AND I 



and little original attitudes out of the soil and reproving 

 its occasional shoulder shrugs, so to speak, Delsarte 

 methods applied to the earth, and you know that 

 Evan actually laughed at us for doing it. 



" Even in the beginning we didn't care much for this 

 grading, but it was in the plan that father Penrose had 

 made for us by a landscape gardener, renowned about 

 Philadelphia at the time he gave us the place as a 

 ' start in life,' so we felt in some way mysteriously 

 bound by it. And I may as well assert right here that, 

 though it is well to have a clear idea of what you mean 

 to do in making a garden, or ever so small pleasure 

 grounds, that every bit of labour, however trivial, 

 may go toward one end and not have to be undone, a 

 conventional plan unsympathetically made and blindly 

 followed often becomes a cross between Fetish and Jug- 

 gernaut. It has taken me exactly four years of blunder- 

 ing to find that you must live your garden life, find out 

 and study its peculiarities and necessities yourself, 

 just as you do that of your indoor home, if success is 

 to be the result ! 



" As it was, the grading began behind the lilac bushes 

 inside the front fence and proceeded in fairly graceful 

 sweeps, dividing each side of the level bit where the 

 old garden had been, the still remaining boxwood 



