THE JOYOUS ART OF GARDENING 



stand. On the other hand, the peculiar charm of the garden 

 is that always one may change it, better it, shift this plant 

 where it will be happier, separate two whose colors quarrel, 

 plan some new effect here or there. To many a gardener there 

 is nothing more exhilarating than making changes, planning a 

 new pool, a new trellis, or steps; there is pure joy in thinking 

 what one will do next year. Always there is the "next year." 

 In this lies the garden's long fascination. 



In this America of ours we have large estates a-plenty and 

 some elaborate gardens, but of lovely little gardens we have 

 sore need. And sore need we have also for keeping what 

 loveliness we have inviolate. In every suburb the contractor 

 is busy wiping out the wild beauty with a baleful industry and 

 thoroughness which makes his progress like that of the army- 

 worm or the seventeen-year locust; not a tree or a bush is left 

 in his path which might hearten the gardening of some new- 

 comer; burdock and five-hundred-year oak-tree fare alike, 

 and instead springs up his ideal the checker-board of treeless 

 streets lined with close-set houses, their outward form as 

 exactly alike as the clothes of asylum orphans. It may be 

 progress, it may be improvement, and yet improvement, as St. 

 Paul says of science, is often "falsely so called." In a com- 

 munity where charming little gardens were the rule, such 

 activity would at least be modified in the interest of beauty. 



Whoever is keenly interested in civic or social betterment 

 can begin in no better way than in making his own garden 

 lovely, for never did any one make a garden without being the 

 better and happier for it; and one of the sweetest effects of 

 gardening is that the art is both contagious and infectious. 

 I doubt if ever any one made a garden without some other 

 being minded to go and do likewise. Long before the roses 

 have covered his bare fence or even his bulbs begun to poke 



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