THE JOYOUS ART OF GARDENING 



and against the walls were trained roses or fruit-trees. Usually 

 the posts of the typical Colonial fence are tall, surmounted 

 by an ornament in the shape of a ball or the pineapple of wel- 

 come; between the posts the intervening pickets are graduated, 

 forming a dip like a crescent. But the chief merit of Colonial 

 fences is their excellent proportion. In the simpler gardens 

 of city yards a common type was the high board fence, very 

 much like our present back-yard fence, but the two-foot-wide 

 lattice which surmounted it, and the vines and shrubs trained 

 against it, took away the reproach of its ugliness. 



Within the garden the beds were outlined with box or 

 bordered with violets or thyme or sweet-william any con- 

 venient edging; sometimes they were outlined with bricks 

 or tile. 



THE PLAN OF THE OLD-TIME GARDEN 



The old-fashioned garden was planned to fit the garden 

 space. Sometimes the beds were laid out in elaborate geomet- 

 rical designs, but the geometry was in the lines of the beds, 

 not in the planting; within their box borders the flowers 

 bloomed with so cheerful a luxuriance and so careless an aban- 

 don that when the flowers were in blossom the lines of the 

 beds were practically unnoticed; only in winter, when the 

 flowers were gone, would the " pattern" of the beds become 

 evident, when outlined with fat and comfortable borders 

 of box it made a sight more pleasing (to my thinking) than 

 the bare brownness of empty flower-beds. 



Being close to the house, the garden was naturally ar- 

 ranged in relation to it. As gardeners say, it was "on the 

 same axis with it," which means that, looking from the house 

 door, the garden-paths do not appear askew. If the door at 

 the rear of the house or at the side of the house (the garden 



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