CHAPTER XVII. WILD GARDENS 



I. Wild Gardening in a Small Area 



By James J. Allen 



CANNOT remember ever to have seen the gentle art of 

 wild gardening numbered among the kingly sports, yet of 

 them all there is perhaps none more worthy of the name. 

 When we read in Mr. Robinson s entertaining book how 

 whole estates may be devoted to its development, we can 

 understand how the ideal wild garden may call for time, money and 

 elaborate equipment such as only those of princely birth and fortune 

 may be presumed to possess But it is not of such extensive affairs that 

 I purpose to speak, but of a modest experiment of my own, one quite 

 within the reach of any purse, and calling for no more of royalty than 

 inheres in any citizen who exercises sovereignty over his own back yard. 

 In fact, mine is such an unpretentious little thing that I am hardly worthy 

 to be called a wild- gardener, and it may be thought presumptuous for me 

 to speak as if I was an accepted member of the guild. Still I have noticed 

 that the true wild- gardener is to be recognised by certain qualities of the 

 mind and heart rather than by the number of acres over which his possessions 

 extend. If he delights in the out-of-door life; if he prefers the field laughing 

 with daisies and spotted with Queen Anne's lace to the regularly laid out 

 garden he exhibits some of the hall-marks of the brotherhood, There is 

 hope for him that he may yet attain to that attitude of tolerant contempt for 

 all purely conventional gardening which is the distinguishing characteristic 

 of the wild gardener. There never yet w^as one at all worthy of the name 

 who could ab de a regular flower-bed. Your prim and formal border is an 

 abomination to him, and it is a settled canon of his cult that wild gardening 

 bears about the same relation to the ordinary kind that epic poetry does to 

 the roundelay. And I take it to be some evidence of inward grace and 

 worthiness that the feeling appeals to me as by no means indefensible. Just 

 as if there were not beauty enough in the individual flowers, but we must 



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