THE AMERICAN GARDEN 



teres t to you if the house were not yours. Your 

 house's morals may be all right, but its manners 

 are insufferable, it talks so much about itself and 

 its family." To a fourth he said: "In a garden- 

 ing sense your house makes too much noise; you 

 can hear its right angles hit the ground. Muffle 

 them ! Muffle your architectural angles in foli- 

 age and bloom. Up in the air they may be ever 

 so correct and fine, but down in the garden and 

 unclothed they are heinous, heinous !" 



Another precept we try to inculcate in our 

 rounds among the gardens, another command- 

 ment in the moral law of gardening, is that with 

 all a garden's worthy concealments it should 

 never, and need never, be frivolous or be lacking 

 in candor. I know an amateur gardener — and 

 the amateur gardener, like the amateur pho- 

 tographer, sometimes ranks higher than the pro- 

 fessional — who is at this moment altering the 

 location of a sidewalk gate which by an earlier 

 owner was architecturally misplaced for the sole 

 purpose of making a path with curves — and 

 such curves ! — instead of a straight and honest 

 one, from the street to the kitchen. When a 



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