N 



THE AMATEUR GARDEN 



place look much larger — as well as incompa- 

 rably more interesting — than can any mere 

 abolition of fences, and particularly of the street 

 fence. But he has not so much as one eye of 

 a genuine gardener or he would know that he 

 is not keeping your lawn but only keeping it 

 shaven. He is not even a good garden laborer. 

 You might as well ask him how to know the 

 wild flowers as how to know the lawn pests — 

 dandelion, chickweed, summer-grass, heal-all, 

 moneywort and the like — with which you must 

 reckon wearily by and by because he only 

 mows them in his bHndness and lets them 

 flatten to the ground and scatter their seed 

 like an infantry firing-line. Inquire of him 

 concerning any one of the few orphan shrubs 

 he has permitted you to set where he least 

 dislikes them, and which he has trimmed clear 

 of the sod — put into short skirts — so that he 

 may run his whirling razors under (and now 

 and then against) them at full speed. Will he 

 know the smallest fact about it or yield any 

 echo of your interest in it ? 



There is a late story of an aged mother, in a 

 170 



