A FOREWORD AND A PLEA xi 



and am deeply interested in, all other kinds of gardens 

 from the great and magnificent, with marble terraces and 

 stairways, rare plants and many gardeners, to the narrow 

 border beside the cottage path or the pot of flowers in 

 the window of a tenement; for each has sprung from the 

 desire of some one to express himself in beauty, and the 

 simplicity of the medium matters not at all. 



As quoted at the head of this chapter, "A garden is 

 preeminently a place to indulge individual taste," and 

 whether one chooses to be Italian, English, Japanese, 

 Colonial, or "natural" in one's style, or a little of each, 

 one does not achieve a lovable, livable, intimate garden 

 until one has put one's self into it lived in it, worked in 

 it, dreamed in it, studied it and brooded over it and 

 woven into its warp of scientific knowledge a woof of 

 sentiment and tenderness. 



My first garden, of which the present is but the 

 emancipated and further developed spirit, was a rec- 

 tangular space twelve feet long by six feet wide, neatly 

 enclosed in a fence of clothes pins and boasting in each 

 corner, by way of embellishment, a fine pink conch, and 

 in the centre a milk pan sunk to the level of the earth 

 and edged with white pebbles a shining pool! Near 

 one end a shabby mulberry tree cast a beneficent 

 shadow, and in season dropped its mussy fruit among 

 the warring Zinnias and valiantly coloured Portulaca. 

 Within this small plot my love of gardening was born a 

 lusty child and it mattered not that there were years 



