THE LURE OF THE GARDEN 



comrades becomes more intimate there, where even the 

 shyest takes heart of grace, where the most self-con- 

 scious forgets to pose, where words come readily to 

 the silent, and where silence is never irksome. 



The garden, in fact, provides the most perfect of 

 social backgrounds, possessing all the advantages and 

 none of the drawbacks of its parents, the wilderness 

 and the palace, those two extremes between which 

 man moves, one the expression of all that lies beyond 

 his control, the other the result of everything he has 

 learned to force into his service. 



There are few who do not feel at home in a garden. 

 The roughest or most cultured, the simplest or the 

 world-weary, the child, the woman of fashion, the en- 

 ergetic or the lazy, the materialist on his clod of earth, 

 and the poet in his rainbow maze all of us, saint and 

 sinner, sad or gay, enter a garden as though it were 

 our own, unoppressed by its most princely magnifi- 

 cence, touched and attracted by its simplest form. 



The lure of the garden! It has drawn us from the 

 beginning of history, and draws us now. Persian po- 

 tentates and Egyptian queens in the days before Moses, 

 delighted to live in one ; and in the scurry of modern 

 existence English M.P.'s and commuters' wives escape 

 from the cares of state and the terrors of housekeeping 

 to plunge into the mysteries of planting and pruning, 

 renewing their strength like Antaeus at every touch 

 of mother earth. As for that special and curious order 



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