THE SOCIAL SIDE OF GARDENS 



they live and eat in them, training vines to keep out the 

 alien eye quite as much as for a protection against 

 the sun. 



There are, however, many exquisite gardens scattered 

 all over the United States, in New England, in the 

 South, in the West; gardens whose owners have dis- 

 covered the precious uses to which they may be put and 

 whose recollection is sweet to the guests privileged to 

 enter them. I recall a summer afternoon in a Maine 

 garden overlooking the shining reaches of a river. The 

 great Colonial house merged through green arbors into 

 the beds gay with corn-flowers and canterbury-bells, 

 sweet with heliotrope and lily, separated each from each 

 by grassy paths edged with box, and given seclusion by 

 rose-hung wall and pergola. The small group sat idly 

 enough among the fragrant smells and gentle sounds, 

 flutterings of leaf and bird, trickle of fountain, sigh of 

 pines. Tea was over, and the west was smoldering 

 with intenser color. The half-dozen guests were all 

 busy persons an actress who is world-renowned, a 

 playwright, an editor, a newspaper woman, a couple of 

 artists. The desultory talk flowed from one to another, 

 interspersed by utterly contented silences. The topics 

 centered upon what and when to plant "things," the 

 massing of colors in beds, the joy of a sun-dial, the va- 

 garies of certain bulbs or slips ; not one but hoped some 

 day for a garden of his own. And altogether delightful 

 as were the days and the amusements of that hospitable 



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