THE AMATEUR GARDEN 



tised with pleasing success; but these gardens are 

 a by-product of peasant toil, and in America we 

 have no joy in contemplating an American 

 home limited to the aspirations of peasant life. 

 In such gardening there is a constraint, a lack of 

 natural freedom, a distance from nature, and a 

 certain contented subserviency, which makes it 

 however fortunate it may be under other so- 

 cial conditions wholly unfit to express the 

 buoyant, not to say exuberant, complacencies of 

 the American home. For these we want, what 

 we have not yet quite evolved, the American 

 garden. When this comes it must come, of 

 course, unconsciously; but we may be sure it will 

 not be much like the gardens of any politically 

 shut-in people. No, not even of those supreme 

 artists in gardening, the Japanese. It will ex- 

 press the traits of our American domestic life; 

 our strong individuality and self-assurance, our 

 sense of unguarded security, our affability and 

 unexclusiveness and our dislike to high-walled 

 privacy. If we would hasten its day we must 

 make way for it along the lines of these traits. 

 On the other hand, if in following these lines 



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