10 



The American Flower Garden 



blind. A master draughtsman of imagination and power, his 

 work in black and white is at once his triumph and his limitation. 

 With a passion to paint in colours, he dares not trust himself to use 

 them lest they be the undoing of his reputation. Would that 

 many gardeners similarly afflicted might exercise his self-restraint! 



Some people there are, not artists, who have an instinctive 

 colour sense, which, when applied to garden making, gives pleasure 

 beyond any other gift. Celia Thaxter was one of these. Poppies, 

 as she grew them in her garden by the thousand, outlined against 

 the summer sea, were a vision of beauty that no one who saw them 

 can ever forget. She had an unerring instinct that told her not 

 only where to sow her seeds broadcast over the little island garden 

 in the Isles of Shoals, but what coloured flowers, blooming in rapid 

 succession and in crowds throughout the long summer, would so 

 combine as always to make an harmonious whole. Childe Hassam's 

 paintings of the lovely pageant have fortunately preserved the 

 spirit of the sea-girt garden, which was as wild and free as the sea 

 itself, and also the colour for which it is chiefly memorable. 



It is not a simple matter to so plan a garden as to have no clash 

 of colour in it any day of the year. The pink phlox, that should 

 have finished blooming before the orange marigolds next it opened 

 a bud, perhaps prolongs its bloom because of unseasonably cool 

 weather, and the eye with a sensitive colour nerve behind its lens 

 turns quickly from the sight. Flaming Oriental poppies do not 

 always have an acre of greensward separating them from the June 

 roses. It should be impossible to include both at a glance. The 

 eye that can tolerate a magenta petunia anywhere will doubtless 

 not object to it in an iron vase next to a scarlet geranium where it 

 usually appears; nor will such an untrained eye weep when a 

 purple Jackman's clematis spreads its royal bloom against a red 



