7 8 The American Flower Garden 



cannot pick a bud for her father's buttonhole, and roses for the 

 library table. 



The informal garden has the additional merit of not being 

 made all at once, but of growing gradually, naturally, by small 

 accretions, whenever one discovers the place where a favourite 

 plant would feel at home or the colour of another is needed, or 

 where a finer effect might be gained by introducing a new feature, 

 or when one may afford a dissipation at the nursery. Every little 

 excursion into the world is likely to yield some new treasure trove. 

 In moving from a home whose garden was about to be swallowed 

 up by the rapidly encroaching city, it was hardest to leave behind 

 a sturdy maple tree, too big to transplant, that, as a tiny seedling, 

 I had brought in the crown of my hat from the battlefield of 

 Lexington. But I jealously removed to the new country home all 

 the white phlox from my old garden. The casual observer sees 

 only a snowy mass of flowers near my veranda, nothing more 

 but at the sight of it there flashes on my inner eye a picture of 

 Hawthorne's cottage at Lenox overlooking the Stockbridge Bowl, 

 where his adorable young wife set out the ancestral plants of this 

 very phlox under his study window. Years after her death, when 

 the phlox that had survived the burning of the cottage, had over- 

 flowed to the roadside, I brought home in a pair of overshoes all 

 the roots they would hold. Whoever owns a garden that is not as 

 full of associations and of sentiment as it is of flowers, misses its 

 finest joy. 



