January 30, 1895.] 



Garden and Forest. 



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4o 



land's damp, mild atmosphere keeps one, perforce, upon 

 -the go, and apparently there are few months in the year 

 when a man cannot work comfortably in his garden and 

 find something to reward his efforts. There roses are to 

 be found until Christmas, unnipped by frost, and Thorns 

 are known to bloom in midwinter. Mrs. Boyle, in Days 

 .and Hours in a Garde?!, tells how she cut a long spray, all 

 wreathed in pearly bloom, on New Year's Eve from the 

 Glastonbury Thorn at Marston Bigot, in Somersetshire. In 

 that mild climate Daisies bloom in January, and Hepaticas 

 and Violets are found on warm and mossy banks. Prim- 

 roses, apparently, never fade in Mrs. Boyle's garden, and 

 Iris ensata ventures to appear in February. Daffodils take 

 the winds of March witii beauty, but are preceded by the 

 Snowdrop, the Crocus and the Polyanthus, and accompa- 

 nied by the Kerria-buds and pink tints upon the Peach-trees. 

 Such things are rare with us so early, north of Washing- 

 ton, and one can realize how under such circumstances the 

 o-arden in England becomes a constant wooer which ever 

 .encourages and recompenses its votaries. 



In England the rich man enjoys his garden, plans it, 

 expresses himself in it. Agriculture and forestry are apart 

 of his business in life. He is, and must be, a husbandman 

 in a large sense, must understand the details of his estate, 

 and give personal consent to the cutting of timber. Here 

 the wealthy owner of a place often takes no more interest 

 in it than in the sidewalk in front of his town house. A 

 glance shows him that it is clean and well swept, and that 

 is all he wants to know. The detail is left to the gardener, 

 and his ideas, not those of the proprietor, are expressed in 

 the grounds. The effect of this is that a man's culture, his 

 fine taste, his trained critical perception go for nothing in 

 his surroundings, and a general dead level of uniformity 

 ensues, with a few notable exceptions where some one 

 takes the matter into his own hands and produces a defi- 

 nite and interesting result which bears the traces of thought 

 and individual experience. 



It would be a good thing for us if the country gentleman 

 could be revived with his traditional interest in his lands 

 and crops ; and it is possible that the new impulse to re- 





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Fig. 6. — An Old Brido;u in Wrentham, IMassachusctts. — See page . 



There is another reason, too, why folk walk abroad in 

 ihe little island more than they do here, which has been 

 ■noted by Mr. Edward Freeman in the Forhiightly Review, 

 and Mr. Price Collier recently in the Forum. The Ameri- 

 can loves reading more than the Englishman, and the gar- 

 -den finds a rival in the library. Both these writers note 

 that while there are more profound scholars in England, 

 -the "general reader" exists in far greater numbers on this 

 side of the Atlantic. The Yankee is nothing if not well 

 :Smattered, and his newspapers are a day's work in them- 

 selves. Moreover, his head is apt to be full of all manner 

 of things which conflict with the serene pleasures of dig- 

 ging and weeding. Business, politics, all sorts of duties, 

 intervene; he spends his life in one perpetual strain, driven 

 by the whirling temperament within him ; by the madden- 

 ing climate without ; by the infinite unrest of a seething 

 civilization which boils about him, and by that impulse to 

 get ahead which tethers him to an office desk, and is at 

 ■once his glory and his shame. 



main late in the country is an evidence that the tide is set- 

 ting that way, and that the coming century, among its 

 other developments, will witness a growth in personal 

 interest in country places. Every one who has once tasted 

 the real delights of gardening returns to it with zest. Tran- 

 quilly pursued it gives a certain richness to life and thought, 

 a wholesome basis for intellectual labor. It is a common 

 bond between the wise and the ignorant, a pursuit wherein 

 men of different station can interchange roles and mutually 

 impart knowledge. ■Rivalry here is of the friendliest: the 

 cottager's Rose may surpass that of a duke, and the interest 

 of one in his specimen be as keen as that of the other. 



If there is one more noticeable fact than another about 

 Americans it is the lack of deep root in the soil. We have 

 not the strong local attachment which comes with a long 

 family history connected with a family estate. Everybody 

 goes west, or somewhere else, instead of maturing on the 

 ancestral acres, so that home is not so much a spot to grow 

 fast to as to move away from, and no one builds gardens 



