IN PRAISE OF GARDENING 



garden, with its incessant claim on one for attention — inces- 

 sant, as I have said before, as that of a baby on its nurse or 

 its mother. And (like the infant) it yields to its admiring 

 parent "1,000 delights," although less-prejudiced observers 

 may fail to locate these. The tiniest garden has room for 

 infinite possibilities and gives room for endless experimenting — 

 now in the naturalizing of some wild flower, now in the cultiva- 

 tion of some garden sport. The sight in a pasture of a squat 

 little apple-tree, cropped year after year by cows until it is as 

 much of a shrub and more than a Japanese quince, suggests 

 that one might make a hedge of apple-trees. And how inter- 

 esting to try ! In his New Hampshire garden, an artist, Mr. 

 Stephen Parrish, clips his Spircea van Houttei, after it has fin- 

 ished blooming, into as stiff a hedge as English holly, and it 

 finishes the summer as a formal background for gorgeously col- 

 ored phlox. Another artist-gardener has made house plants 

 of tiny hemlock-trees and used the common pine for topiary 

 work. 



No less a gardener than Robert Cameron, of the Harvard 

 Botanic Garden, holds the theory — hke that which some of our 

 most advanced psychologists hold in respect to human plants 

 — that it is among the "discards," those rated as probably 

 defective, and, in the garden, those weaker plants that are 

 pulled out when thinning is done to give room to their lustier 

 brothers — that it is among these that the genius, the new and 

 rare sort, will be found, and that for the plants as well as for 

 the human youngsters these are always worth tending in a 

 secluded garden corner, to see what they will come to. 



Another of the delights of a garden is that it is as change- 

 ful as life itself and as capable of experiment. In other arts 

 or crafts what's done is done. One may do better in the 

 future, but for the present work — there it is, and so it must 



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