NEW AMSTERDAM GARDENS 75 



closets — and full gardens and fat. But what did they 

 look like? What was their form"? How were the 

 things planted? Not in "curious knots" — ^yet in 

 beds; what were these like? What was their arrange- 

 ment? Or, to reduce all these questions to one, what 

 were their garden designs ? 



Garden making is a primitive art; nothing, indeed, 

 antedates it as an occupation, whatever one's favored 

 authority may be. So we may confidently say that 

 it was in making garden that man first gave expres- 

 sion to himself. All must have hunted the Diplod- 

 ocus and defended themselves from the Anoplothe- 

 rium — which was not so very fierce, after all, they say 

 — or from those frightful ancestors of the hyena that 

 could grind up the bones of the ancestors of our bears 

 and lions even as the bull pup chews a chicken wing to- 

 day, in very much the same way. But when it came to 

 clearing away the forest and shaping a field, here was 

 chance for variation; and ever increasing opportunity 

 for more and more variation, as the earth was grad- 

 ually subdued. 



It is in the form of his garden, therefore, that man 

 has always been, and is, and always will be, most 

 self-revealing. He is utterly unable to be anything 

 else. There is something within each one of us that 

 shapes — actually, not figuratively — the work of our 

 hands; a something that directs all the delicate forces 



