12 GARDENS AND THEIR MEANING 



Primarily, of course, a garden is beloved for its own 

 sake. There are occasions, however, when it is chosen as 

 a background against which to group other plans. That 

 it can serve in a sense as a theater for human play only 

 brings out a new value. 



A real little drama was recently watched by a young college 

 woman who lives in the Jewish quarter of a seaboard city. 

 One June day two lads (neighbors, but almost strangers to 

 her), having spied some young children gardening with 

 their teacher in a distant part of the park, rang her door- 

 bell and asked if they might not use her back yard for a gar- 

 den. Neither of them, it appeared, had ever had a garden ; 

 but they wanted, so they said, to raise potatoes. At last she 

 consented, and operations began. 



The spot, as she described it, was hardly one to tempt a 

 gardener. The yard was brick-paved, and the sunshine, oh, 

 so scanty ! With the assistance, however, of a number of 

 willing-handed friends, who at the right moment appeared as 

 by magic on the scene, they began filling it layer upon layer 

 with earth, which they brought mysteriously in strawberry 

 boxes and paper bags. Where this came from nobody in- 

 quired, until one day a being in policeman's buttons rang 

 the doorbell and called attention to the fact that her young 

 friends had been scraping soil from around the shade trees 

 in the Mall. The affair, he seemed to think, had gone quite 

 far enough ; and yet, with characteristic softening of mood, 

 he gave her to understand that in one special comer there 

 was an earth heap which the boys might draw upon so long as 

 they dug at certain hours when duty would not compel him 

 to interfere. So, suggestive of ants rather than lads, they 

 continued carrying the earth until it was spread evenly over 

 the plot, at least a foot in depth. Next they brought potatoes 

 from their home kitchens, cut them into quarters, and planted 



