ENTERTAINING IN THE GARDEN 



GRACE TABOR 



Workaday Gardeners Miss Their Final Real Re- 

 ward so Long as the Social Cultivation of the 

 Home's Better Half Lacks the Attention it Merits 



"And add to these retired Leisure 

 That in trim gardens takes his plea sure. 



II Penseroso 



"*E HAVE our gardens — a great many of them here 



in America now — but we have still to learn to use 



) them. 



We are not getting out of them anything 



l>V.^ commensurate with what we have put into them, 

 and are putting in. In other words we are not yet at ease 

 with them; the formalities still prevail; they have a bit the 

 best of us. 



The visitor to an English home, for example, moves with 

 his host gardenward almost at the moment of his arrival, and 

 quite as a matter of course — the garden being to the Briton 

 preeminently the place of rest and refreshment and of enter- 

 tainment resources. But we here seldom get beyond that 

 great American institution known variously as the porch, 

 piazza, veranda — or gallery if we are from the South — with 

 our visitor or even by ourselves, unless we have work to do in 

 the garden. 



Right here indeed is the touchstone of all our garden rela- 

 tions I begin to think. Here I am afraid we have formed 

 the habit of stranding most of our festal garden thoughts 

 immediately they are launched — if indeed they ever actually 

 slip down the ways of our anxious minds. We are so con- 

 cerned with the garden making and garden tending that we 

 lose altogether the real purpose of a garden — its use, the 

 purely pleasure use, the entertainment and enjoyment. We 

 are so fixed in the habit of work therein — observers tell us 

 that this is not confined to any one aspect of our national 

 life — that we have not yet formed the habit of play. 



Like all habits, good and bad, however, it may becultivated; 

 and being distinctly good, it should be. The porch, as we 

 understand it, ought never to be abandoned. But it is not 

 after all a part of the garden. On the contrary, it is very 

 decidedly a part of the house, with the sense of indoors domi- 

 nating rather than outdoors, and with precisely the same 

 limitations of walls and carpets and furniture — and a roof — 

 that the house has. 



So it is to garden entertaining as a definite thing that it 

 seems desirable we should direct attention and thought. For, 

 of course, the first step toward forming a habit is to think 

 about it; then to try it, little by little; and before we realize 

 it we have it, or it has us. 



TO SOME of course there comes at once the thought that 

 a garden alone and by itself, is entertainment — enter- 

 tainment of a persuasive eloquence that lures all sorts of 

 people through all sorts of weathers, in all seasons. And all 

 sorts of people respond, to be sure — gaily, seriously, enthusias- 

 tically, negligently, according to the soul and the circum- 

 stance of each. But after all, this response is only a passive 



acceptance of something insistently offered; and it has never 

 meant and never can mean the realization of a half nor a 

 quarter of the garden's possibilities. 



For the garden, in addition to being entertainment, offers 

 the richest background for positive enterprises in entertain- 

 ing. Nowhere is there such diversity of opportunity as it 

 affords, varying all the way from the simplest intimate going 

 forth for coffee and cigars under the lengthening shadows of 

 our present — alas! only present — lengthened days, to the 

 carefully planned and elaborately prepared pageant or 

 dramatic performance. Moreover, the character of enter- 

 tainment that may be given is, up to a certain point, the same 

 whether the garden be large or small, the scale alone dis- 

 tinguishing the diversions of the one from the other. 



From the old fashioned garden party through tableaux 

 vivants — of a contemporary vintage — to the very modern 

 living moving picture, the small garden shares with the large 

 one in possibilities for delightful affairs. So whether it is the 

 impromptu week-end lark of a group of intimatesor something 

 quite formal to which guests are seriously bidden, let us give 

 the garden its chance. The time has assuredly arrived for 

 it to take its rightful place as an actual part of the home in- 

 stead of remaining merely a secondary and somewhat apart 

 adjunct thereto. 



TH E charm of music when listened to in the open immedi- 

 ately suggests a motif that is subject to widely varying 

 interpretations. The most recent possibly was a twilight 

 garden party given between the rather unusual hours of 

 seven-thirty and ten o'clock of a long June evening, at which 

 the "Kilties" were the feature. Hidden by the trees and 

 shrubbery that frames a lovely lawn they approached from a 

 considerable distance, piping as they marched, and coming 

 at last into view, picturesque and suggestive figures in the 

 midst of their own true environment. In the twilight hour 

 they brought the romance and wild beauty of their great 

 heritage straight into the heart of to-day as never would have 

 been possible indoors, under a roof— and electric lights. At 

 intervals they danced too, as only the Scot can dance out of 

 doors the old dances of his people — all to the same "skirl 

 o' the pipes" of course. 



Far cry it is from the primitive bagpipe to the preserved 

 disk-music of all the world to-day — and likewise far cry from 

 the highland fling and the sword dance to the foxtrot and the 

 shimmy. But where the guests are to do the "dancing on the 

 green" it is the dehydrated jazzing of any preferred jazz king 

 (they are always "kings," I note) that is really more suit- 

 able as well as more readily obtainable. Wherefore, given 



