March, 1912 
flowering verdure, but only because we feel sorry for that 
poet of long ago. He may have known lovely gardens, but 
had he known this one never would the burthen of his song 
carried with it suggestion of any plaint, but he would have 
felt that spirit of all gardens whispering as the genius loci 
to him, as in the exquisite words of Francis Thompson’s 
“An Anthem of Earth”: 
“Here I untrammel. 
Here I pluck loose the body’s cerementing, 
And break the tomb of life; here I shake off 
The bur o’ the world, man’s congregation shun, 
And to the antique order of the dead 
I take the tongueless vows; my call is set 
Here in thy bosom; my little trouble is ended 
In a little peace.”’ 
How inseparable, indeed, are gardens and poetry, poetry 
and gardens, though many there be (they, perhaps, who are 
merely born with the botanist’s eye, the agriculturist’s crop 
proclivities, or the spadesman’s muscle) who pretend to find 
in the garden only the suggestion of a deal of troweling, a 
scattering of seeds, a turn at weeding, a thorn or two, and 
the trouble of beginning it all over again, meeting the oc- 
cupation or the necessity withal, as the case may be, season 
after season and year after year, but as a matter of busi- 
ness, as part of the business of life, a duty performed well but 
blindly, unilluminated by the inner light that sheds its 
radiance upon the joys of gardening. Indeed, I know a 
man who has a yard full of plants spacefilling his Summer- 
times. If you should ask him why he plants them, he could 
not tell you, though I suspect he is coming under the spell 
of habit and that a few more years will find him under- 
standing that he has a garden, not merely a Rose here, a 
Lilac there and a row of Geraniums, causing him a deal 
of grumbling and trouble, because he looks upon them 
solely as agents in outvieing his neighbor’s floral display; I 
say he cannot forever escape the heart-song his sorry garden 
is trying to sing to him—sorry garden, for a garden cannot 
The tall-growing Foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, is one of the favorite 
old-fashioned garden flowers 
AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 77 
There 
The exquisite Morning Glory is a solace in Everyman’s garden. 
is not a lovelier blossoming vine to be found anywhere 
make itself—he cannot escape it if he has a soul, and I 
think he has. When I go down his street and look over his 
fence at the growing things beyond, for all the world a gar- 
den of prim precision and joylessness, I say to myself, ‘““That 
is Noman’s garden,” and I pass on with a sigh. I tried to 
talk to him once about gardens—about mine. It was in the 
early Spring, and I hoped to learn how he had managed to 
make his Larkspurs taller than mine, though his were not 
so blue. Alas! It was by recipe! Enough chemicals to 
have established a pharmacy, and a grim determination that 
his garden should look down upon mine. That was all I 
got out of him; he had never heard of Omar Khayyam, of 
Francis Thompson, and would have lost faith in Francis 
Bacon had he known the great philosopher had ‘“‘wasted”’ 
The picturesque Black Cohosh, Cimicifuga racemosa, comes to us from 
the edges of our ponds 
