The Garden Magazine, November, 1921 



131 



daily life of the family, their convenience and enjoyment, rather 

 than with any idea of display; and we know that much of the 

 family life and activity took place, weather permitting, in the 

 garden, thus impressing it with the personality and individuality 

 that only use can bestow. Perhaps it is this "lived in" quality 

 that we miss in modern gardens more than any other; for to- 

 day, we do not live in our gardens — we work in them, we prowl 

 about them inspectingly, we take our guests the rounds of them, 

 but when it comes to sewing, or reading, meditating or entertain- 

 ing guests at tea, we retire to the screened piazza, or some in- 

 door fastness, so that the garden acquires the reserved atmos- 

 phere of the "best parlour," or the spare bedroom that seldom 

 fulfills its destiny. 



Richard Le Gallienne gave forth the discouraging opinion 

 that a garden to be a garden must be old, "for a new garden, 



quite obviously, is not a garden at all." But more living in 

 the new garden, and planning it in the first place with a view 

 to living in it, would go a long way toward putting the new 

 garden in a class with the old, so far as atmosphere is concerned, 

 and when it comes to the flowers themselves, there is no doubt 

 that we are immeasurably richer and more intelligent than were 

 the gardeners who have preceded us. 



But let no one be of the opinion that early gardens were ill- 

 furnished. In 1629 John Parkinson published his great " Para- 

 disi In Sole," describing "all sorts of pleasant flowers which our 

 English ayre will permitt to be noursed up," with sections 

 devoted to the Kitchen Garden and the Orchard. There are 

 six hundred and twelve pages to the fine volume, and among 

 them one may lose his way along many a fragrant by-path, 

 astonished at the rare and lovely flowers he finds and envious 



Matlie Edwards Hewitt. Photo. 



A MODERN GARDEN TOUCHED WITH OLD-TIME GRACE 



When the spirit of bygone days can be so rehabilitated and continued in the midst of whirring, modern subur- 

 ban life — for this garden is but a score of miles from the "Big City"- — it furnishes heartening assurance that 

 beauty and not fashion guides the genuine gardener. Garden of the Misses Mulford, Hempstead, N. Y. 



