THE SMALL SUBURBAN GARDEN 69 



flowers, and are allowed to get through hedges and scrape 

 about among the borders. The troublesome things are 

 hustled away, after a fashion, but are under no real control, 

 and two or three eggs are supposed to atone for the severest 

 damage. The old herbaceous plants that have been 

 growing and spreading for years attain to any age and size, 

 which does not improve their shapes or blossoms. The 

 country garden is lovely sometimes of its own sweet way- 

 ward will, but its owner might frequently do worse than 

 take a lesson in up-to-date gardening from the proprietor 

 of the small suburban patch. 



A writer who always says the things I wanted to say 

 first, has just confided to the public the particulars of the 

 arrangement of his own small garden near a town, and 

 seems astonished at himself to find how fond he gets of 

 it. It would not astonish me. We all get more fond of 

 small gardens than we do of large ones — great lawns and 

 shrubberies are for the crowd — the brilliant crowd ; we 

 crave a niche in which to work and live, a little corner 

 of our very own, to plan, to perfect, and to stamp with 

 our own impress. So if we happen to have " grounds " 

 instead of gardens, why, then, to put things right, we 

 make a garden within a garden, and it is in this small 

 spot we feel at home ; it is familiar, and it fits us, like 

 the old friend or the long-worn glove, and in our eyes 

 it is beautiful as Corisande's own garden when she 

 picked the Rose. As to beauty, either real or fancied, it 

 is lucky that size is not everything. Here are a few 

 words I found the other day in a book called " Art out 

 of Doors." It was not meant for the suburban garden, 

 but well applies to it : 



" Two trees and six shrubs, a scrap of lawn, and a 

 dozen flowering plants, may form either a beautiful little 

 picture, or a huddled disarray of forms and colours." 



On our own taste it depends whether the little garden 

 is to be the "picture" or the "disarray." Perhaps if it 



