American Gardening 



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kol. xin 



OCTOBER, /< 



No. lo 



OF EARLY PHILADELPHIA DAYS 



Thanks to the human heart by which we live, 

 Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears, 



To me the meanest flower that blows can give 

 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 



— Wo 



1ZAAK WALTON, the happy philosopher, says; 

 "There be many men whom we anglers contemn 

 and pity. Men that are taken to be grave because 

 nature hath made them of a sour complexion ; 

 money-getting men, that spend all their time, first 

 in getting and next in anxious care to keep it ; men that 

 are condemned to be rich, and then always busy and 

 discontented." 



It is a similar feeling that I share with Cowper for 

 crowded, gardenless town-dwellers. What can compen- 

 sate for not being able to watch the subtle daily changes 

 that sun and shower bring to growing plant-life ? It is 

 an endless pity that more care is not taken to secure 

 gardens for new houses and to preserve the old ones. 

 Crowded between bare walls of brick and stone, human 

 lives must share the gracelessness of their surroundings. 



We have ever been thankful that our childhood was 

 spent in one of those long, narrow gardens which early 

 Philadelphia houses boasted. The garden now is a half 

 wilderness, but in its ragged beauty lies a charm that few 

 trim gardens possess, much less the rims of patent pav- ^ 

 ing that surround houses of the new order. Our old 'f' 

 playground will soon be changed, and I want to catch 

 some of its careless grace before art touches it again. 



A fruit-farm, I believe, was our predecessor on the 

 soil. Soon after we came, fruit-trees sprang up over the 

 garden. Most of them were peach trees. I counted 25 

 full-grown ones at one time. What acrobatic feats, what 

 kinship with the birds we had ! The trees came up irreg- 

 ularly, grew in social little clusters, and they yielded to 

 their neighbors in an unselfish way that the solitary little 

 tree of the orchard rarely learns. And they bore pec,ches 



— so many, so large, so rare in quality, that our garden 

 was a famous resort for guests, invited and uninvited, 

 during August and September. There were dainty white 

 early peaches with not a blush on the ripened skin ; there 

 were rich yellow ones with red-gold hearts, that ripened 



The old apple tree has grown into an arching mass of green.' 



