TARRYTOWN LETTERS— X. 



BY A. B. 



OOD gardeners are scarce, like good 



■ cooks, because the broad country 



■ is not propagating enough of them. 

 They will be scarce as long as we 

 spend our best teachings too ex- 

 clusively on the centers, rather than equally upon 

 the circumferences of population. We must give 

 over the idea of outside barbarians. Saul was 

 wrong and Paul was right. Said barbarians — just 

 when we think they are used to our sewage, will 

 sicken, go crazy and run around above us to die in 

 our drinking water, or cut even more horrible ca- 

 pers ; for it is the people we thrust outside that are 

 continually coming back on us with social ven- 

 geances. Gardening and cookery degrade as the 

 farmers become degraded. 



" Blennerhasset could make a garden in the wil- 

 derness, but he was not aware that the deuce in the 

 form of a politician could so easily come in from the 

 outside and destroy it. Precisely so with our pid- 

 dling, narrow gardening centers, which do not realize 

 how the rare plants they are trying to cultivate are 

 endangered by the weedy accidents of a cow-boy 

 civilization. We must be clean outside as well as 

 in." 



Mrs. Tarryer and a couple of proficient dowagers 

 of our acquaintance were talking about this very 

 difficulty of finding safe and fit places for the trial 

 of plants, old or new, in gardens, generally speak- 

 ing, and one of them made the remarks above 

 quoted. Something amiss is continually happening 

 under our present gardening outfit. The cows break 

 in, or the national botanist writes Mrs. Tarryer that 

 " some vandal gardener has spaded under the sod 

 of Phleum alpinmn" grown safely for ages upon ages 

 ic;,5oo feet above the sea in Montana or Wyoming. 



Said dowagers are very individual women, whom 

 I dislike to pass with totally inadequate specifica- 

 tions ; but if I am to write, here in Tarrytown, for 

 the eagle eye of my editor in the woods of Ithaca, 

 by the 20th of June, such scriptures as my constant 

 reader will think spot-knowledge of gardening in 

 August, my human figures must go with the scant 

 drapery of phrases. 



We were driving rapidly on a thirty-mile circuit 

 at the time through a fairly well settled country, 

 and where one or another of the ladies was entirely 



ARKYER. 



familiar with the people of the gardens we passed, 

 knew their exact circumstances, and frequently gave 

 these circumstances to the budding leaves of the 

 roadside with a fulness of detail that must have left 

 a wake of burning ears behind us, but which can 

 only be hinted at in this letter. 



Condensed to a solid, from its most agreeable, 

 effervescent and volatile state, the conversation of 

 those women, their rattling comments upon the 

 moving panorama sweeping by us — now sincere 

 cabbage and potato patches at the fronts of labor- 

 ers' cottages, and now less truthful though more 

 spacious trim grass and conifer transplants of city 

 suburbs — meant that Government begins in the 

 Garden ; or no Government, no Garden. 



But iu places the government was too strict — 

 painfully obvious and exclusive ; in others there 

 was laxity, carelessness and decay. How rarely 

 could the kind voices of these acute and womanly 

 judges blend in murmurs of applause at the subtle 

 art that had concealed itself in a peaceful scene of 

 harmoniously domestic color and form, drawing up- 

 on all our sympathies and making the horses wait 

 and walk, willing to linger in the shaded borders of a 

 sunny rural paradise ? 



"I know those people well," said one of our 

 voices; "they are gardeners from away back; 

 every one of them. You send them a plant — no 

 matter what, or at what season of the year — and 

 in due time you will find it filling some place from 

 which, seemingly, it could not be spared, in the ex- 

 quisite order and system that begins afresh in that 

 family with every morning of the year. They al- 

 ways have room in their garden for everything that 

 is good, old or new, while to the most of the raw 

 places we have passed nothing but insidious weeds 

 and fungi can be added with the consent of their 

 owners. The tree agent is a good enough provi- 

 dence for such." 



Then the voice to which I was well accustomed 

 said : " Not till the most of these people have inter- 

 married wisely, been born again and again, and ac- 

 quired the means and the temper for industrious 

 leisure, will they really know what gardening is." 

 I knew without looking behind me that Mrs. Tarryer 

 was looking away over the tree tops into the dim 

 but hopeful future. 



