THE DOUBLE BORDER 
JOHN L. REA 
With Drawings by the Author 
Old Feature of the Garden Though This Is, an Artist’s Intimate Study 
of It Reveals New Appeal and Unsuspected Opportunity Therein 
j&T MATTERS little or not at all, said Anatole France, 
whither the way may lead so it be beautiful. Now 
there were many who construed this of Monsieur 
France’s into a hard saying; and others who, though 
they had long covertly entertained the like opinion, yet thought 
that in giving utterance he had needlessly and foolishly spilled 
the beans, so to speak — had rashly thrown the fat into the fire. 
At any rate there was a considerable flare-up. The Carlyles 
amongst us were not slow to point out that through following a 
path leading nowhere — or just anywhere, for that matter — we 
obviously could never count on arriving at a satisfactory jour- 
ney’s end; the Herricks, however, of whom there are quite as 
many, went joyously about gathering rosebuds, as heretofore, 
and weaving them into chaplets of great beauty. 
In mentioning the incident now, there is no thought of taking 
sides in the controversy, but merely of pointing out what a 
surpassing gardener “Le Maitre,” as some of his compatriots 
affectionately call him, would have made. Here is one who 
would have the right poetic insight into the true purpose of 
a garden and a just notion of the place of dreams and leisure, of 
idle sunny hours, lingering twilights, and soft moon births a 
proper garden should be. And of all the many forms a garden 
may take is there any more nearly fulfilling the conditions of the 
great Frenchman’s pronouncement than the path lying between 
two flowering hardy borders — the Double Border of our text? 
There are, we are told, poems which appeal particularly to 
poets and novels appealing especially to novelists. However 
that may be, I am very sure the double border is the true gar- 
dener’s garden. A landscape architect thinks largely in masses 
of form and color. The individual plant and its idiosyncracies, 
except as these affect its value in the mass, are of secondary 
importance to him. Not so with the real gardener. His in- 
terest is largely in the individual. Sometimes he can tell you to 
a day when such and such a plant was set, and on what date its 
first flower opened this season and last. He will tell you it bore 
a certain number of flower stalks and grew taller by half a foot 
last year. And it is in the double border that such things 
count, that this intimate interest finds its fullest satisfaction. 
I N THE more usual single. border, designed to be effective 
from a distance — the street perhaps, or a verandah, or the 
house windows — a certain unity and cohesion of design can be 
obtained only by limiting the number of plant forms, and flower 
and foliage colors, to be employed. In the double border, how- 
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