My Garden 
Anne Higginson Spicer, Garden Club of Illinois 
Sometime this March — I wish I remembered the date — my little 
garden will come of age. This coming of age in a human being is 
general!}' a time for a sort of stock-taking; the parents of the twenty- 
one year old are permitted to become reminiscently historical, even 
sentimentally lyric ! 
The editor of the Bulletin has asked me to be the former, but has 
exphcitly denied me the pri\-ilege of the latter, which is of course the 
easier way for one to write of what one loves. If what remains after 
the impulse toward lyricism is extracted be a mere skeleton of as- 
sembled facts, blame her, not me. 
Twenty-one years ago, then, a certain woman started her garden 
in what was a piece of native prairie woodland. Although within the 
limits of a suburban town, there were no houses near, no road was cut 
through, and conditions seemed quite ideally primitive. A lot loo 
by 175 feet may seem an immense estate, if there is nothing to limit 
the view. Later on as houses crept in upon us, the lot has appeared to 
dwindle and dwindle. I am correspondingly glad (undwindlingly!) 
that the inspiration of work I had liked of Frederick Law Olmstead's, 
and, nearer home, of Mr. Symonds, led me to conserve every possible 
sprig of the lovely native shrubs we found on the place. 
Lea\dng quite a thicket between us and the part of the next lot 
to the south where a house might conceivably be built, I had a team 
come and plough a broad cur\dng border in front of this thicket. 
This was the beginning of what is still my garden border. A sturdy 
colored boy with a spade (he is still my gardener) and a sturdy 
young woman with a shovel (who is still my head gardener) pro- 
ceeded to steal from the neighboring woods attractive and well- 
shaped Httle thorn-trees, kinnikinnik, \dbumum, and, trickiest of 
all, a number of small sassafras trees. These were planted wher- 
ever the thicket looked straggly, and across the front of the lot as 
a hedge. 
For a year the woman nursed and tended her beginning of a garden, 
experimenting with vegetables in the low border, and filling all the 
thickets with T^ild flower-roots from all through Cook County. This 
experience was invaluable, as she learned that while the wdld-flowers 
took to the spot jo}^ully, it needed drainage before seeds would grow ; 
so the back of the lot was all tile-drained, and the long border dug 
out below clay level, a layer of brickbats, ashes, bottles and tin-cans 
put in (because they were cheaper than gravel, being like the poor, 
always with us), the clay was broken, mixed with manure and reset 
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