What is a Garden? 
Miss Jekyll's guarded and admirable criticism of the pictures of 
American gardens, reproduced in Miss Shelton's book, which was 
printed in the May Bulletin from her letter to Mrs. King, is worth 
emphasizing afresh. It notes in these gardens the absence of sim- 
plicity, which foreigners miss in things American. 
Bourget, in his book on the United States, with much to praise, 
thinks our love of size and show, regardless of their appropriateness, 
a national weakness — our entertainments are too lavish, our dinner 
tables overladen with silver, our "American Beauties" on their four 
foot stems are out of proportion, and one has too immediate a sense 
of repletion. Some such feeling results from the plethora of bloom 
and color effects so strenuously sought in the present fashion of our 
gardens. Like kaleidoscopes they lie before us in the plans gen- 
erally followed to-day. Often beautiful, the beauty is too obvious and 
too soon wearies the eye, which scarcely takes in one fine color scheme 
when the imperceptible movement of a muscle brings in another 
dazzling field of vision and bewilders us. A central point, to which 
Art says all else should lead up and be subordinated, is not there. 
In the "Landscape Gardening Book" by Grace Tabor, an ex- 
cellent work on elementary landscape gardening, she says, "It is 
decidedly contrary to our American ideas, but it is nevertheless a 
fact, that a garden may be absolutely flowerless and yet be lovely; 
flowers do not make a garden, revolutionary though the thought may 
seem. If you doubt, consider the places where it is possible to go and 
look at quantities of beautiful flowers, but where it is quite impossible 
to feel or say, 'What a beautiful garden! ' " 
The study of fine color schemes appears to be one of the most 
original and best lines of work in our American gardens, but let us 
beware of making it too characteristic by overdoing and so cloying the 
beholder. Just as a really well dressed woman should make us think 
of her own charm, and not of the cleverness and expensiveness of her 
dressmaker, so in a garden an atmosphere of serene beauty and fitness 
should be created that makes us accept the whole as something that 
could not be ordered otherwise, and with no sense of bewildered sur- 
prise at the gardener's skill. 
Should a garden be a horticultural display in a parallelogram 
of a few yards, or several hundred, as the case may be — or should 
it be a conglomeration of stones and mortar, amid inappropriate sur- 
roundings, into which flowers are tumbled, fondly called an "Italian" 
garden — so little resembling those classic models with their back- 
grounds of melting blue mountains, with the green boweriness of their 
