12 
GARDENS AND THEIR MEANING 
Primarily, of course, a garden is beloved for its own 
sake. There are occasions, however, when it is chosen as 
a background against which to group other plans. That 
it can serve in a sense as a theater for human play only 
brings out a new value. 
A real little drama was recently watched by a young college 
woman who lives in the Jewish quarter of a seaboard city. 
One June day two lads (neighbors, but almost strangers to 
her), having spied some young children gardening with 
their teacher in a distant part of the park, rang her door- 
bell and asked if they might not use her back yard for a gar- 
den. Neither of them, it appeared, had ever had a garden ; 
but they wanted, so they said, to raise potatoes. At last she 
consented, and operations began. 
The spot, as she described it, was hardly one to tempt a 
gardener. The yard was brick-paved, and the sunshine, oh, 
so scanty ! With the assistance, however, of a number of 
willing-handed friends, who at the right moment appeared as 
by magic on the scene, they began filling it layer upon layer 
with earth, which they brought mysteriously in strawberry 
boxes and paper bags. Where this came from nobody in- 
quired, until one day a being in policeman’s buttons rang 
the doorbell and called attention to the fact that her young 
friends had been scraping soil from around the shade trees 
in the Mall. The affair, he seemed to think, had gone quite 
far enough ; and yet, with characteristic softening of mood, 
he gave her to understand that in one special comer there 
was an earth heap which the boys might draw upon so long as 
they dug at certain hours when duty would not compel him 
to interfere. So, suggestive of ants rather than lads, they 
continued carrying the earth until it was spread evenly over 
the plot, at least a foot in depth. Next they brought potatoes 
from their home kitchens, cut them into quarters, and planted 
