CHAPTER II 
FRONT DOORYARDS 
“ There are few of us who cannot remember a front yard garden 
which seemed to us a very paradise in childhood. Whether the 
house was a fine one and the enclosure spacious, or whether it was a 
small house with only a narrow bit of ground in front, the yard was 
kept with care, and was different from the rest of the land altogether. 
. . . People do not know what they lose when they make way 
with the reserve, the separateness, the sanctity, of the front yard 
of their grandmothers. It is like writing down family secrets for any 
one to read ; it is like having everybody call you by your first name, 
or sitting in any pew in church.” 
— Country Byways , Sarah Orne Jewett, 1881. 
,D New England villages and 
small towns and well-kept New 
England farms had universally 
a simple and pleasing form of 
garden called the front yard or 
front dooryard. A few still 
may be seen in conservative 
communities in the New England states and in 
New York or Pennsylvania. I saw flourishing 
ones this summer in Gloucester, Marblehead, and 
Ipswich. Even where the front yard was but a 
narrow strip of land before a tiny cottage, it was 
carefully fenced in, with a gate that was kept rigidly 
closed and latched. There seemed to be a law 
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