Garden Furnishings 
387 
mean, light-built affair. It should be of good pro- 
portions and substantial materials. It need not be 
made with brick or marble pillars ; natural tree 
trunks of good size serve as well. It should look 
as if it had been built with care and stability, and 
that the vines had been planted and trained by 
skilled gardeners. A pergola may have a dilapi- 
dated Present and be endurable ; but it should 
show evidences of a substantial Past. 
Little sisters of the pergola are the charmilles , or 
bosquets, arches of growing trees, whose interlaced 
boughs have no supports of wood as have the per- 
golas. When these arches are carefully trained and 
pruned, and the ground underneath is laid with turf 
or gravel, they form a delightful shady walk. 
Charming covered ways can be easily made by 
polling and training Plum or Willow trees. Arches 
are far too rare in American gardens. The few we 
have are generally old ones. In Mrs. Pierson’s 
garden in Salem the splendid arch of Buckthorn is a 
hundred and twenty five years old. Similar ones are 
at Indian Hill. Cedar was an old choice for hedges 
and arches. It easily winter-kills at the base, and 
that is ample reason for its rejection and disuse. 
The many garden seats of the old English garden 
were perhaps its chief feature in distinction from 
American garden furnishings to-day. In a letter 
written from Kenilworth in 1575 the writer told of 
garden seats where he sat in the heat of summer, 
u feeling the pleasant whisking wynde.” I have 
walked through many a large modern garden in the 
summer heat, and longed in vain for a shaded seat 
