THE LURE OF THE GARDEN 
comrades becomes more intimate there, where even the 
shyest takes heart of grace, where the most self-con¬ 
scious forgets to pose, where words come readily to 
the silent, and where silence is never irksome. 
The garden, in fact, provides the most perfect of 
social backgrounds, possessing all the advantages and 
none of the drawbacks of its parents, the wilderness 
and the palace, those two extremes between which 
man moves, one the expression of all that lies beyond 
his control, the other the result of everything he has 
learned to force into his service. 
There are few who do not feel at home in a garden. 
The roughest or most cultured, the simplest or the 
world-weary, the child, the woman of fashion, the en¬ 
ergetic or the lazy, the materialist on his clod of earth, 
and the poet in his rainbow maze—all of us, saint and 
sinner, sad or gay, enter a garden as though it were 
our own, unoppressed by its most princely magnifi¬ 
cence, touched and attracted by its simplest form. 
The lure of the garden! It has drawn us from the 
beginning of history, and draws us now. Persian po¬ 
tentates and Egyptian queens in the days before Moses, 
delighted to live in one; and in the scurry of modern 
existence English M.P.’s and commuters’ wives escape 
from the cares of state and the terrors of housekeeping 
to plunge into the mysteries of planting and pruning, 
renewing their strength like Antaeus at every touch 
of mother earth. As for that special and curious order 
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