THE SOCIAL SIDE OF GARDENS 
they live and eat in them, training vines to keep out the 
alien eye quite as much as for a protection against 
the sun. 
There are, however, many exquisite gardens scattered 
all over the United States, in New England, in the 
South, in the West; gardens whose owners have dis¬ 
covered the precious uses to which they may be put and 
whose recollection is sweet to the guests privileged to 
enter them. I recall a summer afternoon in a Maine 
garden overlooking the shining reaches of a river. The 
great Colonial house merged through green arbors into 
the beds gay with corn-flowers and canterbury-bells, 
sweet with heliotrope and lily, separate^each from each 
by grassy paths edged with box, and given seclusion by 
rose-hung wall and pergola. The small group sat idly 
enough among the fragrant smells and gentle sounds, 
flutterings of leaf and bird, trickle of fountain, sigh of 
pines. Tea was over, and the west was smoldering 
with intenser color. The half-dozen guests were all 
busy persons — an actress who is world-renowned, a 
playwright, an editor, a newspaper woman, a couple of 
artists. The desultory talk flowed from one to another, 
interspersed by utterly contented silences. The topics 
centered upon what and when to plant “things,” the 
massing of colors in beds, the joy of a sun-dial, the va¬ 
garies of certain bulbs or slips ; not one but hoped some 
day for a garden of his own. And altogether delightful 
as were the days and the amusements of that hospitable 
IOI 
