Making a Garden on a Hilltop 
THE RECLAMATION OF A GARDEN NEGLECTED FOR TEN YEARS—THE 
FITTEST SURVIVORS —HOW OLD SPECIMENS WERE REVIVIFIED 
W HEN a man has built a 
house his first duty to 
himself and his heirs is that he 
should plant trees; when the trees 
are planted, if he is the right sort 
of man, on his first holiday he will 
lay out a flower garden. 
Rockgirt is a place built on a 
rocky hilltop, where what to plant 
and when to plant it becomes a 
serious study. When the property 
came into our keeping the trees 
were a magnificent monument to 
the builders forethought, but we 
had to look twice to find the gar¬ 
den. A few uncared-for years 
had brought desolation. They 
always do. That is the pathos 
that strikes deep to the heart of 
everyone who loves a garden. 1 
have always had the care of a lit¬ 
tle plot of ground in a town, and 
in idle moments I have wondered 
if I should go away and let the 
plant-battle wage unrestricted, 
which plants among them all 
would own the garden. 
Here is a garden which the 
maker loved and cherished. He 
set it snugly in a hollow of the 
hill, open to the south sun shining 
across the meadow. He hauled 
loads of loamy dirt to make it 
fertile. He sheltered it by clumps 
of pine trees planted to the north, 
northeast and west. Southwest 
a projecting rise in the hill as¬ 
cends to the house, from which 
place one can look down into the 
garden and from no other point 
by Flora Lewis Marble 
Photographs by the Author 
The site of the hilltop garden as it looked after ten years of 
neglect 
These were deutzias which were coaxed into bloom the first 
Spring 
is it visible. As I have come to 
know the garden, its placing is its 
chief charm. To be perfect a gar¬ 
den must be solitary. 
The first summer that we lived 
at Rockgirt I left the garden 
alone and watched it carefully, 
that I might answer this question 
of the survival of the fittest in the 
war of the flowers. I knew the 
garden was laid out nearly twenty- 
five years ago. I felt sure all the 
good old-fashioned flowers had 
grown there. It had been neg¬ 
lected for ten years. The question 
of what survived was sufficiently 
interesting to make me delay dig¬ 
ging until everything growing 
there had had a chance to bloom. 
The garden is fifty-five feet 
square. The paths were easily 
traced because the beds had been 
raised high above them, though 
now a thick sod of wild grasses 
covered everything. There had 
been a round center bed some 
eight feet in diameter with a path 
circling about. Eight beds, com¬ 
ing from the center one in a star 
shape, filled the remaining space. 
The paths had been about three 
feet wide. As is the case with 
many old English gardens, a 
shrub had been planted in the 
center of each bed. These were 
all alive, though a fire which 
swept across the meadow burned 
them so badly that many of them 
had to be cut back to the ground. 
The shrubs proved to be one white 
.In the places where the garden joine d the wood where the hepaticas 
grow we planted squills 
The wood was our experiment station. Here we successfully sent 
the crocus back to nature 
(108) 
