HOUSE AND GARDEN 
224 
October, 1912 
era. Our estates cost more now, and we copy better models. We 
have substituted Donatello for the iron deer. But we are little 
nearer either an architecture or a garden craft of our own. Espe¬ 
cially in our gardens, the New England back road still shames us 
in its artless use of native materials and the simplicity and grace 
of its effects. The old New England farmhouse against a back¬ 
ing of orchard, pine and wooded hills, seen up an undulating road 
bordered with pink and gold and azure blue, still puts to shame 
our modern country villas amid their pseudo Italian or French 
or Japanese gardens — sometimes all three together, with a dash 
of Tudor-English thrown in. Because it is indigenous to its site 
and soil, it has the ultimate quality of spontaneity, and hence it 
is seemly and beautiful. As once we were in our literature, so 
we are still in out- 
gardening — too 
often mere par¬ 
rots. A true Jap¬ 
anese garden is 
the concentrated 
delicacy and fra¬ 
grance of the 
landscape of 
Japan. How 
many American 
gardens catch and 
compose in little 
the charm and 
freshness of our 
native landscape ? 
Do we t hin k, 
when we enter 
our gardens, of 
Nature and the 
peace of Nature, 
and its pictorial 
magic ? Or do we 
think of a flor¬ 
ist’s catalogue and 
a photograph of 
Italy? For me, I 
prefer a certain 
cross-road t r i - 
angle of wild sun¬ 
flowers and this¬ 
tles to your form¬ 
al beds of phlox 
that lead to a Grecian pergola behind a Tudor sundial, flanked by 
a Japanese pool and an Italian Renaissance stone bench. 
One of the roads winds down the hill to Tyringham, through 
ranks of giant sugar maples that on the dullest day of autumn 
seem to hold the imprisoned sunlight in their golden depths, and 
in mid-summer frame between their shaggy trunks the level 
meadows far below, the roofs of the village, and the distant hills 
beyond. When you come to the cross-road, your ear catches the 
tinkle of a brook, and your dog, sniffing water, disappears into 
the bushes, whence you hear his greedy lapping. The spot is 
warm and sunny, the sound of water refreshing. In the un¬ 
trimmed delta, so common when country roads intersect, the wild 
sunflowers grow shoulder high, and among them, forcing their 
heads up level with the golden blooms, hundreds of pink Aistles 
add their delicate but daring color. Over this bank of pi ik and 
gold hovers in mid-summer a shimmer of brown, rising as you 
draw near, a cloud of tiny butterflies; and in it incessantly, warm 
as the sun itself, stirs and hums the business of the bees. There 
are few passers on this Berkshire by-way. The valley town lies 
far below, reached by other roads less steep. The gorgeous gar¬ 
den spreads its colors for the bees and butterflies and for an oc¬ 
casional farmer on his way to market. It asks no care of any 
one, no trimming of the edges nor thinning of the roots. It is 
just a jewel set in the landscape by a better Architect than we, on 
the sleepy road to Tyringham. 
Such gardens, with as limitless a variety and succession of wild 
blooms as any garden annual can compile for you, are still com¬ 
mon on our American back roads. They used to be commoon 
everywhere, before the invasion of lumber men, telegraph and 
telephone poles, stone crushers and other servants of utility. They 
might be common still for a little love and care. The wanton de¬ 
struction of timber on the borders of our public roads, ome uni¬ 
versal, is yielding slowly to a more enlightened sentiment. But 
there is no more reason why the wild flowers on the untimbered 
borders should be 
mercilessly mowed 
down, and the 
roadsides reduced 
to ugly stubble. 
One prays some¬ 
times for a Sen- 
house in every 
American county, 
to resow our high¬ 
ways with their 
natural wild loveli¬ 
ness, to weave our 
roads into the land¬ 
scape with a bind¬ 
ing chord of color, 
to show us in time, 
perhaps, how we 
might, out of na¬ 
tive materials, 
achieve a garden 
craft of our own. 
So far as we know, 
this is an opportu¬ 
nity for village im- 
provement so- 
c i e t i e s, not yet 
grasped. Their ac- 
t i v i t i e s mostly 
cease where the 
houses of the town 
cease and the true 
landscape begins. 
What formal drive on the most elaborate of estates can match 
for beauty the bend of the country road into the dark shadows of 
the hemlocks, where the banks are lush with moss, and on this 
richest green velvet the scarlet bunch-berries glow ? Perhaps, too, 
a tiny thread of water runs by the road, fringed with gentians. 
The road is unparched and cool, the green moss cool, the color 
rich but sparing, the shadowing trees stately and quiet as a church. 
You will go far amid the gardens made by man, to match it. Nor 
will you easily match so humble a garden as a field of that stub¬ 
born pasture weed some New Englanders wrongly call hardback, 
when on a neglected slope it spreads its yellow blooms from the 
roadside to the border of the forest or the green bulwark of a 
mountain. Pure gold it is amid the pasture rocks, and cow paths 
wind between the clumps with a quaint suggestion of a map of 
Boston. And can you better that shrubbery effect where the 
laurel is massed against the trees, and the road bends around it as 
if in deference to its charm? 
Few of my readers, probably, have been in Mount Washington 
Township in the southwest corner of Massachusetts, an upland 
plateau behind Mount Everett. The post office is the top of a 
desk in a boarding house, and boasts nine boxes. Mount Wash- 
Over the bank of pink and gold hovers in midsummer a cloud of tiny butterflies and within it stirs 
and hums the business of the bees. The valley town lies far below 
