HOUSE AND GARDEN 
October, 1912 
22 
r - 
5 
ington Township is not densely populated. But it has in prodigal 
profusion what many a gardener would perjure his soul to possess, 
established clumps of mountain laurel, eight and ten feet high and 
sometimes twenty feet in circumference, lining every roadside, 
lifting proudly over every gray stone wall, and stretching up the 
pastures into the mountain forest till the hill-slopes fairly riot 
with their wealth of pink. Mountain laurel has been occasionally 
transplanted with success; but usually the most careful attempts 
to domesticate it fail. It demands to be let alone, amid its pasture 
rocks and briers, the self-sufficient aristocrat of our native land¬ 
scape. Some of us love it the better for this, and make annual 
pilgrimage to the gardens where it grows, nor find its loveliness 
less because it flames by gray stone walls and over rocks and 
briers, instead of 
beside formal 
paths and upon 
clipped lawns ; 
and because be¬ 
yond it we see not 
an Italian garden 
and the stone por¬ 
tals of a French 
chateau, but only 
green rows of 
corn, perhaps, and 
a mouse - gray 
barn and then the 
doming ridge of 
the Taconic Hills. 
We like to think 
that laurel is one 
cf those things 
money cannot 
buy. We cannot 
have a formal 
garden with a 
marble sundial 
and lotos flowers 
on the pool. But, 
for a ten cent fare 
on the trolley to 
South Egremont 
and a five mile 
walk past a per¬ 
petual roadside 
garden and a 
dancing brook, we can achieve such pink glory as no nursery man 
ever rivaled, where the only gardeners are the cows. 
The Japanese scorn roses as too “obvious,” though they culti¬ 
vate, somewhat paradoxically, it seems to us, the peony. There 
is something a little showy about roses, however, something sug¬ 
gestive of feminine vanity and expense, especially when they are 
cultivated in formal beds and forced for large and odorous 
blooms. But the climbing rambler would be a sorry loss as an aid 
to architectural picturesqueness, and against the American wild 
rose, surely, no Japanese could cavil, for in its manner of growth, 
its delicacy and its harmony with the landscape, it is almost the 
most Japanese of all our flowers. It opens its heart by the wayside 
when the world is growing lush with green, and beside old fences 
hung with clematis or gray walls where the blueberries are com¬ 
ing to fruit, it masses its pink blooms, each one delicate and per¬ 
fect but all together making a rich note of color against the virgin 
green and white of little birches and the golden summer fields. 
How carelessly massed the wild roses grow, yet how they seem 
to fall into skilfully calculated beds. They add warmth to the 
June day, and they add a delicate wistfulness, too, by their indi¬ 
vidual quality of petal and feminine poise, even as MacDowell has 
caught them in his music. To one who loves Nature (oh, peril¬ 
ous phrase!), and flowers as a part of Nature, of the landscape, 
of the pictorial loveliness of the world, the wild rose garden by 
the wayside has a charm and beauty no collection of her showier 
sisters behind a yew hedge, bounded by formal paths, can hope to 
match. 
The more striking of roadside shrubbery planting, such as the 
clumped sumac, rich in autumn with its red leaves and deep, 
luscious red bloom spikes, has been frequently copied by gar¬ 
deners, employing the same material. The fragrant trailing 
clematis, too, running wild over wall and fence, runs no less 
readily to rule, though seldom in the formal garden has it the 
same charm in winter, when, by the wayside wall, the white 
relics of its blos¬ 
soms are borne on 
delicate sprays 
against the snowy 
mvstery of buried 
fields and shrouded 
hemlocks. We 
prize the flowers of 
spring, as well, and 
save a corner of 
our garden to hold 
the trilliums, the 
bluets, the anemo¬ 
nes, the violets, the 
columbines, which 
grow so carelessly 
just out of the 
wheel ruts on the 
borders of country 
roads, as if they 
had come down 
from the woods 
and fields to speak 
the passer-by of 
May. Yet even with 
our most careful 
art we can hardly 
rival the white 
snowfall of hepati- 
cas under leafless 
trees nor catch the 
careless grace of a 
columbine swaying 
its red bells on a ledge of rock above the bend of the road, a 
ledge where the violets climb up from the ferns and the shy 
anemones lurk in the grass. Nor shall our garden hold that 
vista round the curve, of wood and field and purple hills. 
Of the humbler flowers, the roadside weeds, few are the praises 
sung, though Thoreau did say of mullein that it is “so conspicu¬ 
ous with its architectural spire, the prototype of candelabrums.” 
But one expects the praise of humble weeds from Thoreau. 
There are among the library poets no sonnets to hardhack or 
orange milkweed, no odes to toad-flax, no lyrics to celebrate 
hemp weed or bed straw. Yet each in its season praises its 
Maker with bloom and color along our northern roads, and adds 
to artless gardens the charm of its petals and fragrance. What 
the farmer knows as wild carrot bears a dainty, flat-topped white 
bloom sometimes as large as a saucer, and a long bed of them 
will often appear like a strip of delicate embroidery along the 
wayside, making their more aristocratic title of Queen Anne's 
lace entirely applicable. In winter, too, they are still beautiful, for 
the blooms curl up on the tall, dry stalks and hold, after a storm, 
each its little cup of snow. Indeed, there is seldom the stark 
(Continued on page 248) 
Beside the road grow the delicate and exquisite garden beds that held the tiny blue asters which, 
flowering after the frost, hold a faintly faded blue of summer in their tiny petals 
