28 
House & Garden 
Mr. Cable’s study is a Heldstone Dutch Colonial building, set in a grove of giant trees. Wide lawns 
stretch before it. To one side is a little grouping of stone benches that form a garden resting place 
GEORGE CABLE TALKS of GARDENS 
In the Garden That He Made Himself at Northampton , He Tells 
of Garden Personality and Its Reflection of the Rules of Life 
A GARDEN that expresses its owner’s per¬ 
sonality has a peculiar, fascinating at¬ 
traction for me; and I am fortunate in living 
close to a very beautiful garden with a char¬ 
acter of its own, a character worth knowing 
well. It is none other than “the amateur 
garden” that George W. Cable has made famous 
in his book of that title. 
The chief charms of Mr. Cable’s garden— 
charms that are the more alluring because they 
are rare in American gardens—are its lack 
of pomp and eager show and the kindly, coax¬ 
ing way it has of leading you on and revealing 
its beauties to you gradually. It is Mr. Cable’s 
own garden, made by himself, and the fine 
bravery of its design, and the care and gentle 
taste exercised over its details makei it peculi¬ 
arly the personal garden of the author of “Old 
Creole Days.” 
The Flattering Reflection 
Accordingly, when I crossed the street one 
summer morning to have a garden chat with 
him, I naturally had this thought of person¬ 
ality in gardens in my mind. Finding him 
out in his garden, pruning shears in hand, 
cutting pretty irregularities into a bank of 
shrubbery which his man had shaven much too 
WILLIAMS HAYNES 
smooth for beauty, I made this suggestion. 
“Do you know,” he replied, his eyes twink¬ 
ling, “I think that any man who gardens in 
earnest for himself will inevitably get a show 
of personality into his garden extremely flat¬ 
tering to himself, for we sum up a man’s mis¬ 
takes and all. But a man's garden is like his 
book, which does not betray to the reader the 
thousand and one mistakes which have been 
passed through and left behind—eliminated. 
And yet,” he continued seriously, “the revela¬ 
tion of personality in a garden must not be 
self-conScious, else that self-consciousness will 
get into the garden and treasonably betray 
the garden’s master. Neither do we want a 
man’s self-assertion in his garden. Such 
revelations will be all the more revealing for 
being unpleasant; the revelation of unpleasant 
aspects of his personality. Or else, in a subtler 
way, the garden will reveal a single unlucky 
aspect of his personality, for its character may 
be due to the fact that he has accepted blindly 
or weakly the suggestions of others. 
“The personality that ought to betray itself 
in a garden, and which will be a beautiful be¬ 
trayal if the garden is in any degree a success, 
is like that which is betrayed in a man’s lit¬ 
erary style. It will be,' that is, not something 
which he puts into it, but, as Brownell says, 
something which he cannot keep out.” 
We had seated ourselves on the stone bench 
overlooking the deep, wild ravine with its 
little fountain,—its dryad’s bath as I like to 
think it—at the bottom. 
Simplicity of Rule 
“A garden,” Mr. Cable continued, “is a 
most beautiful reminder of the simplicity of 
rule to which the whole conduct of life can be, 
and should be, reduced. The rules of morals 
are the rules of courtesy; the rules of courtesy 
are the rules of art. The rules of all these 
are the rules of diplomacy and government, 
and when a man in his garden refers any 
gardening problem to the rules that work 
harmony and happiness in the relations of 
life outside his garden he is pretty sure to 
garden correctly. It will keep out of his 
garden faults that are very hard to keep out 
—vanity, frivolity, rude exuberance, selfish 
thoughtlessness, and a dozen others, all kinds 
of ungenuineness, mimicries, fashion, fad. 
“I want to say a word aside,” he went on, 
“about misconceiving the true purpose of a 
garden. The commonest misconception is to 
look on one’s garden—not consciously, of 
