HOUSE AND GARDEN 
260 
April, 
thing useful all yourself, something which you were not trained 
to do, which isn’t your “line,” is to enlarge your power over your 
environment, to give yourself a new sense of mastership, to flatter 
your ego. What credit is it to paint well, or write well, or run a 
railroad well, when that is what you 
were expensively educated to do ? But 
when a painter can build a motor boat, 
or a college president can mend a 
clock, or a railroad president beat par 
on the golf links, that is something 
else, something wonderful, something 
to boast about. I would no more hire 
a man to make a trellis in my flower 
garden than I would employ the golf 
professional to play around the course 
for me, though the carpenter’s trellis 
might be as much better than mine as 
the professional’s score would be 
{might, I say; I don’t admit it would 
be) . 
But, above all, that flower bed and 
that trellis behind it represent happi¬ 
ness — happiness past and yet to be. 
They represent long spring afternoons 
when the April sun beat pleasantly 
down on the back of my neck and on 
my arms, bared for the first time after 
the winter. They represent delicious 
moments when I paused and stood up¬ 
right to straighten out the kinks in my 
spine, while from the nearby ever¬ 
green hedge, from the topmost spike 
of a young Norway spruce, a song- 
sparrow poured 
forth his ecstatic 
song. They rep¬ 
resent hours of 
dream - lightened 
toil, when each 
barrow-load o f 
manure, trundled 
with straining 
shoulder - sockets 
half the length 
o f the garden, 
seemed to hold a 
n i n e-foot holly¬ 
hock, a giant lark¬ 
spur, a forest of 
foxgloves and 
Canterbury bells, 
a pink glory of 
anemone japoni- 
ca, in its wormy 
disgustingness. 
When the bed 
was filled and smoothed, when the trellis was built and painted, 
when the grass in front was raked clean, top-dressed and re¬ 
seeded, then I stood before the work of my putterin' hands, a 
long hour between work-time and dusk, watching my cardinal 
climbers cover the trellis, my foxglove swing their fairy bells, my 
hollyhocks sway in the August breeze. Such an hour of ecstasy in 
the presence of bare soil only the putterer can know ! 
Mrs. Margaret Deland has somewhere spoken of “the grim in¬ 
hibitions of wealth” which prevent certain garden owners from 
themselves working in their flower beds. I fancy we all know 
such people—poor cowards, slaves to their caste, who fear alike 
their neighbors’ and their own servants, and who have lost com¬ 
pletely the faculty of self-support, with the joy the exercise of that 
faculty brings. I know a man—he calls himself a “gentleman 
farmer’’—who thinks he putters 
'round his place. He puts a long, ex¬ 
cellent cigar in his mouth, whistles to 
his West-Highland terrier, buttons the 
belt of his Norfolk jacket, and walks 
out over extensive lawns cropped by a 
power mower to his formal garden, 
where numerous gardeners are per¬ 
petually engaged in digging out one 
kind of plant and setting in another, 
which is supposed to be succession. 
You and I know that succession con¬ 
sists of so filling a bed with permanent 
inhabitants that one may have steady 
bloom. Anybody can achieve succes¬ 
sion with a dozen gardeners, a huge 
seed bed off somewhere out of sight, a 
hothouse and an income of $100,000 a 
year. Once our friend has reached his 
garden, he pokes holes with his cane 
here and there to indicate where lie 
thinks certain plants should be set. 
Catching his cap on a thorn as he goes 
under a rose trellis, he whips out a 
knife and prunes off the offending 
shoot. At the pool he picks up a stone 
from the graveled path, which has 
hurt his thinly clad feet, and carries 
it into the bushes to drop it. Thus, 
laboriously, h e 
makes the rounds 
of his estate, and 
tells his friends 
at luncheon that 
he has been put¬ 
tering (with a 
final “g”). 
Rubbish! H e 
doesn’t know 
what the word 
means. He is not 
a gardener. He 
doesn't deserve 
a garde n. He 
never will till he 
gets, into old 
clothes and dem¬ 
onstrates his ut¬ 
ter inefficiency by 
building a bed 
with his own 
hands, or at the 
very least edging a walk, and then feeling vastly more proud of it 
than of all the rest of his estate put together. 
I have often thought that one of the reasons why “Robinson 
Crusoe” is immortal, and why every book about men wrecked on 
desert islands appeals to us, is because we ultra-civilized folk 
deep in our hearts realize our incompetence to master our environ¬ 
ment single-handed, and we bow in admiration to the man who 
can. The Admirable Crichton, in Barrie’s delightful play, was a 
butler in England, but on the desert island he was “King.” 
Of course, the very first requirement of a man face to face with 
1 have made by myself "slowly and inefficiently” a brick sundial 
which tells the time—and tells it beautifully 
My wife maintains that she built and painted half this trellis, but when the grass was raked and seeded, I folded 
my “putterin’ ” hands and let the cardinal climbers finish the job 
