Pantries, pansies, how I love you, pansies! 
Jaunty faced, laughing lipped and dewey eyed with glee; 
Would my song might blossom out in little five-leaved stanzas, 
Ah delicate in fancies, 
As your beauty is to me. 
James Whitcomb Riley. 
Garden Magic 
The enchantment of a garden, who may analyze it, or who may dispute its 
ineffable charm? It is something so inherent in all of us that to seek its origin 
we go back through the centuries to the first garden that was ever made and the 
first injunction ever given to mortal to “tend the garden.” And then, from these 
walls of Paradise, coming back through the centuries over the limitless regions 
of the earth, we marvel with what wonder-charm man has constructed gardens; 
we make epochs of their loveliness; the hanging gardens of Babylon, the stone 
and verdured beauty of the Italian gardens of the Renaissance:—Isola Bella, 
the Borghese, the Boboli; and again the kingly pleasure ground of Versailles; 
the old English garden with its fruit espaliered against the wall to the colonial 
garden of our own country with its box and clipped hedge walks and its musk of 
Sweet Williams, marigolds and mignonette, its hollyhocks and wall-flowers and 
pungent herbs. 
These are the distinctive models that we all have in mind when we plan or set 
out to form our own garden plot; and no matter how formal and grand and 
spacious, or how simple and confined, the same informing spirit of loveliness is 
possible, for the same materials are ours for the taking. 
A garden should be so studied as to make the most of the ground available for 
it; it should have vistas and it should have nooks, and it should be complementary’ 
to the house; with a due sense of proportion in its massed effects and its details, 
and with relief of sunlight and shadow, it is first aid to getting “in tunc with the 
infinite.” 
The Italians who raised their garden art to the ultimate recognized three 
principles, in making a garden: first, its relations to the house; its relation to the 
landscape (or surroundings) and its relation to its inmates; and this may still 
be done either in grandeur or in simplicity. 
If one may employ water as a garden feature, so much the lovelier; for nothing 
is so grateful and refreshing; nature itself may furnish this break in the garden 
spaces, if one lives near sea or sound or river, and it may also be introduced by 
pool or fountain in whose depths the mirror may be held up to nature and her 
image doubled. There may be garden pictures as well as mural pictures. And 
a garden may have its sanctuary', too. 
A garden may be made up of plants, and trees and flowers and fruits, and so 
arranged in their scheme of color and loveliness and perfection that the imperishable 
garlands of the Della Robbias may be living things for all of us. And finally, a 
garden may go a long way towards teaching us the “holiness of beauty” which 
Amiei paraphrased from the “beauty' of holiness.” 
REGINA ARMSTRONG. 
