THE TRUE CALIFORNIA GARDEN 
By Charles Mulford Robinson 
A student of landscape design inevitably looks 
forward to Southern California as to a field of 
wonder and delight. His head has been filled 
with stories of its wealth ol bloom; and conscious 
that it is annually the Mecca of thousands of per¬ 
sons of taste and culture, who, loving gardens, have 
the means to go where vegetation never sleeps, he 
dares to dream of a landscape fairyland. There 
he will find, he is assured, roses that climb roof 
trees, geraniums that are as tall as lilac bushes, 
heliotrope that screens piazzas, together with the 
luxuriance and strangeness of the semi-tropical 
bloom. But when he reaches Southern California 
he finds one or two things that he had not counted 
upon, in his careless dreams of Eden. 
At its gate there has stood no angel with the 
flaming sword, and even in Southern California’s 
most fertile parts the gardener is sadly handicapped 
by such deficient moisture that irrigation is a con¬ 
stant need, and now and again by the marked and 
blasting presence of alkali in the soil. Gardening 
there is not quite as easy as it looks; but nowhere 
else, perhaps, does a reasonable amount of effort 
bring forth as prodigious results. And with the 
easy philosophy of distance, one can see that even 
the effort is no doubt a good thing, else the gardens 
might tend to be only tangled masses of bloom and 
growth, getting little care because requiring little. 
Where there is scant care, there is scant thought 
and planning. 
Sometimes, i n - 
deed, one could 
wish that Nature 
demanded yet 
more reflection, 
where she gives 
such glorious op¬ 
portunities as in 
Southern Califor¬ 
nia. 
For a second 
disillusioning dis¬ 
covery, as one 
enters the 
dreamed-of land¬ 
scape fairyland, 
is that, taking 
the region as a 
whole, the well 
thought out gar¬ 
dens are rela¬ 
tively few. Actu¬ 
ally, they aggre 
gate a considerable number; but here all the world 
have gardens, and there are whole communities of 
che very well-to-do who came, one is ready to believe, 
as much for the garden as for any other thing. Is it 
not disappointing, then, to see many a show place 
where there is absolutely no expression of an indi¬ 
vidual’s good taste, and where the considerable 
money that oh^ iously is expended on the garden is 
disbursed by an unimaginative gardener; while in 
the generality of those modest homes, that give its 
stamp to a city, a single picture palm that fills the 
yard and dwarfs the house, seems to satisfy all 
desires ^ 
There is reason, no doubt, for such condition 
in the novelty of the problem. Nearly all are very 
recent comers, and confronted by totally new cir¬ 
cumstances and attracted by the palm, because, 
aside from the plant’s stateliness and beauty, it 
epitomizes tropicalness, each household sets out 
one or more, delighting in their rapid growth, and 
settling back to enjoy the easiest and quickest 
ready-made garden in the world. 
Of course, it may be argued that in the East 
many of those who have caught the out-of-door 
spirit and have commenced seriously to care for 
gardens, are quite as new at the business as are 
late arrivals in California. But the former have 
unconsciously imbibed considerable landscape lore 
that is exactly pertinent to the conditions with 
which they have 
to deal, and in 
nearly every plot 
of ground there 
is some inherited 
gardening, in 
well grown shrub, 
matured tree, or 
established walks 
and beds. In the 
West, there is on 
the subject no 
lore that one in¬ 
tuitively knows 
applies, and there 
are no inherited 
conditions. The 
opportunity is far 
greater, but its 
demand is pro- 
portionately 
larger. 
It is so much 
easier, if the walk 
41 
