House and Garden 
ANOTHER WAY OF EXPRESSING SOCIAL POSITION 
doorways—compared with the cabin or cottage 
homes to which they give entrance—and the pro¬ 
fusion of flowers that, in season, decorate every 
yard and entranceway to the home. 
One feels very grateful to these doorways and 
flowers for supplying a certain charm to the one long 
row of dwelling-houses and business places encircling 
the Digby Basin, and comprising the main part of 
the town. Without them the town itself would be 
considered architecturally ugly, and entirely out of 
keeping with its surroundings. Somehow, from the 
first glimpse one obtains of historic, breezy, tide- 
wonder Digby, with the green, forest-crowned hills 
in the background, the deep blue waters of the 
wonderful tidal basin forming a semicircle about it, 
the soft blues of the sky separated from the blue 
waters, by the mystic purplish-blue of the distant 
mountains, one naturally expects great things of a 
town built amid such charms 
I'here is a feeling of disappointment amounting 
almost to indignation when it is discovered, on closer 
aciiuaintance, that the majority of the houses of old 
Digby are one and two storey wooden cottages, with 
narrow facades and steep roofs; but as that observing 
tourist, Margaret W. Morley, quickly discovered on 
entering the town, they possess the inartistic virtues 
of cleanliness and new paint in addition to the artistic 
virtues and natural beauties of their flower gardens. 
“Few Digby houses go to ruin for lack of paint’’ she 
says, “consequently the town has a very new look, 
and presents a thrifty and well-to-do appearance, as 
exasperating to the artist, as it is doubtless gratifying 
to the inhabitant. But all ohjectionahle features are 
redeemed by the flower gardens.” 
Fish-flakes and flowers can do much for a place, 
and in Digby there are fields and coast-lines and 
street borders, filled and crowded with fish-flakes, 
covered with drying cod and hake; and flowers are 
everywhere. The people have a pretty 
way of putting them wherever there 
is a place to hold them. One sees 
pots of blooming plants in the cellar 
windows, on the main street where 
the houses add to their other crimes 
against good taste, that of opening 
directly upon the sidewalk. Flower 
pots stand on brackets on the side 
of the house, and often bank up two 
sides of the little extended entryway. 
It is pleasant to enter a house between 
walls of flowers, and it is pleasant to 
stop before the yards and interview 
the tangles of poppies and pinks and 
all sorts of bright and spicy flower- 
folk that congregate in those places. 
Digby flowers appear to grow for 
the mere joy of it. They are so bright 
and spicy, and crowd out the weeds 
with such vigor, sometimes overflowing the garden 
and straggling out to the roadside. They remind 
one of Celia Thaxter’s flowers at the lighthouse 
on the Isles of Shoals, seeming to have the same 
qualities of brilliancy and fragrance. A house with¬ 
out flowers is the rare exception in Digby. They 
ATTACHED TO A VERY MODEST COTTAGE 
I 20 
