428 
STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
volved the first and greatest law of garden making. It must 
be pleasant, and in order, as we have indicated, to be pleasant, 
it must be made beautiful. Nothing unsightly must be seen. 
Nature must be won by -art to mould herself to your taste and 
design, and the work being completed, the only test, a simple 
and ever true one of its perfection, is the spontaneous pleasure 
it gives to the intelligent eye. Where with an effort you are to 
look ‘for beauty, argues either no beauty present, or the ab¬ 
sence of all taste for the beautiful. The cultivated eye is the 
sole judge. • 
A garden, as I have just said, is but a horticultural painting, 
embracing all the details and accessories that the subject re¬ 
quired. It should have its little lawn, its roses and honey¬ 
suckles on each side of the front door of your house, and its 
ivy, the Virginia creeper at each end of the piazza, and reach¬ 
ing as high as the chamber window and falling in graceful 
festoons from the house gables. It should have a variety of 
flowering shrubs, choice and increasing in size toward the di¬ 
viding fence on one side and a moderate sized tree or two, 
ranged with a few evergreens on the other side, serving, both 
for ornament and as a screen from the public gaze to the back 
garden. Make a little bed of perpetual roses and another for 
geraniums and verbenas, and intersperse a few hardy perennial 
plants among your shrubs. Plant a row of trees outside of 
your sidewalk, and the arrangements for the front of the house 
are tolerably complete. The back gtrden is for use, but 
equally pleasant as the front. This should be laid out so as 
m 
to possess a few choice fruit trees, apple, plum, crab, and if 
you are south enough, a pear, cherry and may be, a peach. 
The walks may be edged with currants, undercropped with 
strawberries. The fence with the south or south-west aspect 
should be covered with grape-vines, and that of the north with 
blackberries and raspberries. It is perfectly wonderful what a 
variety of things can be grown, both luxuries and things neces- 
sary, in a single lot of ordinary city or village size. It fur¬ 
nishes room for all the summer and fall vegetables, salads, etc., 
as well as an odd nook or spot for things purely ornamental. 
I do_not make it essential to have fountains, grotto work, 
f 
