For this
was the genesis of all I have learned or done in gardening, such as it
is.
My appliances for laying out the grades were simple enough: a
spirit-level, a stiff ten-foot rod with an eighteen-inch leg nailed
firmly on one end of it, a twelve-inch leg on the other, a hatchet, and
a basket of short stakes with which to mark the points, ten feet apart,
where the longer leg, in front on all down grades, rested when the
spirit-level, strapped on the rod, showed the rod to be exactly
horizontal. Trivial inequalities of surface were arbitrarily cut down or
built up and covered with leaves and pine-straw to disguise the fact,
and whenever a tree or anything worth preserving stood in the way here
came the loaded barrow and the barrowist, like a piece of artillery
sweeping into action, and a fill undistinguishable from nature soon
brought the path around the obstacle on what had been its lower side, to
meander on at its unvarying rate of rise or fall as though
nothing--except the trees and wild flowers--had happened since the vast
freshets of the post-glacial period built the landscape. I made the
drive first, of steeper grade than the paths; but every new length of
way built, whether walk or road, made the next easier to build, by
making easier going for the artillery, the construction train. Also each
new path has made it easier to bring up, for the lawn garden, sand,
clay, or leaf-mould, or for hearth consumption all the wood which the
grove's natural mortality each year requires to be disposed of.
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