[Illustration: "How the words were said which some of the planters
spoke."
President Seelye of Smith College planting a tree.--A majority of the
company present were Smith College students and others engaged in the
work of the People's Institute. The tree on the left is Barrie's elm.
The tree directly behind the small sapling which is being planted, and
on a line with it, is Max O'Rell's. The hemlock-spruce between them is
Felix Adler's.]
And now as to the single acre by measure, of lawn, shrubs, and plants,
close around my house; for the reason that it was and is my school of
gardening. There was no garden here--I write this in the midst of
it--when I began. Ten steps from where I sit there had been a small
Indian mound which some one had carefully excavated. I found stone arrow
chips on the spot, and one whole arrow-head. So here no one else's
earlier skill was in evidence to point my course or impede it. This was
my clean new slate and at that time I had never "done a sum" in
gardening and got anything like a right answer.
It is emphatically an amateur garden and a book garden: a garden which
to me, as to most of us, would have been impossible in any but these
days when the whole art of gardening has been printed in books and no
amateur is excusable for trying to garden without reading them, or for
saying after having read them that he has planned and worked without
professional advice.
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