The books _are_ the professional advice, with few
drawbacks and with the great advantage that they are ours truly and do
not even have to be "'phoned." I should rather have in my library my
Bailey's "American Cyclopedia of Horticulture," than any two garden
periodicals once a month. These, too, I value, but, for me, they are
over-apt to carry too much deckload of the advice and gentle vauntings
of other amateurs. I have an amateur's abhorrence of amateurs! The
Cyclopedia _knows_, and will always send me to the right books if it
cannot thresh a matter out with me itself. Before Bailey my fount of
knowledge was Mr. E. J. Canning, late of Smith College Botanic Gardens;
a spring still far from dry.
As the books enjoin, I began my book-gardening with a plan on paper; not
the elaborate thing one pays for when he can give his garden more money
than time, but a light sketch, a mere fundamental suggestion. This came
professionally from a landscape-architect, Miss Frances Bullard, of
Bridgeport, Connecticut, who had just finished plotting the grounds of
my neighbor, the college.
I tell of my own garden for another reason: that it shows, I think, how
much can be done with how little, if for the doing you take time
instead of money. All things come to the garden that knows how to wait.
Mine has acquired at leisure a group of effects which would have cost
from ten to twenty times as much if got in a hurry.
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