Let us not even have, you or me, a
wonder garden--of arboreal or floral curiosities. Perhaps because I have
not travelled enough I have never seen a garden of exotics that was a
real garden in any good art sense; in any way, that is, lastingly
pleasing to a noble spirit. Let your garden, and let mine, be the garden
of joy. For the only way it can be that, on and on, year in, year out,
is to be so good in art and so finely human in its purposes that to have
it and daily keep it will make us more worth while to ourselves and to
mankind than to go without it.
THE AMERICAN GARDEN
Almost any good American will admit it to be a part of our national
social scheme, I think,--if we have a social scheme,--that everybody
shall aspire to all the refinements of life.
Particularly is it our theory that every one shall propose to give to
his home all the joys and graces which are anywhere associated with the
name of home. Yet until of late we have neglected the art of gardening.
Now and then we see, or more likely we read about, some garden of
wonderful beauty; but the very fame of it points the fact that really
artistic gardening is not democratically general with us.
Our cities and towns, without number, have the architect and the
engineer, for house and for landscape, for sky-scrapers and all manner
of public works; we have the nurseryman, the florist; we have parks,
shaded boulevards and riverside and lakeside drives.
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