.. to
grow up out of the garden as the high keynote rises at the end of a
lady's song."
On the right of this picture you may see the piers of one of the front
gates of My Own Acre standing under Henry Ward Beecher's elm. The urn
forms surmounting them are of concrete, and the urns are cast from
earlier forms in wood, which were a gift from Henry van Dyke. On the
left the tops of the arbor vitae and a magnolia are bending in the wind.]
Our ordinary American life is also too near nature for the formal garden
to come in between. Unless our formal gardening is of some inexpensive
sort our modest dwelling-houses give us an anticlimax, and there is no
inexpensive sort of formal gardening. Except in the far south our
American climate expatriates it.
A very good practical rule would be for none of us to venture upon such
gardening until he is well able to keep up an adequate greenhouse. A
formal garden without a greenhouse or two--or three--is a glorious army
on a war footing, but without a base of supplies. It is largely his
greenhouses which make the public gardener and the commercial florist so
misleading an example for the cottager to follow in his private
gardening.
To be beautiful, formal gardening requires stately proportions. Without
these it is almost certain to be petty and frivolous. In the tiny
gardens of British and European peasants, it is true, a certain
formality of design is often practised with pleasing success; but these
gardens are a by-product of peasant toil, and in America we have no joy
in contemplating an American home limited to the aspirations of peasant
life.
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