In such gardening there is a constraint, a lack of natural
freedom, a distance from nature, and a certain contented subserviency,
which makes it--however fortunate it may be under other social
conditions--wholly unfit to express the buoyant, not to say exuberant,
complacencies of the American home. For these we want, what we have not
yet quite evolved, the American garden. When this comes it must come, of
course, unconsciously; but we may be sure it will not be much like the
gardens of any politically shut-in people. No, not even of those supreme
artists in gardening, the Japanese. It will express the traits of our
American domestic life; our strong individuality and self-assurance, our
sense of unguarded security, our affability and unexclusiveness and our
dislike to high-walled privacy. If we would hasten its day we must make
way for it along the lines of these traits.
On the other hand, if in following these lines we can contrive to
adhere faithfully to the worldwide laws of all true art, who knows but
our very gardening may tend to correct more than one shortcoming or
excess in our national character?
In our Northampton experiment it has been our conviction from the
beginning that for a private garden to be what it should be--to have a
happy individuality--a countenance of its own--one worthy to be its
own--it must in some practical way be the fruit of its householder's own
spirit and not merely of some hired gardener's.
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