Your house's
morals may be all right, but its manners are insufferable, it talks so
much about itself and its family." To a fourth he said: "In a gardening
sense your house makes too much noise; you can hear its right angles hit
the ground. Muffle them! Muffle your architectural angles in foliage and
bloom. Up in the air they may be ever so correct and fine, but down in
the garden and unclothed they are heinous, heinous!"
Another precept we try to inculcate in our rounds among the gardens,
another commandment in the moral law of gardening, is that with all a
garden's worthy concealments it should never, and need never, be
frivolous or be lacking in candor. I know an amateur gardener--and the
amateur gardener, like the amateur photographer, sometimes ranks higher
than the professional--who is at this moment altering the location of a
sidewalk gate which by an earlier owner was architecturally misplaced
for the sole purpose of making a path with curves--and such
curves!--instead of a straight and honest one, from the street to the
kitchen. When a path is sent on a plain business errand it should never
loaf. And yet those lines of a garden's layout which are designed not
for business but for pleasure, should never behave as though they were
on business; they should loiter just enough to make their guests feel at
ease, while not enough to waste time.
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