In
fact it is one hundred and thirty-nine. However, he has somewhat to do
also with a garden whose grading was quite as bad--identical,
indeed--whose fault has been covered up and its depth made to seem
actually greater than it is, entirely by a corrective planting of its
shrubbery.
One of the happiest things about gardening is that when it is bad you
can always--you and time--you and year after next--make it good. It is
very easy to think of the plants, beds and paths of a garden as things
which, being once placed, must stay where they are; but it is
shortsighted and it is fatal to effective gardening. We should look
upon the arrangement of things in our garden very much as a housekeeper
looks on the arrangement of the furniture in her house. Except
buildings, pavements and great trees--and not always excepting the
trees--we should regard nothing in it as permanent architecture but
only as furnishment and decoration. At favorable moments you will make
whatever rearrangement may seem to you good. A shrub's mere being in a
certain place is no final reason that it should stay there; a shrub or a
dozen shrubs--next spring or fall you may transplant them. A shrub, or
even a tree, may belong where it is this season, and the next and the
next; and yet in the fourth year, because of its excessive growth, of
the more desired growth of something else, or of some rearrangement of
other things, that spot may be no longer the best place for it.
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