In their pages are a host of facts (indexed!) which once had to be
burdensomely remembered. For one preoccupied with other cares--as every
amateur gardener ought to be--these books are no mean part of his
equipment; they are as necessary to his best gardening as the dictionary
to his best English.
What a daily, hourly, unfailing wonder are the modern opportunities and
facilities by which we are surrounded! If the present reader and the
present writer, and maybe a few others, will but respond to them
worthily, who knows but we may ourselves live to see, and to see as
democratically common as telephones and electric cars, the American
garden? Of course there is ever and ever so much more to be said about
it, and the present writer is not at all weary; but he hears his
reader's clock telling the hour and feels very sure it is correct.
WHERE TO PLANT WHAT
Often one's hands are too heavily veneered with garden loam for him to
go to his books to verify a quotation. It was the great Jefferson, was
it not, who laid into the foundations of American democracy the
imperishable maxim that "That gardening is best which gardens the
least"? My rendition of it may be more a parody than a quotation but,
whatever its inaccuracy, to me it still sounds Jeffersonian--Joseph
Jeffersonian.
Whether we read it "garden" or "govern," it has this fine mark of a
masterful utterance, that it makes no perceptible effort to protect
itself against the caviller or the simpleton; from men, for instance,
who would interpret it as meaning that the only perfect government, or
gardening, is none at all.
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