These are things that can be done anywhere in our land, and wherever
done with due regard to soil as well as to climate will give us gardens
worthy to be named with those of New Orleans, if not, in some aspects
and at particular times of the year, excelling them. As long as mistakes
are made in the architecture of houses they will be made in the
architecture of gardening, and New Orleans herself, by a little more
care for the fundamentals of art, of all art, could easily surpass her
present floral charm. Yet in her gardens there is one further point
calling for approval and imitation: the _very_ high trimming of the
stems of lofty trees. Here many a reader will feel a start of
resentment; but in the name of the exceptional beauty one may there see
resulting from the practice let us allow the idea a moment's
entertainment, put argument aside and consider a concrete instance whose
description shall be our closing word.
Across the street in which, that January, we sojourned (we were two),
there was a piece of ground of an ordinary town square's length and
somewhat less breadth. It had been a private garden. Its owner had given
it to the city. Along its broad side, which our windows looked out upon,
stood perfectly straight and upright across the sky to the south of them
a row of magnolias (grandiflora) at least sixty feet high, with their
boles, as smooth as the beach, trimmed bare for two-thirds of their
stature.
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