File:American homes and gardens (1908) (17535100554).jpg

Title: American homes and gardens
Identifier: americanhomesgar51908newy (find matches)
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors:
Subjects: Architecture, Domestic; Landscape gardening
Publisher: New York : Munn and Co
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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464 AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS December, 1908 December, rgo8 Beneath the dining-room windows, next the garden porch, is a wide and spacious border, reaching quite out to the bounding path. Here are row after row of hardy shrubs and flowering annuals; an inner row of nicotiana is fol- lowed by a low hemlock hedge; then another row of nico- tiana; then Japanese barbery; then nicotiana again, and a final luscious growth of heliotrope. The corresponding border beneath the drawing-room windows is chiefly com- posed of day lilies and hardy phlox, harmonizing with the old rose tones of the bricks. But it is the path bordering that seizes the attention and most it would be a florist's catalogue, and would convey no sense at all of this planted loveliness, in which so much has been combined to produce so grand an effect. For there is ample spacing everywhere. The beds are wide and the paths are long; they twist a bit and turn some, so that an end is no sooner reached than an opening presents itself with new varieties and new growths. Somewhere in between this beauty a vegetable garden has been contrived, but it is so embedded and decorated that its more useful growths hardly count in the beauty within which it is planted. There are few things so difficult to describe as a garden, AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 465 may lose oneself in its floral borders; stand, as it were ir the center of a great bouquet, spread out cm every side a far as eye can see. You may, indeed, be the single incon gruous element in the whole landscape, for what mere mar dare compare himself with the loveliness of flowt Not I, surely; and in truth, as my entranced ey me from one mass of flowering to another, from cate hue to perhaps a richer, stronger note, it < though, most unworthily, I had gained entrance uu land, a true and real fairyland; for the path I trod wa real and solid, the trees gave back their natural resistance ;? carried ne deli- :med as fairy- moment, if you please, imagine that there has been no system displayed in its planting, no reasoning avoided in what has been done here. Nor think, if you will, that there can be only confusion here, plentifully distributed, displayed under every tree, flourishing unabashed by every foot of walk. There is nothing of this at all; for how could there be when the single underlying idea that determined the form and content of this garden was simply to gather here every beautiful kind of plant, every plant that had beauty or helped beauty, or that gave forth a delicious perfume, or which had some exquisite or some noble form—if I say all
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holds it. The paths out beyond the house are bordered on both sides by wide beds filled with flowers of the most bril- liant sort. One may almost believe that everything that grows and blooms has its place here, and certainly every plant is at home, for the growth is everywhere lusty and the blooming continuous and vigorous throughout the season. Here are huge beds of verbenas; immense clumps of gay pe- tunias, each color in a place of its own; some immensely high lilies; brakes of fern; clumps of hardy phlox; brilliant as- ters; more nicotiana, and other splendid annuals and peren- nials. In other paths the planting changes and there are masses of dahlias, foxgloves, marigolds, snapdragons, chrys- anthemums, salpiglossis—but why continue the list? At the and few gardens so untranslatable into words as Mrs Chan- ter's. A recital of its contents would be a mere list of names and there would be no conveyance at all of its wonderful charm and beauty. It is a garden that would be lovely everywhere, but which is here most lovely of all; since one hardly looks for this floral wealth in the midst of a forest and the rocks and trees afford so tine a shelter and so beautiful an enclosure. So here it grows and flourishes, like nothing but itself, a beautiful scented garden, so filled with flowers that the air is saturated with their sweet odors, and one carries away from it a lasting sense of its beauty and its perfume. Yet it is a garden to linger in as well as to delight in. Its area, as I have already hinted, is sufficiently large that one once I put my hand upon them, and the flowers were real, too, growing in endless profusion, each stem seemingly capped with its own precious note of loveliness and color. Yes, it was all true and all real, and I had no need to pinch myself or thrust a pin within my flesh to realize that I was awake and really here. But, surely, fairyland could not be fairer than this sweetly scented garden, nor finer nor more beautiful. Even the "common" flowers, if there be such things, took on an unaccustomed note of beauty and seemed the better fitted to fill their part of having some- thing to do and doing it with as much grace as they could. If I have described this garden as a place in which every lovely thing grew and bloomed in profusion, do not for a this lay below the planting of this garden, then how could it be aught but beautiful? Surely, where beauty is gathered together, there is beauty, and all else matters not at all. And a garden being a place for plants, this is a true garden. The architect has not hauled into it mammothly heavy constructions of stone and cement; the sculptor has not set up his statuary or his carved vases; the landscape architect has not brought out his plans and instruments. I doubt if any of these good folk had a "job" here or needed one. Quite certainly they were not needed; for in the deli- -'- lly lovely embroidery of the simple plants themselves s richest .adornment to her face, and it gracious offering to the human mind and senses

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