r friends
of best gardening taste--will be glad you planted it when all your
things are planted. Please those who know best, and so best please
yourself. Nevertheless, beware! Watch yourself! Do so specially when you
think you have mastered the whole art. Watch even those who indisputably
know better than you do, for everybody makes mistakes which he never
would have dreamed he could make. Only the other day I heard an amateur
say to a distinguished professional gardener:

"Did you plant those shrubs of gorgeous flower and broad, dark leaf out
on your street front purely as a matter of artistic taste?"

"I did," he replied. "I wanted to put my best foot foremost. Wouldn't
you?"

"Why should I?" asked the amateur. "I wouldn't begin a song with my
highest note, nor a game with my strongest card, nor an address with my
most impassioned declaration, nor a sonnet with its most pregnant line.
If I should, where were my climax?"

Certainly the amateur had the best of it. A garden is a discourse. A
garden is a play. See with what care both the dramatist and the
stage-manager avoid putting the best foot foremost. See how warily they
hold back the supreme strength of the four or five act piece for the
last act but one. There is a charmingly instructive analogy between a
garden and a drama. In each you have preparation, progress, climax, and
close. And then, also, in each you must have your lesser climaxes
leading masterfully up to the supreme one, and a final quiet one to let
gratefully down from the giddy height.

In Northampton nearly all of our hundreds of gardens contesting for
prizes are plays of only one or two acts. I mean they have only one or
two buildings to garden up to and between and around and away from. Yet
it is among these one-act plays, these one-house gardens, that I find
the art truth most gracefully emphasized, that the best foot should not
go foremost. In a large garden a false start may be atoned for by better
art farther on and in; but in a small garden, for mere want of room and
the chance to forget, a bad start spoils all. No, be the garden a
prince's or a cottager's, the climaxes to be got by superiority of
stature, by darkness and breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom
belong at its far end. Even in the one-house garden I should like to see
the climaxes plural to the extent of two; one immediately at the back of
the house, the other at the extreme rear of the ground. At the far end
of the lo