t I would have the final storm of passion and riot of
disclosure, and then close about the rear of the house there should be
the things of supreme richness, exquisiteness and rarity.

This soft-voiced echo answering back out of the inmost heart of the
whole demesne gives genuineness of sentiment to the entire scheme. To
plant a conflagration of color against the back fence and stop there
would be worse than melodramatic. It would be to close the play with a
bang, and even a worthy one-act play does not close with a bang. The
back of the lot is not the absolute end of the garden-play. Like the
stage-play, the garden-play brings its beholder back at the very last,
by a sweet reversion, to the point from which it started. The true
garden-lover gardens not mainly for the passer-by, but rather for
himself and the friends who come to see him. Even when he treads his
garden paths alone he is a pleased and welcome visitor to himself, and
shows his garden to himself as to a visitor. Hence there is always at
last a turning back to the house or to the front entrance, and _this_ is
the play's final lines, the last grouping of the players, the relief of
all tension and the descent of the curtain.

[Illustration: " ... climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by
darkness and breadth of foliage and by splendor of bloom belong at its
far end."

Everything in this photograph was planted by the amateur gardener except
the pine-trees in perspective.]

One point farther in this direction and we may give our hard-worked
analogy a respite. It is this: as those who make and present a play
take great pains that, by flashes of revelation to eye and to ear, the
secrets most unguessed by the characters in the piece shall be early
revealed to the audience and persistently pressed upon its attention, so
should the planting of a garden be; that, as if quite without the
gardener's or the garden's knowledge, always, to the eye, nostril or
ear, some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon and lure
across easy and tempting distances from nook to nook of the small
garden, or from alley to alley and from glade to glade of the large one.
Where to Plant What? Plant it as far away as, according to the force of
its character or the splendor of its charms, it can stand and beckon
back with best advantage for the whole garden.

[Illustration: "Some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon
and lure."

From a photograph taken on My