--if we will but ask ourselves instead of the lawn-mower man--an
effect of home, of comfort, cheer and grace, of summer and autumn
reminiscences and of spring's anticipations, immeasurably better than
any ordinary eye or fancy can extort from the rectangular and
stiffened-out nakedness of unplanted boundaries; immeasurably better
than the month-by-month daily death-stare of shroud-like snow around
houses standing barefooted on the frozen ground. It may be by hearty
choice that we abide where we must forego outdoor roses in Christmas
week and broad-leaved evergreens blooming at New Year's, Twelfth-night
or Carnival. Well and good! But we can have even in mid-January, and
ought to allow ourselves, the lawn-garden's surviving form and tranced
life rather than the shrubless lawn's unmarked grave flattened beneath
the void of the snow. We ought to retain the sleeping beauty of the
ordered garden's unlost configuration, with the warm house for its
bosom, with all its remoter contours--alleys, bays, bushy networks
and sky-line--keeping a winter share of their feminine grace and
softness. We ought to retain the "frozen music" of its myriad gray, red
and yellow stems and twigs and lingering blue and scarlet berries
stirring, though leaflessly, for the kiss of spring. And we ought to
retain the invincible green of cedars, junipers and box, cypress,
laurel, hemlock spruce and cloaking ivy, darkling amid and above these,
receiving from and giving to them a cheer which neither could have in
their frostbound Eden without mutual contrast.

[Illustration: "The sleeping beauty of the garden's unlost configuration
... keeping a winter's share of its feminine grace and softness."

This picture was taken in the first flush of spring. The trees in
blossom are the wild Japanese cherry.]

Eden! If I so recklessly ignore latitude as to borrow the name of the
first gardener's garden for such a shivering garden as this it is
because I see this one in a dream of hope--a diffident, interrogating
hope--really to behold, some day, this dream-garden of Northern winters
as I have never with actual open eyes found one kept by any merely
well-to-do American citizen. If I describe it I must preface with all
the disclaimers of a self-conscious amateur whose most venturesome
argument goes no farther than "Why not?" yet whom the evergreen gardens
of New Orleans revisited in January impel to protest against every
needless submission to the tyrannies of fro