entious designs in humble materials
are one of the worst, and oldest, of garden incongruities. In my
ventures with concrete I have studied for grace in form but grace
subordinated to stability, and have shunned embellishment. Embellishment
for its own sake is the easiest and commonest sin against good art
wherever art becomes self-conscious. It is having a riotous time just
now in concrete. I have rarely seen a commercial concrete garden-seat
which was not more ornate than I should want it for my own acre. I
happen to have two or three articles in my garden which are a trifle
elaborate but they are of terra-cotta, are not home-made and would be
plainer could I have found them so.

A garden needs furniture only less than a house, and concrete is a boon
to "natural" gardening, being inexpensive, rustic, and imperishable. I
fancy a chief reason why there is such inconsiderate dearth of seats and
steps in our American amateur gardens is the old fashion--so well got
rid of at any cost--of rustic cedar and hickory stairs and benches.
"Have none of them," was Colonel Waring's injunction; "they are forever
out of repair."

But I fear another reason is that so often our gardens are neither for
private ease nor social joy, but for public display and are planned
mainly for street exhibition. That is the way we commonly treat garden
fountains! We make a smug show of unfenced, unhedged, universal
hospitality across a sidewalk boundary which nevertheless we hold
inviolate--sometimes by means of a painted sign or gas-pipe--and never
say "Have a seat" to the dearest friend in any secluded nook of our
shrubberies, if there is such a nook. How many of us know a fountain
beside an embowered seat where one,--or two,--with or without the book
of verses, can sit and hear it whisper or watch the moonlight cover it
with silent kisses? In my limited experience I have known of but two.
One is by the once favorite thought-promoting summer seat of Augustus
Saint-Gaudens on his own home acre in Vermont; the other I need not
particularize further than to say that it is one of the things which
interlock and unify a certain garden and grove.

[Illustration: "A fountain ... where one,--or two,--can sit and hear it
whisper."

The ravine of the three fish pools. There is a drop of thirty feet
between the upper and the lowermost pool.]

The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of the lawn in
under the grove was one of the early task