Felix Adler's.]

And now as to the single acre by measure, of lawn, shrubs, and plants,
close around my house; for the reason that it was and is my school of
gardening. There was no garden here--I write this in the midst of
it--when I began. Ten steps from where I sit there had been a small
Indian mound which some one had carefully excavated. I found stone arrow
chips on the spot, and one whole arrow-head. So here no one else's
earlier skill was in evidence to point my course or impede it. This was
my clean new slate and at that time I had never "done a sum" in
gardening and got anything like a right answer.

It is emphatically an amateur garden and a book garden: a garden which
to me, as to most of us, would have been impossible in any but these
days when the whole art of gardening has been printed in books and no
amateur is excusable for trying to garden without reading them, or for
saying after having read them that he has planned and worked without
professional advice. The books _are_ the professional advice, with few
drawbacks and with the great advantage that they are ours truly and do
not even have to be "'phoned." I should rather have in my library my
Bailey's "American Cyclopedia of Horticulture," than any two garden
periodicals once a month. These, too, I value, but, for me, they are
over-apt to carry too much deckload of the advice and gentle vauntings
of other amateurs. I have an amateur's abhorrence of amateurs! The
Cyclopedia _knows_, and will always send me to the right books if it
cannot thresh a matter out with me itself. Before Bailey my fount of
knowledge was Mr. E. J. Canning, late of Smith College Botanic Gardens;
a spring still far from dry.

As the books enjoin, I began my book-gardening with a plan on paper; not
the elaborate thing one pays for when he can give his garden more money
than time, but a light sketch, a mere fundamental suggestion. This came
professionally from a landscape-architect, Miss Frances Bullard, of
Bridgeport, Connecticut, who had just finished plotting the grounds of
my neighbor, the college.

I tell of my own garden for another reason: that it shows, I think, how
much can be done with how little, if for the doing you take time
instead of money. All things come to the garden that knows how to wait.
Mine has acquired at leisure a group of effects which would have cost
from ten to twenty times as much if got in a hurry. Garden for ten-year
results and get them for next to