ocks and on a vaster scale than we here have to do with. Yet
straight lines in gardening are often good and fine if only they are
lines of real need. Where, when and in what degree it is good to
subordinate utility to beauty or beauty to utility depends on time,
place and circumstance, but when in doubt "don't" pinch either to pet
the other. Oppression is never good art. Yet "don't" cry war, war, where
there is no war. A true beauty and a needed utility may bristle on first
collision but they soon make friends. Was it not Ruskin himself who
wanted to butt the railway-train off the track and paw up the
rails--something like that? But even between them and the landscape
there is now an entente cordiale. I have seen the hand of Joseph Pennell
make beautiful peace with billboards and telegraph-poles and wires.

The railway points us to the fact that along the ground Nature is as
innocent of parallel lines, however bent, as of straight ones, and that
in landscape-gardening parallels should be avoided unless they are lines
of utility. "Don't" lay parallel lines, either straight or curved, where
Nature would not and utility need not. Yet my own acre has taught me a
modification of this rule so marked as to be almost an exception. On
each side of me next my nearest neighbor I have a turfed alley between a
continuous bed of flowering shrubs and plants next the division line,
and a similar bed whose meanderings border my lawn. At first I gave
these two alleys a sinuous course in correspondence with the windings of
the bed bordering the lawn--for they were purely ways of pleasure
among the flowers, and a loitering course seemed only reasonable. But
sinuous lines proved as disappointing in the alleys as they were
satisfying out on the lawn, and by and by I saw that whereas the
bendings of the open lawn's borders lured and rewarded the eye, the same
curves in the alleys obstructed and baffled it. The show of floral
charms was piecemeal, momentary and therefore trivial. "Don't" be
trivial!

[Illustration: "'Where are you going?' says the eye. 'Come and see,'
says the roaming line."

This planting conceals one of the alleys described on page 34. In the
alley a concrete bench built into a concrete wall looks across the
entire breadth of the garden and into the sunset.]

But a cure was easy. I had to straighten but one side of each alley to
restore the eye's freedom of perspective, and nothing more was wanting.
The American eye's fr