drops us a fresh
harvest.

A garden, we say, should never compel us to go back the way we came; but
in truth a garden should never compel us to do anything. Its don'ts
should be laid solely on itself. Those applicable to its master,
mistress, or guests should all be impossibilities, not requests.
"Private grounds, no crossing"--take that away, please, wherever you
can, and plant your margins so that there can be no crossing. Wire
nettings hidden by shrubberies from all but the shameless trespasser you
will find far more effective, more promotive to beauty and more
courteous. "Don't" make your garden a garden of don'ts.

For no garden is quite a garden until it is "Joyous Gard." Let not yours
or mine be a garden for display. Then our rhododendrons and like
splendors will not be at the front gate, and our grounds be less and
less worth seeing the farther into them we go. Nor let yours or mine be
a garden of pride. The ways of such a garden are not pleasantness nor
its paths peace. And let us not have a garden of tiring care or a user
up of precious time. That is not good citizenship. Neither let us have
an old-trousers, sun-bonnet, black finger-nails garden--especially if
you are a woman. A garden that makes a wife, daughter or sister a dowdy
is hardly "Joyous Gard." Neither is one which makes itself a mania to
her and an affliction to her family. Let us not even have, you or me, a
wonder garden--of arboreal or floral curiosities. Perhaps because I have
not travelled enough I have never seen a garden of exotics that was a
real garden in any good art sense; in any way, that is, lastingly
pleasing to a noble spirit. Let your garden, and let mine, be the garden
of joy. For the only way it can be that, on and on, year in, year out,
is to be so good in art and so finely human in its purposes that to have
it and daily keep it will make us more worth while to ourselves and to
mankind than to go without it.

THE AMERICAN GARDEN

Almost any good American will admit it to be a part of our national
social scheme, I think,--if we have a social scheme,--that everybody
shall aspire to all the refinements of life.

Particularly is it our theory that every one shall propose to give to
his home all the joys and graces which are anywhere associated with the
name of home. Yet until of late we have neglected the art of gardening.
Now and then we see, or more likely we read about, some garden of
wonderful beauty; but the very f