o, it should never seem to cost, in its
first making or in its daily keeping, so much pains as to lack, itself,
a garden's supreme essential--tranquillity.

So, then, to those who would incite whole streets of American towns to
become florally beautiful, "formal" gardening seems hardly the sort to
recommend. About the palatial dwellings of men of princely revenue it
may be enchanting. There it appears quite in place. For with all its
exquisite artificiality it still is nearer to nature than the stately
edifice it surrounds and adorns. But for any less costly homes it costs
too much. It is expensive in its first outlay and it demands constantly
the greatest care and the highest skill. Our ordinary American life is
too busy for it unless the ground is quite handed over to the hired
professional and openly betrays itself as that very unsatisfying
thing, a "gardener's garden."

[Illustration: " ... until the house itself seems as naturally ... to
grow up out of the garden as the high keynote rises at the end of a
lady's song."

On the right of this picture you may see the piers of one of the front
gates of My Own Acre standing under Henry Ward Beecher's elm. The urn
forms surmounting them are of concrete, and the urns are cast from
earlier forms in wood, which were a gift from Henry van Dyke. On the
left the tops of the arbor vitae and a magnolia are bending in the wind.]

Our ordinary American life is also too near nature for the formal garden
to come in between. Unless our formal gardening is of some inexpensive
sort our modest dwelling-houses give us an anticlimax, and there is no
inexpensive sort of formal gardening. Except in the far south our
American climate expatriates it.

A very good practical rule would be for none of us to venture upon such
gardening until he is well able to keep up an adequate greenhouse. A
formal garden without a greenhouse or two--or three--is a glorious army
on a war footing, but without a base of supplies. It is largely his
greenhouses which make the public gardener and the commercial florist so
misleading an example for the cottager to follow in his private
gardening.

To be beautiful, formal gardening requires stately proportions. Without
these it is almost certain to be petty and frivolous. In the tiny
gardens of British and European peasants, it is true, a certain
formality of design is often practised with pleasing success; but these
gardens are a by-product of peasant toil, and