in America we have no joy
in contemplating an American home limited to the aspirations of peasant
life. In such gardening there is a constraint, a lack of natural
freedom, a distance from nature, and a certain contented subserviency,
which makes it--however fortunate it may be under other social
conditions--wholly unfit to express the buoyant, not to say exuberant,
complacencies of the American home. For these we want, what we have not
yet quite evolved, the American garden. When this comes it must come, of
course, unconsciously; but we may be sure it will not be much like the
gardens of any politically shut-in people. No, not even of those supreme
artists in gardening, the Japanese. It will express the traits of our
American domestic life; our strong individuality and self-assurance, our
sense of unguarded security, our affability and unexclusiveness and our
dislike to high-walled privacy. If we would hasten its day we must make
way for it along the lines of these traits.

On the other hand, if in following these lines we can contrive to
adhere faithfully to the worldwide laws of all true art, who knows but
our very gardening may tend to correct more than one shortcoming or
excess in our national character?

In our Northampton experiment it has been our conviction from the
beginning that for a private garden to be what it should be--to have a
happy individuality--a countenance of its own--one worthy to be its
own--it must in some practical way be the fruit of its householder's own
spirit and not merely of some hired gardener's. If one can employ a
landscape-architect, all very well; but the most of us cannot, and after
all, the true landscape-architect, the artist gardener, works on this
principle and seeks to convey into every garden distinctively the soul
of the household for which it springs and flowers.

"Since when it grows and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee."

Few American householders, however, have any enthusiasm for this theory,
which many would call high-strung, and as we in Northampton cannot
undertake to counsel and direct our neighbors' hired helps, we enroll
in the main branch of our competition only those who garden for
themselves and hire no labor. To such the twenty-one prizes, ranging
from two dollars and a half up to fifteen dollars, are a strong
incentive, and by such the advice of visiting committees is eagerly
sought and followed. The public educative value of the movement is