morrow, but somewhere in a near future--we
are going to unite our unfenced lawns in a concerted park treatment: a
sort of wee horticultural United States comprised within a few city
squares; but ever our American individualism stands broadly in the way,
and our gardens almost never relate themselves to one another with that
intimacy which their absence of boundaries demands in order to take on
any special beauty, nobility, delightsomeness, of gardening. The true
gardener--who, if he is reading this, must be getting very tired of our
insistent triteness--carefully keeps in mind the laws of linear and of
aerial perspective, no matter how large or small the garden. The
relative stature of things, both actual and prospective; their breadth;
the breadth or slenderness, darkness or lightness, openness or density,
of their foliage; the splendor or delicacy of their flowers, whether in
size or in color; the season of their blooming; the contour of the
grounds--all these points must be taken into account in determining
where things are to stand and how be grouped. Once the fence or hedge
was the frame of the picture; but now our pictures, on almost any street
of unpalatial, comfortable homes, touch edge to edge without frames, and
the reason they do not mar one another's effects is that they have no
particular effects to be marred, but lie side by side as undiscordantly
as so many string instruments without strings. Let us hope for a time
when they will rise in insurrection, resolved to be either parts of a
private park, or each one a whole private garden.

In our Carnegie prize contest nothing yields its judges more pleasure
than to inculcate the garden rules of perspective to which we have just
referred and to see the blissful complacency of those who successfully
carry them out. I have now in my mind's eye a garden to which was
awarded the capital prize of 1903. A cottage of maybe six small rooms
crowns a high bank on a corner where two rural streets cross. There are
a few square yards of lawn on its front, and still fewer (scarcely eight
or ten) on the side next the cross-street, but on the other two sides
there is nearly a quarter of an acre. On these two sides the limits
touch other gardens, and all four sides are entirely without fencing.
From the front sward have been taken away a number of good shrubs which
once broke it into ineffectual bits, and these have been grouped against
the inward and outward angles of the house