and
in the great discussion of Where to Plant What (in America) no one need
hope to prevail who does not recognize that this high principle of
American democracy is the best rule for American gardening. That
gardening is best, for most Americans, which best ministers to man's
felicity with least disturbance of nature's freedom.

Hence the initial question--a question which every amateur gardener must
answer for himself. How much subserviency of nature to art and utility
is really necessary to my own and my friends' and neighbors' best
delight? For--be not deceived--however enraptured of wild nature you may
be, you do and must require of her _some_ subserviency close about your
own dwelling. You cannot there persistently enjoy the wolf and the
panther, the muskrat, buzzard, gopher, rattlesnake, poison-ivy and skunk
in full swing, as it were. How much, then, of nature's subserviency does
the range of your tastes demand? Also, how much will your purse allow?
For it is as true in gardening as in statecraft that, your government
being once genuinely established, the more of it you have, the more you
must pay for it. In gardening, as in government, the cost of the scheme
is not in proportion to the goodness or badness of its art, but to its
intensity.

This is why the general and very sane inclination of our American
preferences is away from that intense sort of gardening called "formal,"
and toward that rather unfairly termed "informal" method which here, at
least, I should like to distinguish as "free-line" gardening. A free
people who govern leniently will garden leniently. Their gardening will
not be a vexing tax upon themselves, upon others, or upon the garden.
Whatever freedom it takes away from themselves or others or the garden
will be no more than is required for the noblest delight; and whatever
freedom remains untaken, such gardening will help everybody to exercise
and enjoy.

The garden of free lines, provided only it be a real garden under a real
government, is, to my eye, an angel's protest against every species and
degree of tyranny and oppression, and such a garden, however small or
extensive, will contain a large proportion of flowering shrubbery.
Because a garden should not, any more than my lady's face, have all its
features--nose, eyes, ears, lips--of one size? No, that is true of all
gardening alike; but because with flowering shrubbery our gardening
can be more lenient than with annuals alone, or wit