The Amateur Garden

52 chapters

1. 1That gardening is best ... which best ministers to man's felicity with least disturbance of nature's freedom." This is my study. The tree in the middle of the picture is Barrie's elm. I once lifted it between my thumb and finger, but I was younger and the tree was smaller. The dark tree in the foreground on the right is Felix Adler's hemlock. [Page 82]
2. 2THE AMATEUR GARDEN
3. 3GEORGE W. CABLE
4. 4ILLUSTRATED
5. 5CONTENTS
6. 6ILLUSTRATIONS
7. 7MY OWN ACRE
8. 8" ... that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill River loiters through Paradise." A strong wire fence (invisible in the picture) here divides the grove from the old river road.
9. 9"On this green of the dryads ... lies My Own Acre." The two young oaks in the picture are part of the row which gives the street its name.
10. 10"The beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full back to the rapids just above My Own Acre." This is the "Hoe Shop." The tower was ruined by fire many years ago, and because of its unsafety is being taken down at the present writing.
11. 11"A fountain ... where one,—or two,—can sit and hear it whisper." The ravine of the three fish pools. There is a drop of thirty feet between the upper and the lowermost pool.
12. 12"The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the pushing of the lawn in under the grove was one of the early tasks of My Own Acre." At the point where the party is drinking tea (the site of the Indian mound) the overlap of grove and lawn is eighty-five feet across the old fence line that once sharply divided them.
13. 13"Souvenir trees had from time to time been planted on the lawn by visiting friends." The Beecher elm, first of the souvenir trees.
14. 14"How the words were said which some of the planters spoke." President Seelye of Smith College planting a tree.—A majority of the company present were Smith College students and others engaged in the work of the People's Institute. The tree on the left is Barrie's elm. The tree directly behind the small sapling which is being planted, and on a line with it, is Max O'Rell's. The hemlock-spruce between them is Felix Adler's.
15. 15"'Where are you going?' says the eye. 'Come and see,' says the roaming line." This planting conceals one of the alleys described on page 34. In the alley a concrete bench built into a concrete wall looks across the entire breadth of the garden and into the sunset.
16. 16"The lane is open to view from end to end. It has two deep bays on the side nearest the lawn." The straight line of high growth conceals in the midst of its foliage a wire division fence, and makes a perfect background for blooming herbaceous perennials.
17. 17THE AMERICAN GARDEN
18. 18" ... 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 vitæ and a magnolia are bending in the wind.

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