Garden

“ In the garden itself the excess of color is as cloying as its surfeit of scent pouring from the thousands of open flower cups; we long for green hedges, even for scanter bloom and for fainter fragrance. It is not a garden to live in, as are our box-bordered gardens of the North, our cheerful cottage borders, and our well-balanced Italian gardens, so restful to the eye; it is a garden to look at and wonder at. ”

“ Thus, a garden rises in my fancy, a garden where neither beetle, borer, nor cutworm doth corrupt, and where the mole doth not break in or steal, where gentle rain and blessed sun come as they are needed, where all the flowers bloom unceasingly in colors of heavenly light—a garden such as never yet existed nor ever shall, till the tales of fairyland come true. ”

“ It may not be just your idea of a garden to begin with, but as you study it and deck its barren spaces with masses of color, and fit a sundial into the spot that so needs it, and give the sunshine a fountain to play with, you love the old garden just a little more every time you touch it, until it becomes to you the most beautiful garden in all the world. ”

“ A garden then so appointed as wherein aloft upon sweet shadowed walk of terrace, in heat of summer, to feel the pleasant whisking wind above or delectable coolness of the fountain spring beneath; to taste of delicious strawberries, of sweet odours, breathing from the plants, herbs and flowers ”

“ And now—hurrah for the garden house-cleaning! The garden is dead—the garden of yesterday! Long live the garden—the garden of to-morrow! For suddenly my mind has leaped ahead to spring.
I can hardly wait for breakfast to be over, before I am out in working clothes, pulling up things—not weeds now, but flowers, or what were flowers. Nasturtiums, asters, cosmos, snapdragon, stock, late-blooming cornflowers—up they all come, all the annuals, and the biennials that have had their season. I fling them together in piles, and soon have small haystacks all along my grass paths, and—there I am! ”

“ I can smell the Roses blooming over his grave.
There should be a sundial in every garden to mark the true beginning and the end of day; some noise of water somewhere; bees; good trees to give shade to us and shelter to the birds; a garden-house with proper amount of flower-lore on shelves within; a walk for scent alone, flowers grown perfume-wise; a solitary place, if possible, where should be a nest of owls; a spread of lawn to rest the eyes, no cut beds in it to spoil the symmetry, and at least one border for herbaceous plants. ”

“ There is a shaded walk in this garden which is a thing of solace and content to all who tread its pathway; a bit is shown opposite this page, overhung with shrubs of Lilac, Syringa, Strawberry Bush, Flowering Currant, all the old treelike things, so fair-flowered and sweet-scented in spring, so heavy-leaved and cool-shadowing in midsummer: what pleasure would there be in this shaded walk if this garden were separated from the street only by stone curbing or a low rail? And there is an old sun-dial too in this enclosed garden! ”

“ A garden is ground knit up artistically; ground which has been the field of artistic enterprise; ground which expresses the feeling of beauty and which absorbs qualities which man has discovered in the woodland world. And the qualities in Nature which may well find room in a garden are peace, variety, animation. A good sweep of lawn is a peaceful object, but see that the view is not impeded with the modern's sprawling pell-mell beds. ”

“ My garden, they tell me, was once the garden of an old priory. Under one corner of the lawn is the well that provided the religious with water. It has been covered in with stone, and just over the stone the grass refuses to grow. It is like a tonsure. But though I have been in my garden I think at every hour of the night and of the early morning, I have met no shadowy figures counting their beads or reading their little illuminated books. These good people sleep long and quietly. ”

“ The whole vegetable world is a long extended floral garden. Where formerly deserts lay waste and wild, now the blooming roses and expansive lawns can be seen. Is it possible to picture to your mind's eye a line of lofty mountains whose sides are dressed in living colors and trimmed with rare flowers? ”

“ My mind has been turned to the subject of fruit and shade trees in a garden. There are those who say that trees shade the garden too much, and interfere with the growth of the vegetables. There may be something in this: but when I go down the potato rows, the rays of the sun glancing upon my shining blade, the sweat pouring from my face, I should be grateful for shade. What is a garden for? The pleasure of man. I should take much more pleasure in a shady garden. Am I to be sacrificed, broiled, roasted, for the sake of the increased vigor of a few vegetables? ”

“ Your garden, now, not only gives a shade pleasant to the traveller, but it yields sweet fruits; clouds rise from it that give us the early and the latter rain; they empty themselves,—the plain rejoices, and the barren places become verdant. Yes, the vine that you planted has budded, and blossomed, and gives of its fruit to every passer by. Come to us, our beloved, open the door of your garden, that the traveller may enter in and be refreshed. ”

“ We had broken into the garden, a wonderful and beautiful garden, with shaven lawns and clipped yew-trees, terraces, dim vistas cypress-roofed, and, far away down one of these alleys a sight to fascinate the heart of any child, the figure of a great stone man running. ”

“ Just so a garden, with charming shrubs and shade of trees, planted on a hill above a stream of limpid waters, though it be well known to us, though known the taste of every fruit therein, though familiar to us its every path, yet drawn by a mysterious feeling, we hasten to walk in it once more, and turn our glances all about us, to discover something new, though we have seen it all before. ”

“ The garden, once a glory, succumbed to a riot of weeds and undesirable brush, till a towering wall seemed to be drawn about the house cutting it off from the activities of the world as it cut it off from the approach of sunshine by day, and the comfort of a star-lit heaven by night. ”

“ Nothing is easier than to make an ideal garden. We lay out our grounds, dig, plant, transplant, manure. We read catalogues of roses till we are bewildered with their lustrous glories. We set out plum, pear, and peach, we luxuriate in advance on bushels of choicest grapes, and our theoretic garden is Paradise Regained. ”

“ Looking through the open door down a vista of archways bowered in clematis and climbing roses, with an alpine rock garden at each side of the broad walk, we might almost imagine ourselves to be at the entrance to some botanical gardens. ”

“ My garden is a forest ledge Which older forests bound; The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge, Then plunge to depths profound. ”

“ Rose gardens, sunk gardens, water gardens lead on to copses where all wild things of beauty are met together to entrance the eye. Broad walks between herbaceous borders, containing every flower loved from the time of Eve; sheltered patches where seedlings thrive, a nursery of carefully-reared young. And in this heaven of gardening land gardeners galore flit to and fro, ever doing their master's behest, and manure and water, and time and money may be considerations but are not anxieties. ”

“ And I dream that these garden-closes
With their shade and their sun-flecked sod
And their lilies and bowers of roses,
Were laid by the hand of God.
The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,—
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.
Dorothy Frances Gurney THE LILIES
Ever the garden has a spiritual word:
In the slow lapses of unnoticed time
It drops from heaven, or upward learns to climb,
Breathing an earthly sweetness, as a bird
Is in the porches of the morning heard ”

“ If a friend tells me that he has a rose garden under the care of a skilled gardener, I know without being told that the roses are growing. I at once look through my friend's words and see bushes full of roses of all colours, some full blown, some half blown, some bursting buds, and some just budding. For there is a garden, and a gardener, and sun and rain and dew. I know there must be growth and beauty. ”

“ When they had passed all those troubled ways, The Garden sweet spread forth her green to shew; The moving crystal from the fountains plays; Fair trees, high plants, strange herbs and flowerets new, Sunshiny hills, vales hid from Phoebus' rays, Groves, arbours, mossie caves at once they view, And that which beauty most, most wonder brought, No where appear'd the Art which all this wrought. ”

“ All alive with birds and flowers and village children, butterflies and trees; fed by broad rivers, or hanging over singing streams or deep in the lush grass of water meadows gay with kingcups.
This garden is for us who care to know it. We can take the road, our garden path, and pluck, as we will, flowers of all kinds from our borders; sleep in our garden on beds of bracken pulled and piled high under trees; or on soft heaps of heather heaped under sheltering stones. If we know our garden well enough it will give us food—salads, fruits and nuts; it will cure us of our ills by its herbs ”

“ In gardening, as in other matters, the true test of one's work is the measure of one's possibilities. A small, trim garden, like a sonnet, may contain the very soul of beauty. A small garden may be as truly admirable as a perfect song or painting. ”

“ A white-gravelled walk led out into the white sun, through a stiff, boxed-in, English garden, stuffed with plants in green tubs, and redeemed only by those natural things that will grow and be beautiful in spite of all conventions. ”

“ Every one in town or country had a garden. Into this garden no foot of man intruded after it was dug in the Spring. I think I see yet what I have so often beheld—a respectable mistress of a family going out to her garden, on an April morning, with her great calash, her little painted basket of seeds, and her rake over her shoulder to her garden of labours. ”

“ In the matter of the garden at least it is a Paradise of a place. A great sill of honeysuckle leans out from my window: beyond is a court grown round with creepers, and beyond that the garden—such a garden! ”

“ Give me a flower-garden, in the early morning, with its dry gravel-walks shining in the fresh sunbeams, and all the thousands of flowers which man's care and God's bounty have raised to beautify our dwellings, expanding their refreshed petals to the young light. The garden into which Colonel Manners now went forth was an old-fashioned one, with manifold beds, arranged in as many mathematical figures. ”

“ In his devotion to grass, his eagerness to display the measure of his art in the curves of shrubberies and the arrangement of specimen plants that strut across your lawn or dot it over as the Sunday scholars do the croft when they come for their annual treat, he quite forgets the flowers—forgets the old intent of a garden as the House Beautiful of the civilised world—the place for nature-rapture, colour-pageantry, and sweet odours. ”

“ The hill covered with wild shrubs sloping to the lake, the formal garden, the water garden and Rose garden, with the long inclined pathway seeming to lead out to space immeasurable into the green Garden of Everyman, combine with the scenery to make it a place of remarkable beauty. ”

“ To many, possibly to most, there is attractiveness in a garden of well-kept, straight-bordered paths, of tidy beds symmetrical beyond reproach, of plants arranged like soldiers under review; but to me such gardens—however pleasant to look at—seem unsuited to repose and impossible to sit and dream in. ”

“ What gardens we anticipate when the snow lies deep and we pore over those seductive lists by a blazing fire! Never a garden this side of Paradise so fair as they. For there are no weeds in our gardens of anticipation, nor pests, nor drought, nor any blight. ”

“ But quite apart from scientific interests, a real old garden, unaltered and unspoiled, has a peculiar interest of its own. It is sure to be haunted by associations, and nothing calls up associations so quickly and certainly as a sudden scent of flowers coming and going upon the summer air. ”

“ You must know, Sir, that I look upon the Pleasure which we take in a Garden, as one of the innocent Delights in human Life. A Garden was the Habitation of our first Parents before the Fall. It is naturally apt to fill the mind with Calmness and Tranquillity, and to lay all its turbulent Passions at rest. ”

“ What must that sweet air from the land have been to the sea-weary Puritan women on shipboard, laden to them with its promise of a garden! for I doubt not every woman bore with her across seas some little package of seeds and bulbs from her English home garden, and perhaps a tiny slip or plant of some endeared flower ”

“ THE GARDEN.
"Gardens have been the scenes of the three most stupendous events that have occurred on earth:—the temptation and fall of man—the agony of the Son of God—and his resurrection from the grave"
Notes of the American Editor of "Kebb's Christian Year."
Is't not a holy place, thy Garden's bound,
Peopled with plants and every living leaf
Instinct with thought, to stir the musing mind? ”

“ A garden many generations old may thus be a reflection of the minds of several of such possessors—men who have not only thankfully paced its green spaces and delighted in its flowery joys, but who have held it in that close and friendly fellowship whose outcome is sure to be some living and lasting addition either to its comfort, its interest, or its beauty. ”

“ A garden should, as I believe, be an emanation from the spirit of its owner, and, just as some men are formal and some informal, some prim and some Bohemian, some careful and some rash, so should their several gardens vary in style and feeling. ”