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AN AMERICAN GARDEN

By J. Horace McFarland

Illustrated from Photographs by the Author

HAT else is a garden in America? Yet there are in our broad land not many real American gardens. Few realize that the trend of rural decoration and lawn adornment in our country has been, for the most part, distinctly imitative of European forms. It was natural that our forefathers, when they began, as Bacon puts it, to "garden wisely," should look for models to their old homes across the Atlantic. In England and on the Continent the adornment of public and private grounds summed up generally as gardening is the growth of centuries of living beyond the struggle for mere existence. It has its distinctive and ripened character, and its materials are quite naturally those of the Eastern hemisphere. True, American plants were introduced in Europe long before the Revolutionary War, and such gentle souls as John Bartram sent to the home lands many members of the distinctively American flora in the last century; but the home gardening sought mainly to introduce the plant life of the older countries. Thus there were brought in and cultivated many familiar plants which are hardly now recognized as foreigners-the geraniums, heliotropes, tulips, fuchsias, of the flower garden, the Norway maples, lindens, and European ashes of the parks.

The

This growing gardening art became more and more formal, and some quaint old examples of that extreme cultivated barbarism called "Italian gardening," with its clipped and sheared yews and box-trees, yet survive among us. free, open, hearty plant life of America was practically unknown to us a century ago, in a decorative sense. The pioneers saw little beauty in the wild tangle of the woodlands they had to cut off for home sites, and the rich flora of the meadows and marshes must be subdued to make pastures. The pets of the housewife in her dooryard, when she came to have time for flowers, were exotic strangers, tenderly nourished, and she exchanged

with her neighbors "slips" of the rarer foreign treasures.

But our European cousins have helped to show us the glory of our own woods and hills, and discovered for us the gems of our meadows and roadsides. Many an estate in England exhibits as its chief glory a planting of American laurel and rhododendron; and the ubiquitous American tourist learns with astonishment that the common bushes and weeds of his generous home land are esteemed as rarely beautiful abroad.

Our greater landscape artists have begun to realize the possibilities of America's wealth of distinctive plant life. The

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Wooded Island at the World's Fair, and the great Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina, have furnished notable object-lessons. It is a smaller but most interesting example that I ask the reader to visit with me, a camera fixing for us a few impressions. Dolobran, near Philadelphia, is the country home of Mr. Clement A. Griscom. Differing little, as approached by the Haverford road, from other well-kept suburban residences, its broad lawns and fine effects in massed foliage show merely the correct taste of the landscape archiIt is not until one passes the gate way of the chestnuts that the distinctively American garden is entered, and the free beauty of native woodland, marsh, and copse presents itself.

tect.

What a change! Here is no tailormade lawn! No geranium-beds or coleus borders of monotonously continuous coloring meet the eye; no "carpet gardening' of mosaic plants offends the taste. Just the natural beauty of American plants, located cunningly where they love to grow, unrestrained, untrimmed. True, the plants are cared for-fed, if need be, watered on occasion-but no attempt is made to guide them into preconceived forms.

It was said of Thoreau-he who loved and lived with American flora and fauna far ahead of his generation-that he could hardly keep away from him the usually shy denizens of the forest about Walden pond. In a measure, this seems to be the feeling of the plants in this American garden which Mr. Griscom's liberality has created-the plants fairly outdo themselves in repayment of the love lavished upon them. See the richness of this great white boneset-it is actually the same herb of bitter memory to the youth of a passing generation, and it is a despised roadside weed elsewhere. Here its majestic spread of bloom in September excites our wonder and admiration. A sister eupatorium, the "joe-pyeweed," throws up its purple richness in company.

In this garden the changes are quick. We visit it on a spring morning, and greet, freshly bloomed, a dozen friends of last year. We come back in the afternoon, and the curtain has risen on a new scene. One of the charms of the native plants is their evanescence. You look for their first appearance, you watch the growth of the tender shoots, you greet the shy blos

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soms on a notable day. The processes of Nature go on; the seed-making follows, the plant may pass into its seasonal retirement. The garden is never two days alike, never tiresome-who wants strawberries every day in the year? Would these white trilliums be esteemed if with us continually?

The time of the moss-pink is eagerly awaited at Dolobran. Great beds of it border a rocky walk in the " quarry its carmine-pink blaze seems to absorb and store away the sunshine in which it luxuriates. While it is at its height, in a rocky, shady corner we find the lovely

columbines lifting jeweled blossoms of red and yellow, white and purple, to sway in every passing breath.

But we must not overlook the springing of the ferns. See these white "croziers" of the energetic cinnamon fern; how they push up from the black mold. and fairly revel in the early warmth! Look at them later, when the splendid foliage has developed, and the odd fruiting fronds are dressed in cinnamon brown - can any exotic pet present more of interest and life?

In kindly nooks a great fern-cluster nestles away from the sunshine, close by

been named the "Pansy Path." Just as the dogwood blossoms are falling to carpet the ground, we may see here, gleaming out from the tangle of green things, a tree whose branches are thickly hung with the silver bells which give it name-and, for once, a sensible "common" name!

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THE RICHNESS OF THE WHITE BONESET a noble American rhododendron. This latter aristocrat of our hills and mountains has not yet attained the majestic size of its nature at Dolobran, but its vigor proves its satisfaction with the environment. A colony of laurel is established in happy conditions in a chestnut grove, and is already a wealth of white and delicate pink in the blooming season.

When Mr. Warren H. Manning, the landscape artist. whose love for and acquaintance with American plants has accomplished this notable result, began the work at Dolobran, he found a succession of excavations from which buildingstone had been taken. These quarries, right in the woodland of chestnut, oak, maple, and dogwood which is the happy possession of the estate, were selected as caskets for the floral jewelry to be naturalized. No filling up was attempted, save as rich soil had to be introduced in the borders and fern-pockets. Between the two principal quarries rough stone steps were placed at several points, and appropriate plant life encouraged around and over these steps. The various paths of The dogwoods cannot be overlooked, the garden are named, and unobtrusive for the native trees in the Dolobran groves but permanent labels give both common have responded to the impulse of kindly and botanical names to the inquiring care, and their snow-drifts of blossoms visitor. There is a constant increase in enrich the tender greens of the spring the number of species, the test being only foliage along the roadsides, while their American origin and adaptability-the soft whiteness showing across the quarry rich orange carpet of California poptakes the eye even from the glow of moss- pies is hard by the bright scarlet of pinks. These splendid trees have even the Virginian silene, while on a lovely invaded the formal lawn, to its great dis- path in the woods, passing by a group of tinction. the delicate and exquisite maidenhair East of the quarry a wood-road has ferns native to the neighborhood, we find

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