"The lawn ... lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one shrub-and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across."
A common garden feature in New Orleans is the division fence with front half of wire, rear half of boards, both planted out with shrubs. The overhanging forest tree is the evergreen magnolia (M. grandiflora).
At the same time, let us note in passing, this enlargement is partly because the lawn—not always but very much oftener than where lawns go unenclosed—lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one shrub-and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across; free of bush, statue, urn, fountain, sun-dial or pattern-bed, an uninterrupted sward. Even where there are lapses from this delightful excellence they often do not spoil, but only discount, more or less, the beauty of the general scheme, as may be noted—if without offence we may offer it the homage of criticism—in one of the gardens we have photographed page [176] to illustrate these argumentations. There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the sward without in the least adding to the garden's abounding charm. The smallest effort of the reader's eye will show how largely, in a short half-day's work, the fair scene might be enhanced in lovely dignity simply by the elimination of these slight excesses, or by their withdrawal toward the lawn's margins and into closer company with the tall trees.
In New Orleans, where, even when there are basements, of which there are
many, the domains of the cook and butler are somewhere else, a nearly
universal feature of every sort of dwelling—the banker's on two or
three lots, the laborer's on half a one—is a paved walk along one side
of the house, between the house and the lawn, from a front gate to the
kitchen. Generally there is but the one front gate, facing the front
door, with a short walk leading directly up to this door. In such case
the rear walk, beginning at the front door-steps, turns squarely
along the house's front, then at its corner turns again as squarely to
the rear as a drill-sergeant and follows the dwelling's ground contour
with business precision—being a business path. In fact it is only the
same path we see in uncrowded town life everywhere in our land.
"There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the sward.... In a half-day's work, the fair scene might be enhanced in lovely dignity by the elimination of these excesses."
The sky-line of this beautiful garden becomes a part of the garden itself, a fact of frequent occurrence in New Orleans. The happy contrast of rearmost oak and palm is also worthy of notice.
But down there it shows this peculiarity, that it is altogether likely to be well bordered with blooming shrubs and plants along all that side of it next the lawn. Of course it is a fault that this shrubbery border—and all the more so because it is very apt to be, as in three of our illustrations [pages 174, 178, 180], a rose border—should, so often as it is, be pinched in between parallel edges. "No pinching" is as good a rule for the garden as for the kindergarten. Manifestly, on the side next the house the edge between the walk and the planted border should run parallel with the base line of the house, for these are business lines and therefore ever so properly lines of promptitude—of the shortest practicable distance between two points—lines of supply and demand, lines of need. For lines of need, business speed!
But for lines of pleasure, grace and leisure. It is the tactful office
of this shrubbery border to veil the business path from the lawn—from
the pleasure-ground. Therefore its outside, lawn-side edge should be a
line of pleasure, hence a line of grace, hence not a straight line (dead
line), nor yet a line of but one lethargic curve, but a line of suavity
and tranquil ongoing, a leisurely undulating line.
Not to have it so is an error, but the error is an inoffensive one easily corrected and the merit is that the dwelling's business path is greenly, bloomingly screened from its pleasure-ground by a lovely natural drapery which at the same time furnishes, as far as the path goes, the house's robes of modesty. Indeed they are furnished farther than the path goes; for no good work gathers momentum more readily than does good gardening, and the householder, having begun so rightly, has now nothing to do to complete the main fabric of his garden but to carry this flow of natural draperies on round the domicile's back and farther side and forward to its front again. Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even above its reach and where it does not conceal, the house's architectural faults, thus winsomely enhance all its architectural charm; like a sweet human mistress of the place, putting into generous shadow all the ill, and into open sunshine all the best, of a husband's strong character. (See both right and left foreground of illustration on page 178, and right foreground on page 180.)
And now if this New Orleans idea—that enough private enclosure to secure good home gardening is not incompatible with public freedom, green lawns, good neighborship, sense of room and fulness of hospitality, and that a house-lot which is a picture is worth more to everybody (and therefore is even more democratic) than one which is little else than a map—if this idea, we say, finds any credence among sister cities and towns that may be able to teach the Creole city much in other realms of art and criticism, let us cast away chalk and charcoal for palette and brush and show in floral, arborescent, redolent detail what is the actual pictorial excellence of these New Orleans gardens.
For notwithstanding all their shut-in state, neither their virtues nor
their faults are hid from the passing eye. The street fence, oftenest of
iron, is rarely more than breast-high and is always an open fence.
Against its inner side frequently runs an evergreen hedge never taller
than the fence's top. Commonly it is not so tall, is always well clipped
and is so civil to strangers that one would wish to see its like on
every street front, though he might prefer to find it not so invariably
of the one sort of growth—a small, handsome privet, that is, which
nevertheless fulfils its office with the perfection of a solid line of
palace sentries. Unluckily there still prevails a very old-fashioned
tendency to treat the front fence as in itself ornamental and to
forget two things: First, that its nakedness is no part of its
ornamental value; that it would be much handsomer lightly
clothed—underclothed—like, probably, its very next neighbor;
clothed with a hedge, either close or loose, and generously kept below
the passer's line of sight. And, second, that from the householder's
point of view, looking streetward from his garden's inner depth, its
fence, when unplanted, is a blank interruption to his whole fair scheme
of meandering foliage and bloom which on the other three sides frames in
the lawn; as though the garden were a lovely stage scene with the fence
for footlights, and some one had left the footlights unlit.
A lovely stage scene, we say, without a hint of the stage's unreality;
for the side and rear fences and walls, being frankly unornamental, call
for more careful management than the front and are often charmingly
treated. (Page 174.) (See, for an example of a side fence with front
half of wire and rear half of boards, page 174, and for solid walls,
pages 180 and 184.) Where they separate neighbors' front lawns they
may be low and open, but back of the building-line, being oftenest tight
and generally more than head-high, they are sure to be draped with such
climbing floral fineries as honeysuckles, ivies, jasmines white and
yellow, lantanas, roses or the Madeira vine. More frequently than not
they are planted also, in strong masses, with ever so many beautiful
sorts of firmer-stemmed growths, herbaceous next the sod, woody behind,
assembled according to stature, from one to twelve feet high, swinging
in and out around the lawn until all stiffness of boundaries is waved
and smiled away.
" ... a lovely stage scene without a hint of the stage's unreality."
The beauty of this spot could be enhanced in ten minutes by taking away the planted urns which stand like gazing children in the middle of the background.
In that first week of January already mentioned the present writer saw
at every turn, in such borders and in leaf and blossom, the delicate
blue-flowered plumbago; two or three kinds of white jasmine, also in
bloom; and the broad bush-form of the yellow jasmine, beginning to
flower. With them were blooming roses of a dozen kinds; the hibiscus
(not althæa but the H. rosasinensis of our Northern greenhouses), slim
and tall, flaring its mallow-flowers pink, orange, salmon and deep red;
the trailing-lantana, covering broad trellises of ten feet in height and
with its drooping masses of delicate foliage turned from green to
mingled hues of lilac and rose by a complete mantle of their
blossoms. He saw the low, sweet-scented geraniums of lemon, rose and
nutmeg odors, persisting through the winter unblighted, and the
round-leaved, "zonal" sorts surprisingly large of growth—in one case,
on a division fence, trained to the width and height of six feet. There,
too, was the poinsettia still bending in its Christmas red, taller than
the tallest man's reach, often set too forthpushingly at the front, but
at times, with truer art, glowing like a red constellation from the
remoter bays of the lawn; and there, taller yet, the evergreen Magnolia
fuscata, full of its waxen, cream-tinted, inch-long flowers smelling
delicately like the banana. He found the sweet olive, of refined leaf
and minute axillary flowers yielding their ravishing tonic odor with the
reserve of the violet; the pittosporum; the box; the myrtle; the
camphor-tree with its neat foliage answering fragrantly the grasp of the
hand. The dark camellia was there, as broad and tall as a lilac-bush,
its firm, glossy leaves of the deepest green and its splendid red
flowers covering it from tip to sod, one specimen showing by count a
thousand blossoms open at once and the sod beneath innumerably starred
with others already fallen. The night jasmine, in full green, was not
yet in blossom but it was visibly thinking of the spring. The Chinese
privet, of twenty feet stature, in perennial leaf, was saving its
flowers for May. The sea-green oleander, fifteen feet high and wide (see
extreme left foreground, page 176), drooped to the sward on four sides
but hoarded its floral cascade for June. The evergreen loquat (locally
miscalled the mespilus plum) was already faltering into bloom; also the
orange, with its flower-buds among its polished leaves, whitening for
their own wedding; while high over them towered the date and other
palms, spired the cedar and arborvitæ, and with majestic infrequency,
where grounds were ample, spread the lofty green, scintillating boughs
of the magnolia grandiflora (see left foregrounds on pages 174, 182
and 184), the giant, winter-bare pecan and the wide, mossy arms of the
vast live-oak.
" ... from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of Easter."
In any garden as fair as this there should be some place to sit down. This deficiency is one of the commonest faults in American gardening.
Now while the time of year in which these conditions are visible heightens their lovely wonder, their practical value to Northern home-lovers is not the marvel and delight of something inimitable but their inspiring suggestion of what may be done with ordinary Northern home grounds, to the end that the floral pageantry of the Southern January may be fully rivalled by the glory of the Northern June.
For of course the Flora of the North, who in the winter of long white nights puts off all her jewelry and nearly all her robes and "lies down to pleasant dreams," is the blonde sister of, and equal heiress with, this darker one who, in undivested greenery and flowered trappings, persists in open-air revelry through all the months from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of Easter. Wherefore it seems to me the Northern householder's first step should be to lay hold upon this New Orleans idea in gardening—which is merely by adoption a New Orleans idea, while through and through, except where now and then its votaries stoop to folly, it is by book a Northern voice, the garden gospel of Frederick Law Olmsted.
Wherever American homes are assembled we may have, all winter, for the
asking—if we will but ask ourselves instead of the lawn-mower man—an
effect of home, of comfort, cheer and grace, of summer and autumn
reminiscences and of spring's anticipations, immeasurably better than
any ordinary eye or fancy can extort from the rectangular and
stiffened-out nakedness of unplanted boundaries; immeasurably better
than the month-by-month daily death-stare of shroud-like snow around
houses standing barefooted on the frozen ground. It may be by hearty
choice that we abide where we must forego outdoor roses in Christmas
week and broad-leaved evergreens blooming at New Year's, Twelfth-night
or Carnival. Well and good! But we can have even in mid-January, and
ought to allow ourselves, the lawn-garden's surviving form and tranced
life rather than the shrubless lawn's unmarked grave flattened beneath
the void of the snow. We ought to retain the sleeping beauty of the
ordered garden's unlost configuration, with the warm house for its
bosom, with all its remoter contours—alleys, bays, bushy networks
and sky-line—keeping a winter share of their feminine grace and
softness. We ought to retain the "frozen music" of its myriad gray, red
and yellow stems and twigs and lingering blue and scarlet berries
stirring, though leaflessly, for the kiss of spring. And we ought to
retain the invincible green of cedars, junipers and box, cypress,
laurel, hemlock spruce and cloaking ivy, darkling amid and above these,
receiving from and giving to them a cheer which neither could have in
their frostbound Eden without mutual contrast.
"The sleeping beauty of the garden's unlost configuration ... keeping a winter's share of its feminine grace and softness."
This picture was taken in the first flush of spring. The trees in blossom are the wild Japanese cherry.
Eden! If I so recklessly ignore latitude as to borrow the name of the first gardener's garden for such a shivering garden as this it is because I see this one in a dream of hope—a diffident, interrogating hope—really to behold, some day, this dream-garden of Northern winters as I have never with actual open eyes found one kept by any merely well-to-do American citizen. If I describe it I must preface with all the disclaimers of a self-conscious amateur whose most venturesome argument goes no farther than "Why not?" yet whom the evergreen gardens of New Orleans revisited in January impel to protest against every needless submission to the tyrannies of frost and of a gardening art—or non-art, a submission which only in the outdoor embellishment of the home takes winter supinely, abjectly.
This garden of a hope's dream covers but three ordinary town lots. Often it shrinks to but one without asking for any notable change of plan. Following all the lines, the hard, law lines, that divide it from its neighbors and the street, there runs, waist-high on its street front, shoulder-high on its side bounds, a close evergreen hedge of hemlock spruce. In its young way this hedge has been handsome from infancy; though still but a few years old it gives, the twelvemonth round, a note both virile and refined in color, texture and form, and if the art that planted it and the care that keeps it do not decay neither need the hedge for a century to come. Against the intensest cold this side of Labrador it is perfectly hardy, is trimmed with a sloping top to shed snows whose weight might mutilate it, and can be kept in repair from generation to generation, like the house's plumbing or roof, or like some green-uniformed pet regiment with ranks yet full after the last of its first members has perished.
Furthermore, along the inner side of this green hedge (sometimes close against it, sometimes with a turfed alley between), as well as all round about the house, extend borders of deciduous shrubs, with such meandering boundaries next the broad white lawn as the present writer, for this time, has probably extolled enough. These bare, gray shrub masses are not wholly bare or gray and have other and most pleasingly visible advantages over unplanted, pallid vacancy, others besides the mere lace-work of their twigs and the occasional tenderness of a last summer's bird's nest. Here and there, breaking the cold monotone, a bush of moose maple shows the white-streaked green of its bare stems and sprays, or cornus or willow gives a soft glow of red, purple or yellow. Only here and there, insists my dream, lest when winter at length gives way to the "rosy time of the year" their large and rustic gentleness mar the nuptial revels of summer's returned aristocracy. Because, moreover, there is a far stronger effect of life, home and cheer from the broad-leaved evergreens which, in duly limited numbers, assemble with and behind these, and from the lither sorts of conifers that spire out of the network and haze of living things in winter sleep. The plantings at the garden's and dwelling's front being properly, of course, lower than those farther back, I see among them, in this dream, the evergreen box and several kinds of evergreen ferns. I see two or three species of evergreen barberries, not to speak of Thunberg's leafless one warm red with its all-winter berries, the winter garden's rubric. I see two varieties of euonymus; various low junipers; two sorts of laurel; two of andromeda, and the high-clambering evergreen ivy. Beginning with these in front, infrequent there but multiplying toward the place's rear, are bush and tree forms of evergreen holly, native rhododendrons, the many sorts of foreign cedars and our native ones white and red, their skyward lines modified as the square or pointed architecture of the house may call for contrasts in pointed or broad-topped arborescence. If, at times, I dream behind all this a grove, with now and then one of its broad, steepling or columnar trees pushed forward upon the lawn, it is only there that I see anything so stalwart as a pine or so rigid as a spruce.
Such is the vision, and if I never see it with open eyes and in real
sunlight, even as a dream it is—like certain other things of less
dignity—grateful, comforting. I warrant there are mistakes in it, but
you will find mistakes wherever you find achievement, and there is no
law against them—in well-meant dreams. Observe, if you please, this
vision lays no drawback on the garden's summer beauty and affluence.
Twelve months of the year it enhances its dignity and elegance. Both the
numerical proportions of evergreens to other greens, and the scheme of
their distribution, are quite as correct and effective for contrast and
background to the transient foliage and countless flowers of July as
amid the bare ramage of January. Summer and winter alike, the gravest
items among them all, the conifers, retain their values even in those
New Orleans gardens. When we remember that in New England and on all its
isotherm it is winter all that half of the year when most of us are at
home, why should we not seek to realize this snow-garden dream? Even a
partial or faulty achievement of it will surely look lovelier than the
naked house left out on its naked white lawn like an unclaimed trunk on
a way-station platform. I would not, for anything, offend the reader's
dignity, but I must think that this midwinter garden may be made at
least as much lovelier than no garden as Alice's Cheshire cat was
lovelier—with or without its grin—than the grin without the cat.
"It is only there that I see anything so stalwart as a pine or so rigid as a spruce."
The blossoming trees in this picture are a Chinese crab blooming ten days later than the Japanese wild cherry (see illustration facing p. 186), which is now in full leaf at their back.
Shall we summarize? Our gist is this: that those gardens of New Orleans are as they are, not by mere advantage of climate but for several other reasons. Their bounds of ownership and privacy are enclosed in hedges, tight or loose, or in vine-clad fences or walls. The lawn is regarded as a ruling feature of the home's visage, but not as its whole countenance—one flat feature never yet made a lovely face. This lawn feature is beautified and magnified by keeping it open from shrub border to shrub border, saving it, above all things, from the gaudy barbarism of pattern-bedding; and by giving it swing and sweep of graceful contours. And lastly, all ground lines of the house are clothed with shrubberies whose deciduous growths are companioned with broad-leafed evergreens and varied conifers, in whatever proportions will secure the best midwinter effects without such abatement to those of summer as would diminish the total of the whole year's joy.
These are things that can be done anywhere in our land, and wherever done with due regard to soil as well as to climate will give us gardens worthy to be named with those of New Orleans, if not, in some aspects and at particular times of the year, excelling them. As long as mistakes are made in the architecture of houses they will be made in the architecture of gardening, and New Orleans herself, by a little more care for the fundamentals of art, of all art, could easily surpass her present floral charm. Yet in her gardens there is one further point calling for approval and imitation: the very high trimming of the stems of lofty trees. Here many a reader will feel a start of resentment; but in the name of the exceptional beauty one may there see resulting from the practice let us allow the idea a moment's entertainment, put argument aside and consider a concrete instance whose description shall be our closing word.
Across the street in which, that January, we sojourned (we were two), there was a piece of ground of an ordinary town square's length and somewhat less breadth. It had been a private garden. Its owner had given it to the city. Along its broad side, which our windows looked out upon, stood perfectly straight and upright across the sky to the south of them a row of magnolias (grandiflora) at least sixty feet high, with their boles, as smooth as the beach, trimmed bare for two-thirds of their stature. The really decorative marks of the trimming had been so many years, so many decades, healed as to show that no harm had come of it or would come. The soaring, dark-green, glittering foliage stood out against the almost perpetually blue and white sky. Beyond them, a few yards within the place but not in a straight line, rose even higher a number of old cedars similarly treated and offering a pleasing contrast to the magnolias by the feathery texture of their dense sprays and the very different cast of their lack-lustre green. Overtopping all, on the farther line of the grounds, southern line, several pecan-trees of nearly a hundred feet in height, leafless, with a multitude of broad-spreading boughs all high in air by natural habit, gave an effect strongly like that of winter elms, though much enlivened by the near company of the evergreen masses of cedar and magnolia. These made the upper-air half of the garden, the other half being assembled below. For the lofty trim of the wintergreen-trees—the beauty of which may have been learned from the palms—allowed and invited another planting beneath them. Magnolias, when permitted to branch low, are, to undergrowth, among the most inhospitable of trees, but in this garden, where the sunlight and the breezes passed abundantly under such high-lifted arms and among such clean, bare stems, a congregation of shrubs, undershrubs and plants of every stature and breadth, arose, flourished and flowered without stint. Yonder the wind-split, fathom-long leaves of the banana, brightening the background, arched upward, drooped again and faintly oscillated to the air's caress. Here bloomed and smelled the delicate magnolia fuscata, and here, redder with flowers than green with shining leaves, shone the camellia. Here spread the dark oleander, the pittosporum and the Chinese privet; and here were the camphor-tree and the slender sweet olive—we have named them all before and our steps should not take us over the same ground twice in one circuit; that would be bad gardening. But there they were, under those ordinarily so intolerant trees, prospering and singing praises with them, some in full blossom and perfume, some waiting their turn, like parts of a choir. In the midst of all, where a broad path eddied quite round an irregular open space, and that tender quaintness of decay appeared which is the unfailing New Orleans touch, the space was filled with roses. This spot was lovely enough by day and not less so for being a haunt of toddling babes and their nurses; but at night—! Regularly at evening there comes into the New Orleans air, from Heaven knows whither, not a mist, not a fog nor a dampness, but a soft, transparent, poetical dimness that in no wise shortens the range of vision—a counterpart of that condition which so many thousands of favored travellers in other longitudes know as the "Atlantic haze." One night—oh, oftener than that, but let us say one for the value of understatement—returning to our quarters some time before midnight, we stepped out upon the balcony to gaze across into that garden. The sky was clear, the neighborhood silent. A wind stirred, but the shrubberies stood motionless. The moon, nearly full, swung directly before us, pouring its gracious light through the tenuous cross-hatchings of the pecans, nestling it in the dense tops of the cedars and magnolias and sprinkling it to the ground among the lower growths and between their green-black shadows. When in a certain impotence of rapture we cast about in our minds for an adequate comparison—where description in words seemed impossible—the only parallel we could find was the art of Corot and such masters from the lands where the wonderful pictorial value of trees trimmed high has been known for centuries and is still cherished. For without those trees so disciplined the ravishing picture of that garden would have been impossible.
Of course our Northern gardens cannot smile like that in winter. But they need not perish, as tens of thousands of lawn-mower, pattern-bed, so-called gardens do. They should but hibernate, as snugly as the bear, the squirrel, the bee; and who that ever in full health of mind and body saw spring come back to a Northern garden of blossoming trees, shrubs and undershrubs has not rejoiced in a year of four clear-cut seasons? Or who that ever saw mating birds, greening swards, starting violets and all the early flowers loved of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Bryant and Tennyson, has not felt that the resurrection of landscape and garden owes at least half its glory to the long trance of winter, and wished that dwellers in Creole lands might see New England's First of June? For what says the brave old song-couplet of New England's mothers? That—
"Spring would be but wintry weather
If we had nothing else but spring."
Every year, even in Massachusetts—even in Michigan—spring, summer, and autumn are sure to come overladen with their gifts and make us a good, long, merry visit. All the other enlightened and well-to-do nations of the world entertain them with the gardening art and its joys and so make fairer, richer and stronger than can be made indoors alone the individual soul, the family, the social, the civic, the national life. In this small matter we Americans are at the wrong end of the procession. What shall we do about it?