. 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 arborvitae, 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.
[Illustration: "Back of the building-line the fences ... generally more
than head-high ... are sure to be draped."]
[Illustration: " ... 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
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