n the grin without the cat.

[Illustration: "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, wh