is not in some
way finer than the reality it simulates. In other words, imitation
should always be in the nature of an amiable condescension. Whatever
falseness, pretension or even mere frailty or smallness, suggests to the
eye the ineffectuality of a toy is out of place in any sort of
gardening." We do not actually speak all this, but we imply it, and we
often find that the mere utterance of the one word, "toy gardening," has
a magical effect to suggest all the rest and to overwhelm with
contrition the bad taste and frivolity of many a misguided attempt at
adornment. At that word of exorcism joints of cerulean sewer-pipe
crested with scarlet geraniums, rows of whited cobbles along the walk or
drive like a cannibal's skulls around his hut, purple paint-kegs of
petunias on the scanty door-steps, crimson wash-kettles of verbenas,
ant-hill rockeries, and well-sweeps and curbs where no wells are, steal
modestly and forever into oblivion.

Now, when we so preach we try also to make it very plain that there is
not one set of rules for gardening on a small scale of expense in a
small piece of ground, and another set for gardening on a larger scale.
For of course the very thing which makes the small garden different from
the large, the rich man's from the poor man's, the Scotch or Italian
peasant's from the American mechanic's, or the public garden from the
private, is the universal and immutable oneness of the great canons of
art. One of our competitors, having honestly purged her soul of every
impulse she may ever have had to mimic the gardening of the cemeteries,
planted her dooryard with a trueness of art which made it the joy of
all beholders. Only then was it that a passing admirer stopped and
cried: "Upon me soul, Mrs. Anonyma, yir gyairden looks joost loike a
pooblic pairk!" He meant--without knowing it--that the spot was lovely
for not trying to look the least bit like a public park, and he was
right. She had kept what it would be well for the public gardeners to
keep much better than some of them do--the Moral Law of Gardening.

* * * * *

There is a moral law of gardening. No garden should ever tell a lie. No
garden should ever put on any false pretence. No garden should ever
break a promise. To the present reader these proclamations may seem very
trite; it may seem very trite to say that if anything in or of a garden
is meant for adornment, it must adorn; but we have to say s