The hills have known me of old, and they do not forget;
Long ago was I friends with the wind; I am friends with it yet."

--GERALD GOULD.

Whenever a piece of the land is to be set apart for a garden, two mighty
rulers must be consulted as to the boundaries. When this earth child is
born and flower garnished for the christening, the same two must be also
bidden as sponsors. These rulers are the Sun and the Wind. The sun, if
the matter in hand is once fairly spread before him and put in his
charge, is a faithful guardian, meeting frankness frankly and sending
his penetrating and vitalizing messengers through well-nigh inviolable
shade. But of the wind, who shall answer for it or trust it? Do we
really ever learn all of its vagaries and impossible possibilities?

If frankness best suits the sun, diplomacy must be our shield of
defence windward, for the wind is not one but a composite of many moods,
and to lure one on, and skilfully but not insultingly bar out another,
is our portion. To shut out the wind of summer, the bearer of vitality,
the uplifter of stifling vapours, the disperser of moulds, would indeed
be an error; therefore, the great art of the planters of a garden is to
learn the ways of the wind and to make friends with it. If the soil is
sodden and sour, it may be drained and sweetened; if it is poor, it may
be nourished; but when all this is done, if the garden lies where the
winds of winter and spring in passing swiftly to and fro whet their
steel-edged tempers upon it, what avails?

What does it matter if violet or pansy frames are set in a sunny nook,
if it be one of the wind's winter playgrounds, where he drifts the snow
deep for his pastime, so that after each storm of snow or sleet a
serious bit of engineering must be undergone before the sashes can be
lifted and the plants saved from dampness; or if the daffodils and
tulips lie well bedded all the winter through, if, when the sun has
called them forth, the winds of March blight their sap-tender foliage?
Yet the lands that send the north winds also send us the means to deter
them--the cold-loving evergreens, low growing, high growing, medium,
woven dense in warp and woof, to be windbreaks, also the shrubs of
tough, twisted fibre and stubborn thorns lying close to the earth for
windbuffers.

Therefore, before the planting of rose or hardy herbs, bulbs or tenderer
flowers, go out, compass in hand,