My growing garden

Front matter

Copyright 1^?

COPYRIGHT DEPOSm

Plate I. Excelsarose: "A wonderful grower . . . it blooms late." (See page 93.)

Preface

FOR many gardenless years I had been reading of gardens, and not seldom seeing some of them. The reading was mostly of the greater gardens, the appearance of which more often reflected the personal taste of the designer or the gardener than the garden -love of the owner. Indeed, the very sight of some gardens was irritating, because of their expensive elaboration.

In one notable instance, the great formal garden I repeatedly visited contained no suggestion of its owner, and I came to think of it in the name of the soft-voiced Scotchman who kept it growing and glowing. In another garden, of which I kept for some time a photographic record, the owner was unsympathetic, unrelated; he was doing a garden as part of his spending job as a rich man.

But one garden that I saw told another story. It had been started lovingly more than a generation before by a fine-spirited clergyman. With his own hands he planted in it, and his daughter, who lived in it when I visited it, was adding her ideals to those of her father in that yet growing garden. This seemed altogether worth while.

When it came my time to have a garden, it

(vii)

viii

PREFACE seemed right that my garden should grow in my way, mainly by my own endeavor. Incidentally, and fortunately, it also was necessary that it should so grow, if at all, for financial reasons !

This garden — my garden, our garden — has grown for a half-dozen years under these conditions. It has been my golf, in pleasurable exercise; it has been my open-air school, in what it has taught me; it has been my physical regeneration from the debility of overwork.

It is only proper to mention the unusual conditions surrounding the making of this book. I have written it, but my family have hved it with me, and the print-shop which bears my name and enjoys my garden has made of the book much more than a perfunctory item of work. The publishers, too, have let down all the bars, so that in a very special sense the book has been Hved, written, designed, illustrated, printed, and bound as the work of one man and those about him. Whatever it is, therefore — and I am keenly conscious of its faults — it is mine, or ours; it is of the man, the family, and the shop.

J. H. McF.

September 28, 1915

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. January: The Place and the Prospect . . 1

II. February: The Planning and the Catalogues 13

Chapter I— January

A next the park; and again when our two friends had decHned to settle with us away from immediate gas and electricity, from the city mail dehvery and the water main.

Then came the sight of the httle place, not at all the garden-place of our dreams, but a ''practicable" lot of sixty-five feet front in a pleasant neighborhood, on which we might at least have a little room outside the home walls. Inquiry of a friendly real-estate man as to values followed, and also, glory be ! his suggestion that we ''look at the old H place."

Look we did, and we found, that dull November day, a tangle of tall grass and taller weeds, drifted leaves, dead pear trees and a dingy-looking old "mansion-house." But also there were pines and hemlocks about, splendid maples and horse-chestnuts, and a glorious old giant of a sycamore. A long arborvitae hedge — several hedges, in fact — rambled across the place, near the slope on which had fallen from their trelhses old, old grape-vines, rehcs of a famous vineyard.

Somber was the look of things outdoors that day, and worse indoors — but this is not a house story. I had "the surprise of my life" when the two ladies of the family, smelling the sweet odors of the autumn fohage, feeling the touch of wet hemlock boughs as they walked about under the drooping evergreens, agreed that this was right for a home, regardless of what might be inside those shuttered French windows. The outdoors had called, and we, city-tired, were answering according to our blood.

I have often thought, since, of that first day, and of the good fortune that was ours in coming to "the place" under the most depressing conditions, in the worst weather of that season which Bryant ■ — who must have had mental malaria at times — calls melancholy. Melancholy! We couldn't find reason then, nor have we ever found reason since, for melancholia concerning the passage of any of the seasons here at Breeze Hill. Even that first winter was certainly a season of loveliness. Never a day but brought its own beauty in the trees, of sky and cloud, even of rain and fog, of frost and wind. The snow was always making pictures for us, on the pines and hemlocks, along the hedges and plants; and the occasional sleet outlined more completely the lovehness and the symmetry of the tree twigs.

And if I may exercise the writer's privilege of sudden change of time, I can say now, after a half-dozen growing-garden years, that spring and summer are each a new joy, each always better than any other season ever was until the insensible passage into the *^melancholy" autumn sets us tingling with color joy in the happy maturity of leaves and twigs, and shows us nature's color balance of warmth for winter and "coolth" for summer. Then we are sure that autumn is the best of all. We see how the honeysuckle holds its glossy green robe right through the frosts which bring down the golden shower of horse-chestnut leaves; we enjoy the berry brightness on the dogwoods and the persistence of the chrysanthemums; we watch the thermometer leaves of the big rhododendrons, and we have learned to pick out the promise of those fat, sumptuous buds on the lilacs, the forsythias, the deutzias and spireas, that are all ready for the spring show, not so many weeks ahead. Melancholy? We don't see it, or feel it, or know it, here at Breeze Hill, in this growing garden.

Now I've named It, though it was my much better half who did it first. It is the right name, for we are on a hill, and surely the breezes that reach us come straight from the distant mountains, not often touching the rising smoke and dust of the city a hundred feet lower. At first, we had a whimsical reason for the name, in that a change of but its first letter would be required to make it fit the arctic predictions of our city-bound friends. But it has never been "Freeze Hill!'*

This is to be a story of the growing garden, and it begins in the month of first possession, the snowy Christmas month. What is the place, and what the prospect?

The place had been rather aptly described to us as "two acres of San Jose scale with a house attached." In addition to the scale, there were in sight weeds, and weeds, and more weeds, but now the snow has made fiowers of their aftermath. Of garden there is nothing, and the street plan upon which access depends predicates grading that will probably mean much raw soil, scantily arable. The trees are noble, but neglected and dilapidated. There are no walks save those that will have to be changed, and back of a great old arborvitse hedge are the fallen ruins of a greenhouse and an ice-house — which we cannot hope to restore.

One or two Norway maples that had been planted have, through years of neglect, estabhshed everywhere thousands of their seedHngs from an inch to twenty feet in height, sometimes sucking dry and killing portions of the great evergreen hedge, and sometimes just impudently declaring an intention to entirely possess the land. The once fine old pear orchard is dead, dead, of San

Jose scale, save only two trees. The tremendous old lilacs have been mutilated for their flowering branches every spring of untenancy by the lawless, and are as well thickly coated with another no less hateful parasite, the oyster-shell scale; but they are ahve! There are gnarled quinces that look as if fruit could not come, and the nearly as much gnarled grape-vines that make up the most of the planted growth are said to be rich in root-knot, and to be worthless. Where I dug into the soil before frost sealed it, I found little depth of ground fit for a garden above the heavy shale that characterizes this neighborhood.

Here and there a pipe, or a stump, or a heap of stones denotes some long-gone feature of the mansion-house surroundings. Several great locusts tower near the foundation remains of the burned barn. There must have been some sort of a fountain here in front of the house, and there remain several forlorn old terra-cotta vases on wobbly foundations. Of the seven horse-chestnuts that too closely environ the house, six are more or less decayed as a consequence of splitting. The two branches into which each main stem was permitted to separate thirty-five years ago have not had strength to hold against the snow-loads, and a little crack in the crotch has widened until it is now a serious opening, which, may probably mean decay in the trunk.

Discouraging, all this? Not at all; for here are these same trees that time has matured into dignified beauty and efficient shelter; here is such a varied contour, such a succession of natural divisions by tree and hedge and house and approach, that the relative largeness of the place is at once apparent, or, to be honestly accurate, was apparent not to my desk-dulled eyes, but to the acute vision of my landscape-engineer friend, who early came to look at my purchase and quickly saw how very big were these particular two acres, and what they might become as a garden. He saw that the natural vertical axis of the place was through the selected living-room of the house and along the center of the garden-to-be, and that a horizontal axis could readily be created at a proper intersection. He it was who gave me courage to cut away some trees that the better ones might be yet better, and whose own great skill suggested the development which has made the new plantings fit the old trees and shrubs so that maturity has seemed to go right along with that same planting.

I have had very many reasons to be thankful for friends, and none more potent than for the friendly professional aid of a man whose mind and heart are so full of the glory of the land and what grows on it that he plants garden poems and builds park epics right along. And I have, too, reason to pity the unfortunates who try to make a garden home by the T-square method, or who have it *'sent in" ready made, without any clear ideal of developing the individuality that every bit of God's green earth can hold. Both a home, and a garden, and much more a garden-home like Breeze Hill, deserve the better treatment of individual thought, preferably aided by consultation with a good landscape architect, or engineer, or designer, or whatever these fine men call themselves. And any such place will reward its owner who loves it and patiently works with it; reward him with a true garden individuality all its own.

If this may be done, there will be less tiresome monotony and less thoughtless duplication of plants. Gardens will not be mere repetitions of hydrangea and golden glow, but will show the taste and knowledge and ideals of the makers of them.

It may easily be seen, by now, that I am planning for a garden that shall be my own, in the sense of ideals; but that shall also be saved by reliance upon skilled advice from the errors I might

Plate III. "The nuirvelous elasticity of the arborvitses under a great load of clinging whiteness." (See page 10.)

make. It needs also to be made apparent to the reader that my growing garden is not to grow on gold, of which I have little, but rather on my own growth into that real garden knowledge which is found only with the spade and the rake, and amongst the seeds and plants and bulbs and roots and vines of American hardiness. My readers, therefore, may expect to find confession of deficiencies and failures, and of difficulties due to the lack of funds to rapidly accomplish my ambitions. They will have little trouble, I think, in perceiving that I now regard the failures and the lack of funds as blessings not at all disguised, because they have caused me to get more health, happiness and "fun" out of my garden hours, and to make my garden's growth more precious to me and mine. It is surely true in growing a garden that there is a far greater reward to the worker who personally strives for a result, eyes open to nature's wonderful ways of doing things, than is possible to be had by one who has merely waved the fairy wand of wealth, with a presto ! but not worked-for result. Indeed, it is seemingly almost as hard for just money to make a garden that is home-like as it was for that camel of long ago to thread himself through the allegorical needle !

Those early winter days, when I escaped from the call of the carpenters who were renewing the old house, gave me vast benefit. I knew about snow, of course — had I not shoveled my own sidewalk part of the time for a score of years? But I had forgotten some of the snow-happenings about niy boyhood's garden home, so that the marvelous elasticity of the seemingly stiff arborvitses under a great load of chnging whiteness was new to me, as I waded about, lifting here and shaking there to see the branches spring to position as released from their snow burden.

Twenty years of walking on city streets gave me no preparation for the sheer beauty of the walk through a foot of virgin snow, with the afternoon sun sending blue sky-shadows into every footprint. The outlining in snow of the lovely reverse curves of the branches on the western big horse-chestnut showed me anew what tree architecture means.

I made acquaintance, one winter day of hoar-frost, with the dehcacy of the twigs of the sturdy young linden, and with the green plumes of the Norway spruce nearby. Curiously enough, I passed without seeing it a fine persimmon, which I presume was loaded then as it has been since with delicious fruit. Those same scraggly quinces which looked so forlorn in November took on a new possibility when their branches were cased in crystal, for no fruiting could more completely justify their existence.

And the great old sycamore showed greater with the snow about it than it had when leaves instead carpeted the ground. Those days indeed gave me the prospect of the growing garden, while they showed me the loveliness of the snow garden that came into bloom in a night. The open space about — ^how it stirred me! I would — and did — shout for the joy of it all, and no one looked on me as insane; while had I raised my voice half so loud in rejoicing on the twenty-foot lot of my streetfront home, some astonished neighbor might properly have telephoned for a policeman, or set on foot rumors of doubt as to my Hfe-long abstinence from alcohol.

So I face this January the garden prospect. The items are as they have been above set down, but may be here summarized as including perhaps twenty fine trees, some hundreds of feet of old arborvitse hedges, some scores of ancient grape-vines, some half-dozen great old Hlacs, some slopes of weedy land, a flat expanse of raw and seemingly barren shale. The incidental detriments of brokendown outbuildings, and the interloping bushes and misplaced trees that had prospered during n MY GROWING GARDEN years of neglect, may be disregarded. The scanty pocket-book that had to stand for the prospects ahead cannot be disregarded; it is to be carefully conserved, so that it may answer imperative demands for garden necessities. There is a hope that the things we may grow to eat on this land will make possible an occasional transfer from the household account to the garden budget.

Lest I forget, the shape of the place must be here set down : it is almost exactly a quarter-circle of a radius of four hundred feet. In my joy I call it my Breeze Hill piece of pie! And it slopes gently toward the south and east and west from the noble clump of Norway spruces that hold off much of the fierceness of winter's storms.

The place and a little of the prospect are before us, to work out in the months of the years that God gives us.

Chapter Ii— February The Planning And The Catalogues

THIS fine February day — a day of white sky over the white snow, of a clear cold that has just a hint of the growing strength of the sun back of it— I found "Old WiUiam" deftly working fruit off the upper branches of that persimmon tree I had not noticed at all the first winter of acquaintance with Breeze Hill. The old man had spHced together two long clothes-props, and with the uplifted end he could tickle off the wrinkled persimmons that were by now surely free from any astringency. The sight tempted me, and my younger legs were good for the simple climb that took me up where I could pick, eat and truly enjoy a fruit which to most Americans who live in the northern states is merely a tradition of their boyhood.

I have been wondering why the hybridizers have not worked some of the size and mildness of the big Japanese "kaki" into this delicious morsel of the north, and the inquiry born of that wonder is answered to the purport that the much larger

Nipponese fruit seemingly will not mix or "cross" or hybridize with our native persimmon. It is not recorded that Burbank has ever tried to bring together these two fruits in a union that easily might produce a result of great economic value; but then Burbank has not done much that is of any real use to any climate outside of California, and the spectacular seems to appeal to him much more strongly than the useful. Sometime, however, the union will be made, and we shall have a fruit somewhat larger than this shapeless mass of juicy pulp I am eating, with, let us hope, at least a portion of its exquisite wild tang.

There are two of the persimmon trees, but only one has fruited. Both have the distinct habit of the genus so clearly outlined in even these trees that are probably not over twenty-five years old, and which in the years of their maturity will make them splendidly effective.

I have discovered another treasure not far from the persimmons — sl fine, shapely mulberry, surely old enough to bear. Truly my growing garden has surprises !

But now is the time for garden planning, so that later we may plant with order and certainty. While the hedges and the paths impose certain lines, in general the garden may be what we like.

This liking must be modified, however, to what my check-book will properly back up with cash. Therefore, and certainly, some things will not be there! My dream has not included great exotic rhododendrons like those at Wellesley, nor has it compassed the lovely magnolias I would be glad to see blooming among these evergreens, and in contrast to their sohd color.

But I can have dogwoods and red-buds, and they are going to be planted where I can see them against the green of the high hedge of old arborvitses. Then I will eventually come to see in the May time a home bit of the exquisite picture that I have often visited along the almost unknown Conodoguinet creek, where God certainly planted a garden, good enough for any Adam, in or out of Eden. And nearby, also with the evergreen background, there must be some more of that same slope of the Conodoguinet, in bits of Phlox divaricata^ Mertensia virginica, Dutchman's breeches, bloodroot, May-apple and the other friends of my spring rambles. Perhaps I may even compass some of the great trillium, that woods aristocrat, which vies with the cotton flower of the South in its change of color in the same bloom, from purest white to a lovely blush-pink as the days mature it.

There will be other shrubs, of course, so that I may have a succession of bloom all through the spring and summer. Certain old flower friends must meet me in the garden, but its invisible gate shall be barred against that gross hydrangea, the flowers of which hang on until the once white panicles blush into dirty pink and turn a corpselike green, and which is planted as if it was the only shrub available in America. I will have hydrangeas, but the worth-while ones only — ^the plain paniculata and the oak-leaved one; the beautiful radiata, with its leaves silvered beneath; and the showy form of arborescens which loves half-shade and blooms early.

I shall prefer for admission here the native shrubs, and especially those native to Pennsylvania. Of course it will not do to overlook some of the fine exotics that the plant-collectors have sent us from over the seas, particularly from Japan and China, like certain snowballs and spireas; but I want the home place to reflect the home state. Those dogv^^oods and red-buds will be of 'Tenn's Woods," surely enough; and the great old sycamore which distinguishes the place is a native tree, naturally planted. The arborvitses belong to the Atlantic coast, and these white pines and hemlocks are of the hills and valleys of this state, reminiscent to me of my summer home at lovely

Plate IV. "One winter day of hoar-frost . . . the dehcacy of the twigs of the young Hnden." (See page 10.)

Eagles Mere, with its grandly beautiful primeval forest.

The Norway spruces are not of America, and here they show it; for the older trees are becoming bedraggled, as might be expected when they are called upon to endure the vicissitudes of a climate with a variation of over a hundred degrees in annual temperature, instead of the lesser variations of the central European hills from whence it comes. These dominating horse-chestnuts, however, can hardly be happier on their own native Grecian slopes than they are here, or more beautiful in bloom; wherefore it may be that the leaf -dropping trees stand the change to America better than those we call evergreen.

Most of us, famihar as we are from early childhood with its spring sweetness, consider the common lilac as belonging to America, of course. Instead, we owe it to Bulgaria; and the many "improved" varieties of it are of French origin, while other and quite different hlacs come from various parts of Asia, with none at all native to America. The big, rugged, picturesque old hlac clumps at Breeze Hill may therefore remind me of the Balkans, if I can for a moment forget the similar plants that were a lovely feature at my old home along the Susquehanna.

But I want here in this garden more of the Pennsylvania good things that bloom; just as I should, I hope, prefer to have an Ohio garden, if I lived in that state of presidents, or a Massachusetts garden if I inhabited that very particular form of existence. I often wonder why people will continually plant monkey gardens, imitating something from somewhere else! I have seen the futile struggle for blue-grass lawns in Fort Worth, with the richly velvety Bermuda grass belonging comfortably there; and I have been angered at the folly of transplanting Newport and Bar Harbor to St. Augustine and Miami in the gardens provided around the hotels for the painfully rich. My disposition, therefore, for a home-state garden here is rooted in odious comparisons.

I see places here for some native rhododendrons and some laurels from our hillsides; and I am hoping these can be invited within my price range, for they will not be so financially repellent as the haughty hybrids "made in Belgium." The soil of this garden is without any hmestone character, and if I can gather or get some. of nature's compost or *'leaf-mold," I ought to be able to have something worth while in these ericaceous plants, "collected" from the woods. Parenthetically, I wish the catalogue men would tell what they know about soils, when a plant they sell will simply die in ground uncongenial to it.

There are on the place some plants of the native elder, a lovely though neglected shrub, esteemed more for its shining black berries than for its broad cymes of creamy white flowers, which come between spring and summer. So I will have this relative of the native viburnums or snowballs to start a collection with, that I hope will in good time give me bloom nearly from frost to frost, twig colors to brighten the winter days as well, and that will make my garden grow into a live and changing museum of the flora of Pennsylvania.

Of course roses are to be in, and of, and about, this garden; and I'll have to accept many not native to America. A rose-hedge about the whole place I wanted, but I have been word-persuaded and pocket-convinced that I was wrong. There will be a rose-fence, to separate two parts of the "formal" garden, south of the long arborvitse hedge; and I see ahead a rose-arbor built of the completely weathered and long-enduring locust posts that the passing vineyard has left about the place. Rose-borders there must be, and I surely will have the great Rugosa hybrids that are pointing the way to a new race of rugged everbloomers.

This old mansion-house was the operating center of a farm of hundreds of acres, and could afford an encircling road about the home. But now with only two acres, such a road would bite too deeply into the lawn that must give repose and dignity to the house. A carriage approach from the new street on the west is therefore part of Mr. Manning's plan, and I have been staking it out these February days, finding the ground unfrozen under the snow that has given us days of good sleighing.

A February variation has appeared to my husky son, who has acquired a pair of skees, or more precisely ski, on which at first he tumbled entertainingly, but with which now he skims the new-fallen snow, and scales the hills which give us a changing vista each day. And while my fiftyyear bones are not ski-inclined, I am rejoiced that by proxy I am thus freed from the trammels of street and sidewalk, because we are in and growing a garden.

To hurry our sight of flowers in spring we have placed a modest coldframe in a sheltered spot, where in these sunny February days we get a glimpse now and then of a violet, and see the readiness to grow of the pansies, campanulas, foxgloves and other carried-over perennials. We have

Plate V. "A carriage approach from the west." . . . "M}' son has acquired a pair of ski." (See page 20.)

been anticipating spring, too, by cutting some twigs off the great old forsythia bushes, which after two or three days in the water-filled vases, and in a dark place, and two weeks more in whatever sunshine we have — ^yet in the vases, of course — are shaking their golden bells for us, just as brightly as their outdoor sister twigs will do in mid-April. It is a pleasant foretaste of the spring feast of flowers, and easily obtained.

Even in January the catalogues called to me, and now I know I must settle down to conclusions, so that orders may go to the seedsmen and the plantsmen whose aid we invoke. This catalogue lure is an old one, but it is a perennial surprise that I should never acquire immunity to it. As may without much difficulty be ascertained, I print catalogues for a living, and thus I truly live with them every work-day in the year. Just now I am in thankfulness that the recurrent push to have the seedsmen satisfied in January has been met; yet I turn to the pages of these books, as some of them are, with as much garden zest as if I had not worried for months to get them ready. It is, I suppose, a sort of automatic change of personality that happens, when I cease to see the catalogue as a printer and begin to gloat over its offerings as a garden maker.

n MY GROWING GARDEN

So now comes the delightful difficulty of it all ! I want everything new and fine that is offered; but I know quite well that I have neither room nor reason for all these "novelties." And also I know as well that not all of them will turn out in my garden exactly as they are described; which is, I presume, one of the best reasons in the world for adventuring into the trial of them. It is a fascinating gamble, a fair game of chance; and even if I draw less prizes than I hope for, I shall have had the anticipation of prizes and the satisfaction of trying for them. So it is, paraphrasing in my garden philosophy, better to have tried and lost than never to have tried at all. In fact, I am sure to win something, even if the sweet peas are not go many inches across, the petunias so wonderfully blotched, the asters larger than a respectable chrysanthemum, and if those phenomenal South African annuals fail to germinate at all.