Horticultural Snobbishness

The amateur gardener, of active imagination and a limited garden plot, as he pores over the alluring and misleading seed catalogues in the winter evenings, annually faces a most perplexing question. How can he make this summer’s garden both “look” well and “pick” well ? It is a question which few of us have been able to settle satisfactorily, partly because of the total depravity of inanimate seeds which won’t come up, partly because of a fondness which some of us have for constantly giving away our flowers to less fortunate neighbors and city friends; but chiefly, perhaps, because we have refused to admit to ourselves the real source of our difficulty. It is true that the dining-room table must be decorated, even at the cost of a barren patch on the sweet pea vine. It is true that if Aunt Rhoda breaks her leg again this year, she shall have jacqueminots daily, even though the rose bed is left stripped. But these incidents cause only occasional moments of dreariness in the garden’s summer, moments which we do not grudge if the garden has brought pleasure to the family or Aunt Rhoda; and I doubt whether even these moments would exist if there were other attractions in the flower beds to hide these temporary bald spots. Is not the real cause of the trouble the horticultural snobbishness in the heart of the gardener ?

For, after all, is the little garden world in which we live so happily, shut in by box and privet hedges, very different from the larger world outside ? We are entirely ready to admit that life is made more full of color by dashing cowboys in broad sombreros and gay-colored handkerchiefs, by down-east skippers with their nasal drawls and disregarded g’s. Traveling drummers with their endless talk of shop, humorous politicians, and picturesque bandanna-ed darkies, all give different touches to our life, with which we would not willingly dispense, though of course it is not from among these that we are apt to choose dinner guests to meet the famous foreign diplomat, or sympathetic critics of our latest monograph on radium. Life, however, is not one long dinner party, either in the garden or in the real world. Dignified hollyhocks and larkspurs, dainty poppies and harebells, charm us with their refined intellectual bearing while they last, and each in turn gives true pleasure to us and to the diplomat, as they do their share in making our dinner or our garden beautiful for him. But alas, the day of these aristocrats and their kindred spirits is all too short. By the time the larkspurs arrive to make a background, poppies in the foreground have gone to seed. Hollyhocks hasten along to support the bluebells, only to find them faded and the leaves turning yellow. The delicately veined salpiglossis and the feathery love-in-a-mist bloom alone and unprotected, because their lily neighbors blossomed only for a week, leaving behind them nothing but dried stalks.

So in this dilemma, I, true democratic American, have turned to the masses for support. Flaunting salvias, blatant zinnias, plebeian marigolds, well-meaning but hopelessly overdressed fuchsias, even stolid dahlias, though lacking in the graces and refinements, have at least one undeniable merit, — they can always be depended on for both “looking” and “picking.” Though, to be sure, they are never asked to grace the dining-room table, they have few equals for lighting up a corner of the dark hall, or smiling a welcome from a big bowl on the piazza. Pick them as you may, there are always more to-day than there were yesterday, nodding merrily in the garden from July to October, over the graves of their more aristocratic but less sturdy sisters. Truly the garden would have many forlorn and dark stretches without the help of these dependable cowboys and darkies.

Yet after this burst of democratic spirit , I must confess to one hidebound, immovable prejudice. While I have strength to pull them up, petunias shall never live in my garden. I have tried to think I was biased because they invariably live in tubs. Sometimes I have thought it might be because they have so little moral and physical backbone. But no. I have decided it is nothing but a hearty Dr. Fellian dislike which cannot be explained or uprooted from my heart. They have only one excuse for being. Can any one who in his youth has entered such a competition, ever forget the apoplectic excitement of holding one of them to his nose with a long breath, while the little girl by his side, her face looking like a Fourth of July mask, vainly endeavored to hold hers on for a longer time ? But when fascinating morning glories in charming summer gowns of pink, white, and lavender, lend themselves equally well to such pastimes and cover the garden wall so invitingly, why should my children even be tempted by the vulgar petunia? Away with it, say I, while there are other democrats to depend upon!

But I would not be charged with being an actual socialist in my feeling about the democrats. Among the dahlias, for instance, I must still protest against the bullet-headed variety, originally intended, I am sure (except for its contradictory colors) as a mourning rosette, and put in a plea for its single cousins, and its nouveaux-riches but rather more æsthetic relatives, the cactus dahlias. Zinnias must present a cheery scarlet and yellow mass before I can love them unreservedly, and the solferino kinds somehow or other disappear over the fence. Certainly if Nature would let me arrange it as I thought best, and not as she saw fit, I should prefer to have more sweet-scented roses and sweet peas through the season, and fewer gaudy sunflowers and pungent marigolds. But after all, these are merely reasons of congeniality and sympathy. Surely we are allowed to choose our friends on these lines, and our hearts should be big enough to include also acquaintances of humble origin and less refined exteriors. So why need we be snobs in our gardens, either ? Why should we leave them without these reliable though commonplace acquaintances ? Let us repudiate the charge next summer by allowing zinnias and salvias to dance their dashing cake-walk beside the more stately minuet of the hollyhocks and lilies.