【国外英文文学】The Amateur Garden.doc

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1、【国外英文文学】The Amateur GardenTitle: The Amateur GardenAuthor: George W. CableRelease Date: September 29, 2006 EBook #19408Language: EnglishCharacter set encoding: ISO-8859-1* START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMATEUR GARDEN *Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Janet Blenkinshipand the Onli

2、ne Distributed Proofreading Team atIllustration: That gardening is best . which best ministers to mansfelicity with least disturbance of natures freedom.This is my study. The tree in the middle of the picture is Barries elm.I once lifted it between my thumb and finger, but I was younger and thetree

3、was smaller. The dark tree in the foreground on the right is FelixAdlers hemlock. Page 82THE AMATEUR GARDENBYGEORGE W. CABLEILLUSTRATEDCHARLES SCRIBNERS SONSNEW YORK: MCMXIV_Copyright, 1914, by_CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS_Published October, 1914_ CONTENTS PAGE MY OWN ACRE 1 THE AMERICAN GARDEN 41 WHERE T

4、O PLANT WHAT 79 THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF NORTHAMPTON 107 THE PRIVATE GARDENS PUBLIC VALUE 129 THE MIDWINTER GARDENS OF NEW ORLEANS 163 ILLUSTRATIONS That gardening is best . which best ministers to mans felicity with least disturbance of natures freedom _Frontis_ . that suddenly falling wooded and bro

5、ken ground where Mill River loiters through Paradise 6 On this green of the dryads . lies My Own Acre 8 The beautiful mill-pond behind its high dam keeps the river full back to the rapids just above My Own Acre 12 A fountain . where one,-or two,-can sit and hear it whisper 22 The bringing of the gro

6、ve out on the lawn and the pushing of the lawn in under the grove was one of the early tasks of My Own Acre 24 Souvenir trees had from time to time been planted on the lawn by visiting friends 26 How the words were said which some of the planters spoke 28 Where are you going? says the eye. Come and

7、see, says the roaming line 34 The lane is open to view from end to end. It has two deep bays on the side nearest the lawn 36 . until the house itself seems as naturally . to grow up out of the garden as the high keynote rises at the end of a ladys song 48 Beautiful results may be got on smallest gro

8、unds 52 Muffle your architectural angles in foliage and bloom 52 Fences masked by shrubbery 64 After the first frost annual plantings cease to be attractive 72 Shrubbery versus annuals 72 Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles. South Hall, Williston Seminary 74 . a line of shrubbery

9、 swinging in and out in strong, graceful undulations 74 However enraptured of wild nature you may be, you do and must require of her some subserviency about your own dwelling 84 Plant it where it will best enjoy itself 86 . climaxes to be got by superiority of stature, by darkness and breadth of fol

10、iage and by splendor of bloom belong at its far end 94 Some clear disclosure of charm still remote may beckon and lure 96 . tall, rectangular, three-story piles . full of windows all of one size, pigeon-house style 100 You can make gardening a concerted public movement 112 Plant on all your lots bou

11、ndaries, plant out the foundation-lines of all its buildings 122 Not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but to procure its widest and most general dissemination 122 Having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having spiritual wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus

12、138 One such competing garden was so beautiful last year that strangers driving by stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy a nearer view 138 Beauty can be called into life about the most unpretentious domicile 148 Those who pay no one to die, plant or prune for them 148 In New Orleans the home

13、 is bounded by its fences, not by its doors-so they clothe them with shrubberies and vines 174 The lawn . lies clean-breasted, green-breasted, from one shrub-and-flower-planted side to the other, along and across 174 There eight distinct encumbrances narrow the sward. In a half-days work, the fair s

14、cene might be enhanced in lovely dignity by the elimination of these excesses 176 The rear walk . follows the dwellings ground contour with business precision-being a business path 178 Thus may he wonderfully extenuate, even . where it does not conceal, the houses architectural faults 180 . a lovely

15、 stage scene without a hint of the stages unreality 182 Back of the building-line the fences . generally more than head-high . are _sure_ to be draped 184 . from the autumn side of Christmas to the summer side of Easter 184 The sleeping beauty of the gardens unlost configuration . keeping a winters

16、share of its feminine grace and softness 186 It is only there that I see anything so stalwart as a pine or so rigid as a spruce 192MY OWN ACREA lifelong habit of story-telling has much to do with the production ofthese pages.All the more does it move me because it has always included, as perhapsit d

17、oes in most story-tellers, a keen preference for true stories,stories of actual occurrence.A flower-garden trying to be beautiful is a charming instance ofsomething which a storyteller can otherwise only dream of. For such agarden is itself a story, one which actually and naturally occurs, yetoccurs

18、 under its masters guidance and control and with artistic effect.Yet it was this same story-telling bent which long held me back whilefrom time to time I generalized on gardening and on gardens other thanmy own. A well-designed garden is not only a true story happeningartistically but it is one that

19、 passes through a new revision each year,with the former translations diligently compared and revised. Eachyear my own acre has confessed itself so full of mistranslations of thetrue text of gardening, has promised, each season, so much fairer a showin its next edition, and has been kept so prolonge

20、dly busy teaching andreteaching its master where to plant what, while as to money outlayscompelled to live so much more like a poet than like a prince, that thebent for story-telling itself could not help but say wait.Now, however, the company to which this chapter logically belongs isactually showi

21、ng excellent reasons why a history of their writers ownacre should lead them. Let me, then, begin by explaining that the smallcity of Northampton, Massachusetts, where I have lived all the latterthree-fifths of my adult years, sits on the first rise of ground whichfrom the west overlooks the alluvia

22、l meadows of the Connecticut, ninemiles above South Hadley Falls. Close at its back a small stream, MillRiver, coming out of the Hampshire hills on its way to the Connecticut,winds through a strip of woods so fair as to have been named-from amuch earlier day than when Jenny Lind called it so-Paradis

23、e. On itstown side this wooded ground a few hundred yards wide drops suddenly ahundred feet or so to the mill stream and is cut into many transverseravines.In its timber growth, conspicuous by their number, tower white-pines,while among them stand only less loftily a remarkable variety of foresttree

24、s imperfectly listed by a certain humble authority as mostly h-oak,h-ellum, and h-ash, with a little ickory.Imperfectly listed, for there one may find also the birch and the beech,the linden, sycamore, chestnut, poplar, hemlock-spruce, butternut, andmaple overhanging such pleasant undergrowths as th

25、e hornbeam andhop-hornbeam, willows, black-cherry and choke-cherry, dogwood and othercornels, several viburnums, bush maples of two or three kinds, alder,elder, sumach, hazel, witch-hazel, the shadblow and other perennial,fair-blooming, sweet-smelling favorites, beneath which lies a leaf-mouldrife w

26、ith ferns and wild flowers.From its business quarter the towns chief street of residence, ElmStreet, begins a gently winding westerly ascent to become an openhigh-road from one to another of the several farming and manufacturingvillages that use the water-power of Mill River. But while it is still a

27、street there runs from it southerly at a right angle a straight bit ofavenue some three hundred yards long-an exceptional length of unbentstreet for Northampton. This short avenue ends at another, stillshorter, lying square across its foot within some seventy yards of thatsuddenly falling wooded and

28、 broken ground where Mill River loitersthrough Paradise. The strip of land between the woods and this laststreet is taken up by half a dozen dwellings of modest dignity, whosefront shade-trees, being on the southerly side, have been placed not onthe sidewalks roadside edge but on the side next the d

29、wellings andclose within their line of private ownership: red, white and post-oaksset there by the present writer when he named the street DryadsGreen. They are now twenty-one years old and give a good shade whichactually falls where it is wanted-upon the sidewalk.Illustration: . that suddenly falli

30、ng wooded and broken groundwhere Mill River loiters through Paradise.A strong wire fence (invisible in the picture) here divides the _grove_from the old river road.On this green of the dryads, where it intercepts the avenue that slipsover from the Elm Street trolley-cars, lies, such as it is, my own

31、 acre;house, lawn, shrubberies and, at the rear, in the edge of the pines, thestudy. Back there by the study-which sometimes in irony we call thepower-house-the lawn merges into my seven other acres, in Paradise.Really the whole possession is a much humbler one than I find myselfable to make it appe

32、ar in the flattering terms of land measure. Thoseseven acres of Paradise I acquired as waste land. Nevertheless, if Iwere selling that waste, that hole in the ground, it would not hurtmy conscience, such as it is, to declare that the birds on it alone areworth more than it cost: wood-thrushes and ro

33、bins, golden orioles,scarlet tanagers, blackbirds, bluebirds, oven-birds, cedar-birds,veeries, vireos, song-sparrows, flycatchers, kinglets, the flicker, thecuckoo, the nuthatch, the chickadee and the rose-breasted grosbeak, notto mention jays or kingfishers, swallows, the little green heron or that

34、cock of the walk, the red squirrel.Speaking of walks, it was with them-and one drive-in this grove, thatI made my first venture toward the artistic enhancement of myacre,-acre this time in the old sense that ignores feet and rods. I wasquite willing to make it a matter of as many years as necessary

35、whenpursued as play, not work, on the least possible money outlay and havingfor its end a garden of joy, not of care. By no inborn sagacity did Idiscover this to be the true first step, but by the trained eye of anhonored and dear friend, that distinguished engineer and famous streetcommissioner of

36、New York, Colonel George E. Waring, who lost his life inthe sanitary regeneration of Havana.Illustration: On this green of the dryads . lies My Own Acre.The two young oaks in the picture are part of the row which gives thestreet its name.Contour paths was the word he gave me; paths starting from the

37、 top ofthe steep broken ground and bending in and out across and around itsridges and ravines at a uniform decline of, say, six inches to every tenfeet, until the desired terminus is reached below; much as, in itslarger way, a railway or aqueduct might, or as cattle do when they roamin the hills. Th

38、us, by the slightest possible interference withnatural conditions, these paths were given a winding course every stepof which was pleasing because justified by the necessities of the case,traversing the main inequalities of the ground with the ease of levelland yet without diminishing its superior v

39、ariety and charm. And so withcontour paths I began to find, right at my back door and on my own acre,in nerve-tired hours, an outdoor relaxation which I could begin, leaveoff and resume at any moment and which has never staled on me. For thiswas the genesis of all I have learned or done in gardening

40、, such as itis.My appliances for laying out the grades were simple enough: aspirit-level, a stiff ten-foot rod with an eighteen-inch leg nailedfirmly on one end of it, a twelve-inch leg on the other, a hatchet, anda basket of short stakes with which to mark the points, ten feet apart,where the longe

41、r leg, in front on all down grades, rested when thespirit-level, strapped on the rod, showed the rod to be exactlyhorizontal. Trivial inequalities of surface were arbitrarily cut down orbuilt up and covered with leaves and pine-straw to disguise the fact,and whenever a tree or anything worth preserving stood in the way herecame the loaded barrow and the barrowist, like a piece of artillerysweeping into action, and a fill undistinguishable from nature soonbrought the path around the obstacle on what had been its lower side, tomeander on at its unvarying rate of rise or fall as t