I wonder!

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(Boston Transcript)

A PARADISE FOR A PENNY

MADDENED BY THE CATALOGUES OF PEACE-TIME, ONE LOVER OF GARDENS YET MANAGED TO BUILD A LITTLE EDEN, AND TELLS HOW HE DID IT FOR A SONG

By WALTER PRICHARD EATON

War-time economy (which is a much pleasanter and doubtless a more patriotically approved phrase than war-time poverty) is not without its compensations, even to the gardener.  At first I did not think so.  Confronted by a vast array of new and empty borders and rock steps and natural-laid stone, flanking a wall fountain, and other features of a new garden ambitiously planned before the President was so inconsiderate as to declare war without consulting me, and confronted, too, by an empty purse—­pardon me, I mean by the voluntarily imposed necessity for economy—­I sat me down amid my catalogues, like Niobe amid her children, and wept. (Maybe it wasn’t amid her children Niobe wept, but for them; anyhow I remember her as a symbol of lachrymosity.) Dear, alluring, immoral catalogues, sweet sirens for a man’s undoing!  How you sang to me of sedums, and whispered of peonies and irises—­yea, even of German irises!  How you spoke in soft, seductive accents of wonderful lilacs, and exquisite spireas, and sweet syringas, murmurous with bees!  How you told of tulips and narcissuses, and a thousand lovely things for beds and borders and rock work—­at so much a dozen, so very much a dozen, and a dozen so very few!  I did not resort to cotton in my ears, but to tears and profanity.

Then two things happened.  I got a letter from a Boston architect who had passed by and seen my unfinished place; and I took a walk up a back road where the Massachusetts Highway Commissioners hadn’t sent a gang of workmen through to “improve” it.  The architect said, “Keep your place simple.  It cries for it.  That’s always the hardest thing to do—­but the best.”  And the back-country roadside said, “Look at me; I didn’t come from any catalogue; no nursery grew me; I’m really and truly ’perfectly hardy’; I didn’t cost a cent—­and can you beat me at any price?  I’m a hundred per cent American, too.”

I looked, and I admitted, with a blush of shame for ever doubting, that I certainly could not beat it.  But, I suddenly realized, I could steal it!

I have been stealing it ever since, and having an enormously enjoyable time in the bargain.

Of course, stealing is a relative term, like anything else connected with morality.  What would be stealing in the immediate neighborhood of a city is not even what the old South County oyster fisherman once described as “jest pilferin’ ’round,” out here on the edges of the wilderness.  I go out with the trailer hitched to the back of my Ford, half a mile in any direction, and I pass roadsides where, if there are any farmer owners of the fields