Читать книгу The Amateur Garden - George Washington Cable - Страница 5

On this green of the dryads, where it intercepts the "avenue" that slips over from the Elm Street trolley-cars, lies, such as it is, my own acre; house, lawn, shrubberies and, at the rear, in the edge of the pines, the study. Back there by the study—which sometimes in irony we call the power-house—the lawn merges into my seven other acres, in Paradise. Really the whole possession is a much humbler one than I find myself able to make it appear in the flattering terms of land measure. Those seven acres of Paradise I acquired as "waste land." Nevertheless, if I were selling that "waste," that "hole in the ground," it would not hurt my conscience, such as it is, to declare that the birds on it alone are worth more than it cost: wood-thrushes and robins, golden orioles, scarlet tanagers, blackbirds, bluebirds, oven-birds, cedar-birds, veeries, vireos, song-sparrows, flycatchers, kinglets, the flicker, the cuckoo, the nuthatch, the chickadee and the rose-breasted grosbeak, not to mention jays or kingfishers, swallows, the little green heron or that cock of the walk, the red squirrel.

Speaking of walks, it was with them—and one drive—in this grove, that I made my first venture toward the artistic enhancement of my acre—acre this time in the old sense that ignores feet and rods. I was quite willing to make it a matter of as many years as necessary when pursued as play, not work, on the least possible money outlay and having for its end a garden of joy, not of care. By no inborn sagacity did I discover this to be the true first step, but by the trained eye of an honored and dear friend, that distinguished engineer and famous street commissioner of New York, Colonel George E. Waring, who lost his life in the sanitary regeneration of Havana.