determine whether it is best to climb over or walk around it. As Browning puts it:

The common problem .

Is, not to fancy what were fair in life Provided it might be, but finding first What may be, then find how to make it fair According to our means. A very different thing.

This is the proper mental attitude for the city gardener, and with the right mental attitude much may be accomplished.

The first thing that happens is that the prospective gardener sits down not only to count the cost, which may be much or little, but to catechize himself sternly in somewhat this fashion:

Q. 'What is a garden's chief end?" A. "The chief end of a garden is to grace the house, to give pleasure to them that look upon it, to them that walk therein, to them that smell thereof."

Q. "What are the names of the months wherein I look upon my garden, July and August?"

This question and answer, usually the last consideration, is precisely where one's gardening should begin; for it needs little study to perceive that the prominent architectural features of a yard are the fence and the clothes-posts. The color comes. and goes, the plants wax and wane, but these remain unmoved.

"Clothe ugly fences with green," advise the gardening magazines, "mass shrubs before them, let vines clamber over and conceal them." Another paper, more rich in helpful detail, urges one to "spread wire and let it be covered with gay nasturtiums, and to stretch strings that morn

A. "Those that will grace it during the months wherein I look upon it."

Q. "What conditions are they whereto my choice of plants must conform?"

A. "The situation, whether the place be sunny or shady or of partial shade; the soil, whether it be rich or poor. It is not meet to plant sun-loving plants in the shadows, nor to set shade-loving plants in the sun."

Farther on in his catechism he will reach the question:

ing-glories may as

cend."

This is well enough in summer, but frost acts upon the greenery like the stroke of twelve upon Cinderella's raiment: the leaves will fall; the branches show themselves brown and disheveled; nasturtiums, pale wraiths, cling to their support like half-drowned sailors to a spar; while to the fore, by way of decoration, comes their sustaining chicken-wire, and unless the gardener is unusually energetic,

there it stays, and the fence is as visible as ever, and remains visible for six long months.

But why need the fence be ugly? What is the moral necessity of a fence fashioned after the similitude of a bill-board? Why need the rear of a city house, in its contrast to the front, offer a shock to the nervous system? Is the house a lay figure that its back must be unseen and unregarded? Why may we not have a "streetside" and a "garden-side" different, surely, but equally respectable and self-respecting? A fence of beautiful design is not a difficult thing to compass-one that may indeed be embellished by vines, but need not be hidden to be endured. The older fences were better; some of them were beautiful, and the plainest ones had lattice atop,

snowball and other shrubs in a very de

lightful fashion that we seem to have forgotten completely. When blessed with a friendly neighbor, a gate between can be made a very pretty feature of the garden.

Once the fence bettered, the city gardener attacks his next architectural problem, the clothes-posts. To these the general arrangement of the yard is usually subordinated, the prevailing scheme being a ten- or twelve-foot-deep space at the end of the yard, a narrow bed along the fence at each side, while the middle is occupied by an oblong of greensward, surrounded by a flagged or concrete path and guarded by four clothes-posts set in its four corners. Undoubtedly it is needful to dry clothes, and the yard. is the most convenient place; but why make the posts a feature, and a dominant feature? The Romans, as Mr. Arthur Shurtleff pleasantly suggests, may have had their togas hung to dry in their town gardens, but they were very pretty little gardens, none the less.

There are dozens of arrangements whereby a little ingenuity can circumvent the insistence of the clothes-posts.

relief, and is able to look about him with some degree of peace and comfort, and consider within himself what manner of garden he will have. For, like his house, a man's garden should fit his uses. If he is in town throughout the summer, then his garden should be to him a place of pleasant refuge. He may not be able to compass the Rose grot, Fringed pool, Ferned plot

of the much-quoted poet, but at least he can make provision for the simpler luxury

of a green thought in a green shade.

Take a small, paved yard near one of the business streets. Great office buildings cut off the light; one has its immensely tall brick back set squarely against the end of the lot, which for only an hour a day is visited by the sunshine. Yet here the semblance of a garden is not impossible. One could make the tiniest of summer-houses to dwarf the yard, and make it miniature instead of inadequate. Against the brick of the tall building a small fountain might be set, for water is easily had. There would be a broad shelf on each side of this whereon plants in pots would stand, to be changed for others when their glory has departed. If the soil is quite hopeless, then it is best to grow plants in concrete boxes, in which the earth can be replenished as often as needed.

If tall enough, the fence-posts may lend themselves to that use; a tree could serve as one of them. If the arrangements of the garden are symmetrical, as befits so small a space, and the posts are green-painted, and, instead of being treated as part of the garden-plan, are simply put where they will be least noticed, the yard will have a wholly different character, and the flowers and plants and pleasure of the owner will have the first consideration, as is their right.

Freed from the tyranny of the clothesposts, with a fence that does not implore to be hidden, but can be looked on with pleasure, even if it be in the nude, the prospective gardener draws a breath of

1 Far better than a fence is the older, more substantial, and self-respecting wall of brick, if the house be of brick; of stone, if the house be of stone. This is not suggested

Viewed in the right light, another seeming excrescence of our civilization affords an opportunity for the exercise of our city gardener's cleverness; this is the arrangement for drying clothes with which many extension roofs are adorned. It is made of "two-by-four" uprights set at the because of its expense. A reader who can afford an eightor ten-foot brick wall as a beginning to his gardening should invoke the aid of a landscape-gardener.

doorway. There were candles in sconces against the walls, a Japanese lantern overhead, and, near enough for the lights to touch it, a tiny fountain-and all this in a yard many people would have thought impossible. It was small and shaded, with little sunlight and poor soil. Near the house, there was the tiniest terrace, brickfloored, and divided from the garden by a little balustrade. The pergola was hardly more than eight feet long, in a little alcove of the garden, a spot which a less enlightened soul might have used for a closet for tools or junk.

A place where one may sit in peace outof-doors uninspected by one's neighbors is in the city a peculiar happiness, and by no means so difficult to arrange as it seems. In this matter of seclusion, barriers of shrubs are futile, since it is from high above that the batteries of eyes are trained; wherefore overhead defense is effective with the effectiveness of a parasol against the sun or an umbrella against the shower.

If one wishes comfort in his garden, and not a great number of flowers to care for, it would be easy to make into an arbor the whole lower end of his yard by raising the fence-posts until they were high enough for his overhead trellis. On this may grow wild grape, wistaria, or, for hasty defense, gourds. The arbor would be brick-floored cxcept for a narrow marginal bed at the back for violets and other shade-loving plants, with seats at the ends against the fence, and a hammock swung from the overhead beams. Japanese screens, drawn down a bit from the top, would give complete protection. From this vantage-point a very simple garden would appear charming. It would be a tempting place for sewing or reading or afternoon tea, for it is the lack of overhead screening that robs the city garden of its privacy. And if the family cared not to use it, what a boon and lure to the servant, this out-of-door sitting-room!

The all-summer sojourner who likes to

work in his garden would have his cold frame, which is to a gardener as a nursery to a mother of a family; also a tiny workshop of good design at the end of a garden path, where of a rainy Sunday he might work at his potting-bench in peace and comfort. Such a one would devote his whole garden space to flowers, outlining the beds in box for the sake of their winter aspect.

As for the arrangement, that is a matter of individual taste; but because the garden is small, because its shape is so plainly visible, it is specially necessary that the scale be right and the proportions good. "Naturalistic planting," as it is called, is unsafe to attempt on so small an area. It is futile to attempt disguising boundaries so plainly obvious. Shrubs must go against the walls and at the back, except the few that may be used for the purpose of definite accent. Set elsewhere, they make the garden seem inconveniently small. The outline of the beds may be as simple or as intricate as one likes. The geometrical designs of the older gardening are interesting, or one may keep the traditional center of grass, and fit his flower-beds about it; but the usual grass oblong is too large and out of scale, unless the paths are omitted and the turf stretched uninterrupted to the flower-beds, while, instead of the paths, tiles for steppingstones may be used. One of the easiest ways for the amateur to determine and decide on his outlines is to mark out the proposed beds with tennis-tape or the like, then go to an upper window and look down on it. He can tell at a glance whether the paths are too wide or too narrow or if the beds are in the right relation, and it is a simple matter to have these tentative boundaries shifted until it "looks right."

A difference in level, even a slight one, adds a very definite charm to a

affords space for the kind of decoration which the city gardener finds easiest to bestow. There will be steps, at the side of which he may set plants in decorative jars or pots. He can change them when their charm is fled, and set sturdy evergreens in tubs in their place in the winter. He may have a tiny terrace, a low wall against which a slight growth of vine or plant has real effectiveness. It will open to him all the range of potted trees-dwarf fruits and flowering-plums and cherries. and cherries. A tiny garden is an ideal place for these.

And if the city man have the garden very deeply in his soul, he will make at the foot of his yard, if the exposure be good, or at the beginning, if that be better, a house of good design, which may be glassed in completely in the winter. It would not have other heat than that of the sun through the windows, and here would be planted tender rhododendrons and camellias. Violets and pansies would bloom cheerfully throughout the winter.

One of the minor details which makes for charm in a city garden is the matter of paths. If it is a possible thing, let these be of gravel, for concrete or flagstone bring a reminiscence of the pavement into the garden which one would fain keep out.

But before the city gardener has gone very far in his garden enterprise he is confronted by another of the high hurdles

that Madam Nature sets for his confusion-the soil. No honest country soil is his, redolent of clover, with a breath that is "blent with sweet odors." It may be as hard as the heart of a wicked corporation, as poisoned as the mind of a bribed juror, and the city gardener, book in hand, looks at the unlikely and unlovely, perchance illsmelling, material, then at his book, and wonders if it be "loam," or a "light sandy loam," or any