"My dear sir," the architect replied, "you wouldn't know the corpse."
I suppose one reason why even the miscopying of gardens provokes so little offence is that the acts it mimics have no art it can murder. Mrs. Budd sets out her one little "high geraingia" in the middle of her tiny grass-plat (probably trimming it to look like a ballet-dancer on one leg). Whereupon Mrs. Mudd, the situation of whose house and grounds is not in the least like her neighbor's, plants and trims hers the same way and feels sure it has the same effect, for--why shouldn't it?
The prize-winning copyist I am telling of copied principles only. To have copied mere performance would have been particularly unlucky, for though his garden stands within fifty yards of the one from which it drew its inspiration the two are so differently located that the same art principles demand of them very different performances. An old-time lover of gardens whom I have to quote at second-hand mentions in contrast "gardens to look in upon" and "gardens to look out from." The garden I have described at length is planned to be looked in upon; most town gardens must be, of course; but its competitor across the street, of which I am about to give account, is an exception. The lot has a very broad front and very little depth--at one side almost none, at the other barely enough for a small house and a few feet of front yard. Why there should be a drive I cannot say, but it is so well taken into the general scheme that to call it to account would be ungenerous. It enters at the narrowest part of the ground, farthest from the house, makes a long parabola, and turns again into the street close beside the dwelling. In the bit of lawn thus marked off, shrubs have place near the street, three or four old apple-trees range down the middle, and along the drive runs a gay border of annual flowers. Along the rear side of the drive lies but a narrow strip of turf beyond which the ground drops all at once to another level some thirty feet below. On the right this fall is so abrupt that the only way down to it is by a steep rustic stair. On the left, behind the house, the face of the bluff is broken into narrow terraces, from top to bottom of which, and well out on the lower level, the entire space is mantled with the richly burdened trellises of a small vineyard. At the right on this lower ground is a kitchen garden; beyond it stretch fair meadows too low to build on, but fruitful in hay and grain; farther away, on higher ground, the town again shows its gables and steeples among its great maples and elms, and still beyond, some three miles distant, the green domes and brown precipices of the Mount Holyoke Range stand across the sky in sharp billows of forest and rock. It seems at times a pity that Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom cannot themselves know how many modest gardens they are a component part of--the high violin note of: gardens, like this one, "to look out from."