The Daily Phoenix

The Season of Gardens.

The time is at hand for indulging in one of the best of amusements, and the most invigorating of exercises. People of taste and feeling who have once thoroughly enjoyed gardening, and who possess facilities for still enjoying it, do not need to be reminded of the season. There are many, however, each year in New York—and the number constantly increases—who change their homes from city to surrounding country, and to whom a few suggestions regarding the most invigorating occupation they secure by the change, may not be superfluous. The pains and cost bestowed upon the garden during the coming few weeks will be richly compensated hereafter. Lord Bacon holds, it is true, that in the royal ordering of gardens there ought to be gardens for all the months of the year; but for unambitious people the period just at hand is the fittest, if not the sole one, for preparing them. For, despite the leaden skies and sullen drip, of which we have lately had so much, we are, as yesterday's weather denoted, on the verge of

The sweet Spring days,
With whitening hedges and uncrumpling fern,
And blue bells trembling by the forest ways,
And scent of hay new mown.

The taste for ornamental gardening has developed among us of late years with great rapidity. What with the accumulation of wealth, the pressure of population into the suburbs, and the example of Central Park, (as it used to be,) growing up under the popular eye, a love for this graceful and elevating art is happily spreading among all classes of the people. Few, indeed, can afford to practice gardening on a large scale in the neighborhood of a great city. Bacon's thirty acres of garden, for most of us, is a mere Utopia. It is to be observed, however, that with the growth of taste in these matters, the grounds of other people become, as regards visible beauty and harmony, practical additions to our own.

When the general eye for such things is uncivilized or barbaric, each individual is, in some degree, at the mercy of his neighbors; and only the very rich man can keep all neighbors so far away as absolutely to control the prospect. Increasing refinement dispenses with this necessity; and, accordingly, in our finest suburbs on the banks of the Hudson, the slopes of Staten Island, and the heights of Orange, there is little to offend the eye among hundreds of closely mingled dwellings and grounds.

Whoever can possess a garden, though it be upon the humblest scale, should get it. Even bough pots out of a window are better than nothing. The passion for gardening, like others less innocent, grows with indulgence. It is not uncommon to hear people object that gardening does not "pay"—not often, let us admit, from feminine lips. Of course, the obvious reply is that the garden may almost invariably be proportioned to the means of its cultivator. There is no finer ornament for the table than flowers, and, as certainly, no daintier gift. The humblest meal is invested with elegance by flowers, and the plainest rooms may derive from their use an air of refinement. But the highest use of a garden is not to give the possessor vegetables; or fruit, or flowers. These can, in fact, be better and more cheaply grown by the market gardeners.

The superior function is that of inculcating patience and philosophy, together with other virtues which the habit of communing with and depending upon nature nourishes in the mind. When to this is added the consideration of how much health is bettered and nerves soothed by the open air exercise of a garden, enough has been said to outweigh commercial objections, even were they more cogent than in most instances they are.

New York Times.