"A Half Caste" and Other Writings

A Neighbor’s Garden, my Own and a Dream One

✻ a neighbor’s garden, my own and a dream one I have always loved flowers. The wild ones tossing up their bright heads in the fields and woods I have gathered at will and filled my house with. But toward the exquisite darlings which bloom in gardens I have felt as I do to precious jewels which I see set out in a shop window or ablaze on the person of some fortunate lady: they are things I love to look at, but do not own. At least, I have only a few bits of fine jewelry, just as I have only a few flowers I can call my very own. Though I have never desired to possess jewels, I have positively hungered for a garden of flowers. I have spent sleepless nights in which I planned to have one all my own, and have gone to sleep to dream of it. Since I came to America, however, I have been a dweller, until recently, in the big, grimy cities where the ugly buildings and the noises made of life to me a veritable inferno . It is not always the ones who live among the flowers that love them most. The city child—child of the slums, sometimes—with its one pot of geraniums , will often expend upon it more care and thought than some women give to the flowers which seem literally to garland their home, inside and out. I often think of my mother, and her pathetic attempts to recall the bloom of the flowering land of Japan which had been her home. The first time she made the long journey to this country, she carried with her a dozen or more boxes in which seeds and slips were planted, and even at sea she had her little green growth always with her. Here in America she was never without her own bit of a garden, her “flowering spot,” as she named it, and often it consisted only of an ugly hotel window ledge, or the roof of some city house. But she never lost her passionate love for flowers, and she passed this trait along to me. I consider flowers the loveliest things in creation, and yet, as I have said, I have never owned any, hardly. About four years ago I bade the city a sincere and cordial farewell. For a 110 Part 1: Short Fiction time we lived in the suburbs, where, on a tiny lawn, I cherished a few pansies and geraniums, but I could not have a garden, for with my work as a writer I found that the most I could do in life was to produce a book and a baby a year. Besides, I wanted the real country for my garden. By and by fortune made this possible. I dwell now in the heart of Westchester, near the metropolis. I have a little acre of land all my own. Around me are sumptuous homes, mansions set amid grounds kept as perfect and smooth as a wellswept parlor. My little frowsy acre, with its unshorn lawns and overgrown carriage drives, seems a reproach to an otherwise immaculate community. I’m sure my neighbors regard me with suspicion, convinced I am an eccentric individual who prefers my place unclipped. But, in truth, I love the smooth, sweet, rolling green expanse of well-cut lawns, and I should like to own the flowers and flowering shrubs which grow within the gardens of my neighbors. But I keep no man, and have neither the strength nor ambition to push a lawn-mower over an acre of lawn. When the babies have ceased to come, and when the ones that are here have ceased to need me all the time, then I expect to have flowers of my own. Meanwhile I content myself with wandering into the gardens of my neighbors. I am not interested in the work of the mere professional landscape gardener ; so after a brief look at a few of these places, I turn away. In nearly all the places hereabouts I perceive only the work of the conventional hired gardener. I like a garden which shows individuality, which not only is a bit of earth in which to grow flowers, but in which, like a room in which one lives, one’s actual personality appears. My neighbors seem impressed, however , with the necessity of formal gardens on their places. Italian, Dutch, even Japanese, gardens are out of place in America, and...