The Anderson intelligencer. [volume] (Anderson Court House, S.C.) 1860-1914, 1875-03-18
WHY So Few Gardens +?

It is astonishing that, with the facilities by
which every man in our country is surrounded
TO supply himself and his family with the sub
stantial advantages and refining influences of a
garden. so few avail themselves of them.
It is a great error to suppose that it is neces-
sary to be wealthy to have good garden and
attractive flower yard. Every man who chooses
can have land enough to have both. Even in
the most densely populated portions of the
northern cities we have seen lovely collections
of plants and flowers, with many varieties of
fruits. In European cities, where the poorer
classes live in crowded tenements, we have seen
the fairest and choicest flowers blooming IN
window gardens, cultivated by hands that
earned but few cents per day to provide for
the wants of large family. In the country,
especially one like ours with the finest climate
and the richest. soil in the world, it is re-
proach to our civilization that our flower gar
dens are so ill supplied and poorly cultivated !;
in our eagerness to obtain wealth we imagine
that it is necessary to devote all our time to its
pursuit, and that every moment OF time and
every rod of ground that is not devoted to ma
King money is wasted. "We have no time to
fool with garden truck or with flowers" says
the farmer who lives in q tumbledown log house
with worm fences, dilapidated stables and sheds,
eat hog and hominy, makes his fifty, a hundred
or two hundred bales of cotton. Every hour in
the day, week after week, year after year, must
be devoted to raise more cotton. Not q mo-
ment can be spared to enjoy the beauty and glo-
~ which nature so lavishly yields for the asking
The vegetable gardens, 80 called, which are to
be found on nineteen out of twenty plantations
are monuments of thriftlessness, ugliness and
poverty. A few struggling collards, a row or
two of unstaked peas, q few snaps, with dim
inutive patch of Irish potatoes struggling for
bare life with weeds and grass, constitute the
vegetables.
We venture to say that in not one of the cot
ton States can there be found dozen planta-
ton gardens where asparagus, beets, carrots,
parsnips, peas, beans, celery, tomatoes, satisfy,
egg plant, okra, lettuce, onions, cabbage and
cucumbers can be found in their proper success
sion, and yet there is not single plantation
where all these vegetables could not be raised IN
abundance on less than an acre of land for an
outlay of few dollars, yielding more of domes-
tic comfort than any other ten acres on the
place. And as for flowers, where do we lind
| them except those which nature gives in spite
of man? Is this 80 because we are destitute OF
an appreciation of comfort and all taste for the
beautiful? Is it because the sweet sunshine OF
heaven and the beauty and glory of the world
have no charms for us except as they are con-
nected with the yield of our cotton patch?
For small part of what we spend for cigars
whiskey and the circus, the poorest of us can
surround himself with valuable vegetable and
fruit Garden and invest his dwelling, be it ever
so humble, with the flowers Of rich foliage and
the bloom and fragrance of flowers. "Nature
lets the tree grow,' as Willis said, "and the
flower expand for man, without reference tt
his account at the nk."-Southern Farmer.