Excerpt from The Joy of Gardens Any book about gardens, written for the pleasure of writing, must have its sources in dreams. The visions of gardens beautiful and retired hover before the imagination, and no real garden, however humble, but is invested in celestial light of cherished hopes of what it may become in fragrant flowers or what it might have been had fortune been kind. The facts and the fancies of this book were discovered in various gardens, some centuries old, fruitful of memories of those whose hands have long since turned to dust, others in the joyous public gardens with parterres, and the most precious of all in the quiet gardens of my friends. "Gardening," said a wise writer, "is among the purest of pleasures," and one tossed on the fretful world knows that there is no purer delight than that which comes to the human heart with friends in gardens. To many friends, far and wide, I owe whatever inspiration lives in these pages. The illustration of the book was an afterthought carried out in the desire to suggest the art of landscape gardening. Credit is gratefully recorded to those who aided with the pictures, and especially to Jens Jensen, Jessie T. Beals, Mary H. Northend, J. Horace McFarland, W. H. Rau, Henry Fuhrman, E. L. Fowler, Alice Enk, and Mode Wineman. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.