O ornament the home with flowers and plants is not difficult, if undertaken in the right way and in the right spirit. To be sure, it takes much thought, much enthusiasm, and a deal of power to endure failure, mishaps, and various set-backs. But the apparent difficulty vanishes when the knack begins to develop and the spell of the charm of such work once sets in. We meet now and then people of whom it is said that all flowers grow for them, and that every plant thrives in their hands. What is the magic? In what lies the secret of such success? Briefly, I should say, intelligence and loving attention to little things. It is wonderful to note how a little ill-advised attention, instead of neglect, will often kill a plant; five minutes doing harm that days will not repair. The management of living things of all kinds is a delicate and refined operation, but love often secures strange instinctive success. Most things of value one has to learn from experience. Books sometimes cannot teach us, or masters of any kind, but there are aids and suggestions that the plant-grower must seek. They will certainly aid, if they are assimilated properly and applied intelligently. I have therefore decided Fences. Lawn-planting. Trees. Shrubs. Color Values. to limit myself to suggestions and hints that will help the intelligent lover of lawn and dooryard gardening to work out something peculiarly her own. When you set out to do this kind of work, let me advise you to determine in the beginning not to be, in the ordinary sense of the term, "artistic." First, practise common sense by making yourself comfortable and making your plants grow, and after that be artistic. to your soul's desire. Anything that falls short of this, that mars your comfort, or makes your plants unhappy, is a delusion and a snare. For instance, when you select your village lot don't be deluded by the picturesque charm of badly drained ravines, where nothing will grow except at the cost of a large amount of labor and expense. Choose rather a good, honest, level piece of ground, well drained, and with warm and mellow soil. It will surprise you to see what picturesque effects you can obtain with the exercise of some pains and ingenuity, and above all, your grass and plants will thrive as it may not be possible to make them in the ravine. Having secured the land, naturally, the next thing to do will be to select the site for the house. This will, of course, be governed largely by the style and arrangement of the house itself, but, after all this has been considered, there still remain some wise suggestions that should be followed in nearly all cases. Give plenty of space in front of the house, in order to exhibit it to better effect and to secure at the same time greater privacy from the street. Suppose, for instance, your lot happened to be two hundred or three hundred feet deep and your house stood exactly in the middle of it, how much better your place would look than if your front door opened directly on the edge of the street. Sometimes, if the lot is narrow, it is a good idea to build the house on one side, thus securing more lawn in a single mass. But here again you must be governed, not only by the architectural design, but also by the contour of the ground. You cannot very well build the house in a hollow. If there is a distinctly high part of the lot, there your house must stand to secure good drainage. All this is practical and common sense, and you must look to it if you do not want your cellar But after all these considerations are properly disposed of, there still remains plenty of opportunity to display artistic sense. The site for the house can be shifted and shifted until just the right spot is secured to make the place look well; neither too far back nor too far front, nor too much to one side nor too much in the middle. There must be a just proportion of the various parts of the lot to each other and to the house itself. To secure this result often requires much study, and the way to study it satisfactorily is this Draw the outlines of your lot to a definite scale, eight feet or sixteen feet to the foot, the scale of a common two-foot rule being preferred. Then draw the exact outline of the house to the same scale on a bit of cardboard, and move this here and there about your lot as drawn out, until you find the exact spot you think looks best. If there are evidently lower and higher regions on the lot, first mark them on your map and carefully take them into consideration in selecting the site. After you have selected the site as well as you can on paper, try to make a sketchy sort of model of the house by means of tall poles set in the ground, and connected by scantlings or thin strips of board lashed to their tops. This will enable you to get a better idea of how the house will look on the spot you have chosen on paper; and ten to one you will make some alteration after the poles have been set up. This sounds a little fussy, I know, and many people will object to taking so much trouble to locate a house. But think of the future, and how many nights and mornings you will pass in and out of that house, and how often, if you have failed to secure just the right site, you will regret that you did not fuss a little with these same despised cardboard and poles. We often, I fear, also make the mistake of thinking it less important to study the site of a house on a small, inexpensive place than on a large one. The fact is, that glaring mistakes of this kind are always more glaring on small places than on large ones. Poor people, I think, suffer more from artistic blunders than rich ones, for the simple reason, perhaps, that they can afford to make fewer of them. The site of your house selected, the next thing to do is to grade the ground; the next thing, I should say, of a landscape-gardening nature. It would be wise to get the house built first, and any drainage attended to that would require pipes to be led out through the lot. When you begin the grading, first and foremost, you must consider how the rains that fall in torrents at times on its surface can be managed. Fortunate for you, if the lot is tolerably level drained lot, and obtain inspiration from existing facts concerning the way they should be treated. Never, if you can help it, depart far, in grading a lawn, from the suggestion afforded by nature in the original condition of the surface. By all means secure graceful lines, accentuate the high points by making them higher, and the low points by making them lower. Soften and swell the hillocks, and deepen and scoop out and has no pockets where water will collect, or slopes that will be sure to shed the water toward the house. If you get into trouble in this way, you may sometimes succeed in relieving the lot by what is termed a land-basin, either penetrating into a sandy sub-soil, or leading through a pipe to the street gutter or other convenient outlet. In some cases, however, you may find it necessary to change the contour of the lot to a marked degree in order to the hollows smoothly and gracefully, manage properly the water that falls but never forget the essential and nor on it. Grading, it should be understood, practical considerations of drainage, etc., once disposed of, must be viewed as a distinctly artistic undertaking. In other words, in grading your lawn you should mould its surface with as fine a sense of artistic breadth, light and shade, and grace of line and contour, as though in reality you were a sculptor modelling his clay. As in the selection of the house site, the first thing to do is to study the natural surface of the mal character of the surface of the place. If it was flat, originally, don't attempt to secure an engineering line, but softly and slightly sink or raise the ground in the central parts-not in the exact centre-and thus secure a long, easy flowing contour which will give the ground just enough swell or hollow to avoid the appearance of a dead level. The professional grader often, at this point, makes the mistake of contriving miniature valleys and hills out of what is essentially a level surface. Such Grading, Lawns, Paths, and Roads. treatment is distinctly bad, theatrical, and forced, and much worse than the honest attempt to make an absolutely level surface-a feat, by the bye, which in actual practice is seldom, if ever, really accomplished. If nature, however, has endowed your lot with hills and hollows, squarely accept them and devote your energies to making them graceful, and to bringing out, with as much art as lies in your power, their essential and fully developed charms. In the same way, if you have a large stone or stump on one side of your place, so situated as not to injure its general breadth and effectiveness, don't blow or root them up, but plant along side the stone two or three smaller ones as if they had accidentally grown there, and over the stump train a Virginia creeper. Around the outside borders of the place the grade of the ground should be kept somewhat higher, and wherever groups of shrubs are to be planted, there the soil should be slightly elevated. The amount of the elevation must be determined by the taste of the owner, and here, more perhaps than in any other operation of home gardening, may be displayed that sense of true proportion and fine gradation that should characterize all good artistic work. Remember that to make the elevation too high is to create a fussy, artificial, and theatrical effect. Having drained and graded the lawn, the next thing to do is to lay out and build the walks. Walks, however, should be considered as necessities, and sometimes necessary nuisances, never as beauties. Their lines and surfaces are sharp and unattractive in color, and never as satisfactory as the turf itself. On this account, beware of arranging a path between any points where it can be, with reason, avoided. Better dispense with paths and walk occasionally on the grass, than cut up the turf with bare 7 earth or stone foot-ways. Most places require only one path, the one leading to the front door. If there is a well or a rear building a path may be required to reach it, and a path may be needed for the back entrance; but it is seldom wise to make a circuit walk around a small place, and, for that matter, the closely shorn turf is always pleasant enough to wander over to enjoy shrubs and trees, which is the chief incentive to cross over the lawn. Avoid building a path close to the house, just under the parlor, library, or dining-room windows. It interferes with their privacy and cuts up the turf just at the point where grass and vines and low shrubs are specially needed to modify and soften the right angle the walls of the house make with the lawn. To complete properly this framework, moreover, the grass must extend out many feet in unbroken perfection. Something should be said also about roads, for many home grounds in suburban towns and villages have space enough for a carriage road to the front door, a turn around, and a way to the stable or barn. The entrance, for twenty-five or thirty feet into the place, should be as near a right angle to the road as possible. Then the curve of the road. should be made easy and regular until it approaches the front door; after which, for at least twenty-five feet, if possible, it should run parallel with the house, or nearly so. The road, now, may pass out of another gate into the highway, or it may make a turn and go out of the same entrance again. This turn should, for easy passage of the carriage, have its smallest diameter at least forty feet, and its general form that of an ellipse flattened at each end. Avoid a pear-shape turn, although it looks well. The carriage will fail to turn round easily about such a turn. The back road to the stables should leave the carriage-drive at a convenient |