The Livable House 



such a border as this, keep out the petty gardenesque feeling — one 

 weigelia will ruin the character of a whole group of field plants; 

 save the nursery shrubs for the flower garden and the planting 

 near the house. 



The converse of this warning is not true — any number of na- 

 tive shrubs and trees can be introduced into a border of lilacs 

 and spireas and altheas, without hurting it in the least; but one 

 shrub of this tamed company is enough to dispel the illusion of 

 an entire naturalistic planting. The same strict rule is observable 

 in connection with evergreens; cedars, white pines, Douglas 

 spruce, and other native evergreens take their places very prop- 

 erly in woodland plantings, but retinosporas, cryptomerias, golden 

 arbor vita?, smack of the nursery — and destroy utterly the free 

 spirit of the woods and fields. 



Some landscape architects never get away from the suburban 

 type of planting. Their materia medica, so to speak, consists of 

 the contents of the nursery catalogues, and they treat a big park 

 just as they would a little garden plot, using over and over again 

 barberry, snowberry, forsythia, mock orange, and spireas, with 

 perhaps a few native shrubs mixed in, out of deference to a dim 

 idea that parks should be planted a little differently from small 

 places. But the big conception that country is only to be intro- 

 duced into city by means of fidelity to country planting, or that 

 the spirit of existing country, its own particular charm, is to be 

 preserved only by adherence to the example it sets, quite escapes 

 them. A big meadow will never have the feel of a real meadow, 

 will never be anything but an enlarged lawn, unless it be fringed 



[62] 



