LANDSCAPE GARDENING 339 



Rapidly increasing values in effect actually decrease your mort- 

 gage without your paying a dollar toward it, and if the land has 

 been well selected, judicious sales will enable you to pay off the entire 

 indebtedness and still leave the major part of the property free and 

 clear. 



The summer kitchen that will yield summer comfort and the 

 woodshed or old English "outshot" beyond, 'gainst which the 

 "norther" fruitlessly beats, are both desirable features if in your 

 Eldorado find, but neither are essential. 



Avoid farming, at first, except in a small way for family use. 

 Wait! Make the old house do, with a few must-haves. jKeep a cow, a 

 horse to plough and cultivate, and chickens. That cheap automo- 

 bile picked up second-hand, but carefully selected, will answer as 

 means of locomotion, and give family and friends an occasional out- 

 ing. Set out immediately an asparagus bed for home use at least, 

 and if for market, all the better, and a shrub and tree nursery. Buy 

 as many hardy, ornamental, small plants by the thousand as you 

 can afford; they can be had for a few cents each in Europe and at 

 times in this country, including evergreens, rhododendrons, etc., and 

 start that hole-in-the-ground greenhouse for early stuff and shrub pro- 

 pagation. Fill out with the surplus stock of some nurseryman that you 

 can get at a bargain out of season, you to move it if conveniently near. 

 Put on an extra man occasionally to push cultivation and care for 

 the nursery stock. Set out some fruit of the right sort grapes cost 

 little and yield enormously, but plant only the non-mildewers and 

 sure ripeners. 



Landscape Gardening. 



Employ a landscape gardener to lay out your farm on paper, 

 showing roads, building sites, and the general planting scheme. If 

 you know in some ways more than he does, at least buy his advice, 

 but settle the price ahead of the buying, then do as you please, keep- 

 ing the horse and extra man busy in cutting and filling grades, mov- 

 ing this tree or that shrub, thinning out where needed in a word, 

 shaping up your farm roughly with choice building sites, so planted 

 with fruit and ornamental trees as to avoid shutting off prospective 

 roads and views or interfering with lawns or vegetable garden. There 

 is no better aid to longevity than this kind of life. 



No man ever voiced a greater truth than Abraham Lincoln 

 when he said the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving 

 a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil. 



Aim to have in five years fifteen or twenty building sites of two 

 or three acres each, with main landscaping finished. Meantime, you 

 can harvest hay and possibly sow and gather some essential crops, 

 and, by protecting the trees, use some of the land for pasturage, 

 throttling expense in large measure with horse boarders. Prospective 



