44 HOW TO LIVE IN THE COUNTRY 



every six years. You see you are losing your drive- 

 way steadily, so that in thirty years five feet of it 

 (two feet and a half on each side) will have been ab- 

 sorbed by the hedge. This requires foresight in 

 planting, as does every other step that you take in 

 creating a country home. 



The advisability of bordering your drives with 

 hedges depends upon the lay of your land. The first 

 object of a hedge is not the beauty of the thing in 

 itself so much as the break that it makes in a smooth 

 landscape. We shall discuss this more hereafter, 

 and for that matter the hedge planting can easily be 

 deferred until after the house is built. If you plant 

 hedges at all, at present, confine yourself to Tartarian 

 honeysuckles, among the shrubs, which are very easily 

 replaced and transplanted. 



While laying out my Clinton homestead, having 

 placed my house far back from the street, I found 

 that road-making was the one most essential feature 

 in my preliminary work. My neighbor caustically 

 suggested that I was laying out a railroad. Bor- 

 dered with arbor vitae these drives now constitute a 

 most attractive feature of the home. They de- 

 manded a thorough study of swales and slopes and 

 natural approaches. They were then thoroughly 

 drained, with tile placed at the sides and the roadbed 

 made of furnace slag, covered by red shale. This 

 shale first melts under the effect of showers and then 

 compacts until it is a solid and nearly imperishable 

 roadbed. 



