CHAPTER V 



PLANNING FOR BEAUTY IN LAWNS AND 

 SHRUBBERY 



I COME now to a most delightful part of my 

 general subject, where your training and your 

 creative art will find exercise and you can con- 

 struct your ideas with plants and trees only do not 

 make too much of your freedom in the way of ex- 

 pressing preconceived or inherited notions, not to say 

 whims and oddities. Nature must still be your very 

 strict adviser, to be counseled at every turn, and we 

 shall hope not to see a lot of leveling and hacking 

 down of beautifully carved knolls, or the cutting 

 away of trees that Nature spent two or three hundred 

 years in building. Now, if ever, we must have com- 

 mon sense, or we shall make our home a mere com- 

 posite of badly related bits and strips called lawns. 

 Let Nature alone, and she will plant shrubberies 

 almost everywhere, lots of them and the finest that 

 ever were conceived. She will cover the hillsides 

 with them, and there will be others down by the 

 creeks and wherever else she can twist a brook to and 

 fro through the meadows. She sets the birds and 

 the squirrels to bringing seeds, some of them stolen 



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