16 TREATMENT OF SLOPING GROUNDS. 



comfortable and pleasant occupation as level or slightly 

 hollowing. 



The accompanying illustration will convey some idea of 

 what I mean by a slightly hollowing lawn. This surface 

 is to my mind quite as irregular as one would desire for 

 pleasant walking, and anything more irregular I should call 

 sloping grounds, and not properly a lawn. We may find 

 attractive sloping grounds all ready-made for us by nature 

 or we may be obliged to humbly follow her lead and treat 

 more or less artificially our sloping grounds after the fashion 

 practised by the natural forces about us. 



The hardest part of such work is to keep from exag- 

 gerating nature or repeating over and over again some one 

 of her ways of doing things. It should be always remem- 

 bered, in landscape gardening, that nature never repeits 

 herself. A torrent of rain rushes down a hillside and ploughs 

 furrows or heaps piles of stones in its path and partially 

 covers them with earth from above, but it never ploughs 

 the same kind of furrow twice or heaps up the earth and 

 stones again in the same way. There will be, indeed a cer- 

 tain similarity in the trend of the furrows and the course 

 of the rolling stones. This may be largely established by 

 the character and pitch of the slope, or it may come from 

 the general direction of the storms. 



Keeping this in mind, we will proceed to consider the 

 best way to treat sloping grounds of obvious steepness. 

 There are two kinds of steep sloping ground in connection 

 with lawns which require special modes of handling. One 

 we may describe as artificially irregular, and the other as 

 only in part artificially irregular. A portion of it may be 



