LAWN BEAUTIFICATION 273 



was considered unsafe to pasture stock on it, as 

 it endangered the legs of the animals, the cracks 

 often being several inches in width and appar- 

 ently bottomless. No crop had been grown here 

 for years ; and house lots a mile or more out sold 

 for about the price I paid for the four acres. 



Of course there is nothing novel about the 

 statement that the drainage of land is important. 

 The matter has been more or less understood 

 since the earliest periods. Yet a very large part 

 of the land of the United States that is given 

 over to lawns and gardens is left to depend 

 entirely on natural drainage, and fails to pro- 

 duce anything like the crops that might be grown 

 on it, if a more rational provision had been made 

 for adjusting the water supply. 



In California the value of drainage has been 

 shown in the results obtained even with wheat on 

 fields drained and those not drained. Only one 

 or two ditches across a field have made it possible 

 to produce two or three times as large a crop as 

 was grown in the same field before the ditches 

 were made. 



In a certain oat field in Wisconsin the yield 

 per acre was doubled by drainage. The yield 

 before drainage was only sixteen bushels, but 

 after drainage it was increased to 32.3 bushels 

 per acre. 



