240 How to Make a Formal Garden at Moderate Cost 



for room upon which to estabhsh the border plantations required to shut 

 out unattractive and frame in attractive views, as seen from important 

 viewpoints within house and grounds. In all this study regard should be 

 had for the general composition — that is, the picture to be produced 

 ultimately by the house, with its drapery of vines, its skirting of shrubs, 

 and the trees that form its background and frame in its lawn areas. 



Primarily, the architectural character, the general arrangement and 

 location of the house, as well as the arrangement of the grounds, of which 

 the garden, be it formal or informal, is a part, should be governed by the 

 existing conditions. On a very rugged and picturesque site, where the 

 surface is covered with an attractive growth of low, dense shrubs, an unsym- 

 metrical house made to fit into and grow out of the surface with little injury 

 to attractive rock formation and shrub growth would be fitting. Upon 

 such a site a formal garden would be quite out of place, because the cost of 

 construction and sacrifice of another type of beauty would be greater than 

 the return. A distinctly informal garden, with the flower beds in pockets 

 and valleys of deep soil, and where the native shrubbery already established 

 on the thin soil of ridges and ledges is retained, will have a peculiar beauty 

 of its own. A person having such a lot, who can appreciate the beauty 

 of natural conditions, or one having an abandoned quarry or pit and who 

 can take full advantage of such unusual situations, may excite the mild 

 derision of his neighbours for buying a "rubbish hole" and saving "brush," 



A bit of formal gardening — an incidental feature of the Stokes estate at Lenox 



