OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES 



have your cheap grapery built against the 

 south-side of the barn, and convenient for the 

 transmutation you suggest; at {b) is your 

 stable, and at (d) your poultry house with a 

 sunny stable court to the south of it. At 

 (m) you have your paddock for the mare, or 

 your mall for base-ball, or your plow-ground 

 for a premium crop— utterly free from shrub- 

 bery, and communicating with barn and with 

 street alike. The lawn explains and describes 

 itself; but I would only suggest that the 

 shrubbery marked (/) will be a capital spot, 

 under shade from south, for your Rhododen- 

 drons,^ and the circle (/) I would advise you to 

 fill with a dense coppice of hemlock spruce to 

 break the wind from the north. Along the 

 border marked (k) you can either plant apple 

 trees, and at fifteen feet of distance, a thicker 

 line of dwarf pears (being careful to trench or 



* Various horticulturists have discussed the method 

 of isolating a border of rhododendrons from the in- 

 fluences of a forest screen to the south — one suggesting 

 simple amputation of the roots of the trees forming the 

 screen, and the other the interposition of a wall. The 

 last is expensive and the former liable to be neglected. 

 An open ditch, some two feet deep by eighteen inches 

 wide, I have seen most effectively employed for the end 

 proposed, by a very successful southern horticulturist, 

 who succeeded, year after year, in securing a magnif- 

 icent bloom of some ten or twelve varieties of Azaleas, 

 within twenty feet of gigantic cypresses and magnolias. 

 The ditch may also serve as a convenient receptacle for 

 leaves and the rakings of the borders. 



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