LANDSCAPE GARDENING 5 



year* if we want to, by planting long-livedf instead of short-lived 

 material. 



But I soon found something vastly more important viz. : 

 that the old attitude which makes age and climate insuperable 

 obstacles to progress can be swept aside. Age is not valuable for 

 itself, but only for what it can give. Ask yourself, "What is the 

 most precious thing that the centuries can bestow?" Is it not 

 that serenity of spirit of which mellowness, atmosphere, person- 

 ality, self-restraint, and repose are merely phases? I grant you 

 that America as a whole may have to wait eight or ten centuries to 

 become as mellow as England, but that is not a practical question 

 which concerns you and me. The important thing is to find out 

 how each one of us can secure mellowness for his home grounds 

 without waiting even one lifetime. And I boldly assert that 

 any one can get 90 per cent, of all the mellowness that age can give, and 

 this, too, in only five years, prbvided, of course, that the individual 

 has a cultured personality or enough hard sense to follow implicitly 

 the advice of a first-class landscape gardener who really knows the 

 facts. If you want to see proof of this with your own eyes drive 

 past the home of Mr. Thomas Hitchcock, Jr., at Westbury, or of 

 Mr. John L. Lawrence, at Lawrence, L. I. (See plate 3.) 



How can we get such luxuriance? Qne way is to transplant 

 big trees not many; perhaps two will be enough to frame the 

 picture every beautiful house should make. Another way is to 

 bank some extra large shrubs about the front porch and near the 



* We waste this much on " Dutch stuff " alone. I mean the evergreens, deciduous trees and shrubs which we import 

 by the thousand from Holland and Belgium. That black Dutch soil never amalgamates with American soil. These 

 trees and shrubs are really forced into an unnatural growth, because the water is only eighteen inches below the surface 

 in some of those Dutch nurseries. Dutch stuff always looks best to the buyer, and is so much cheaper that a beginner 

 cannot resist it, but it is likely to die after the first winter. For full details, see Country Life in America for May, 1908, 

 pages 48 to 53. 



t For example, red pine instead of Scotch pine, hedges of Japanese yew instead of English yew, the Colorado form of 

 Douglas spruce instead of the Californian, Oriental spruce instead of Norway, the Colorado white fir instead of the 

 silver fir. 



