210 CLIMBERS 



close and stuffy. In winter it will actually be warmer and cosier; 

 in summer it will be cool and country-like. Therefore I shall hail 

 the day when the wooden age passes. For when we have to build 

 with costlier materials, every detail will be more carefully con- 

 sidered, the old instinctive sense of proportion will return to the 

 people and we shall evolve a national style. 



This is not mere "art talk." I do not ask you to accept these 

 statements on authority. Take any street car in any city and 

 you will see that most people simply choose the climbers they 

 happen to like without any special thought of fitness. Yet the 

 most artistic people that ever lived took as their mottoes "fitness" 

 and "nothing too much." Clearly then, the first step is not to 

 order "best sellers" from a catalogue but study the house we live in. 

 We must decide how much is good architecture and how 

 much is bad; how to enhance the former and transmute 

 the latter. 



CLIMBERS FOR HOUSE WALLS 



Meanwhile a man's first duty is toward his house walls, so let 

 us consider them before we do the porch. And the first big fact 

 is that climbers are so easy to grow and so long-lived that questions 

 of fitness are of far greater importance than details of cultivation. 

 England can teach us relatively little about new kinds of climbers 

 or better ways of cultivating them, but we have everything to 

 learn about artistic ways of using them. We are so ignorant that 

 we often use wood-destroying climbers on wooden houses, and as to 

 our public taste well, we live in what might be called the 

 "Crimson Rambler period." Before you go to England you 

 dimly realize that we are in the experimental stage. But in 

 England any one can see that most of the experiments we are try- 

 ing have long ago been settled. In old countries there has grown 



