THE LURE OF THE GARDEN 



planted, as obtains so much here in the suburbs, can 

 ever produce the imaginative and suggestive loveliness 

 to be gained by surrounding the gardens with walls. 

 It is the elusive, the half-revealed, that is always the 

 more alluring. And just as the old garden-makers 

 insisted that no garden should be so laid out or planted 

 as to be visible from any one spot, but should hide 

 behind hedges and boskets, have hidden recesses and 

 paths curving out of sight, so, too, the .town that hints 

 at hidden, lovely places removed from the general ob- 

 servation, will still prove the more beautiful, though, 

 nay, because, so much of its beauty is concealed. 



Many American places upon which both time and 

 money have been spent fail in another essential, that 

 of harmony. Too often there has been no attempt 

 made at suiting the house to the grounds, nor any 

 study of the general environment, its possibilities, its 

 drawbacks, and its characteristic quality undertaken. 

 Yet harmony alone will excuse many a shortcoming. 

 Nothing exists solely for itself, and in making a country 

 place, the closer the co-relation between the house, the 

 garden, and the surrounding lay of the land, the hap- 

 pier the result. An Italian villa with formal grounds 

 set in the middle of a bleak and bare New England 

 coast-line, where the embattled rocks are forever fling- 

 ing back a furious sea, will never create in the beholder 

 that feeling of satisfaction which a place, perhaps less 

 lovely in itself, but belonging more intimately with its 



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