JAPANESE CRAB APPLE 



INTRODUCTION 



HIS book has not been written to teach the art of 

 landscape gardening, but the need of it. The stu- 

 dent of landscape gardening will find many excel- 

 lent books on the subject, but the public hardly 

 knows that there is such an art, and that good gar- 

 dens and grounds, like good houses, are always the 

 result of intelligent study and design. 



The annual expenditure for suburban and country 

 homes is enormous, and while an architect is always 

 employed to design and plan the house, with but few 

 exceptions the treatment of the grounds is intrusted 

 to the nearest two-dollar-a-day jobbing gardener, or 

 the owner is his own landscape gardener. The result 

 is always unsatisfactory, although often the expendi- 

 ture would have secured most beautiful effects if 

 directed by skilled advice. The folly of this is more 

 apparent when it is considered that fully fifty per cent 

 of the cost of the better class of houses is expended with the desire of 

 producing beauty ; one dollar intelligently spent on the grounds will 

 afford more beauty than will ten spent on the house, and the attractive- 

 ness of the house is greatly enhanced by the beauty and fitness of the 

 grounds. I have endeavored to show this by good pictures rather than 

 with much writing. ; WILKINSON ELLIOTT 



Pittsburg, September 10, 1902 



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