5 
has admirably described the prevailing vice of our 
domestic architecture. “The owner has built him- 
self out of his house, and his house out of the land- 
scape.” He not only builds in defiance of the nature 
of the ground, but he conceives a prejudice against 
whatever the place naturally affords, and prefers such 
features as are difficult and costly. He will prefer 
gravel to grass, and will ostentatiously parade an 
enormous driveway on the lawn side of his house, 
thus sacrificing beauty and privacy to a feeling which 
he would himself, probably, find it difficult to explain. 
He will prefer a stiff hedge to an informal shrubbery. 
He not only choses plants whose culture involves 
expense and difficulty, but he declares indiscriminate 
war upon all the indigenous vegetation. Here again 
the motive for the wrong steps seems altogether 
inadequate, and they would, probably, in many cases 
be avoided, if the owner would stop and think, not of 
what the prevailing fashion demands, but of what 
will give him real satisfaction. 
Lastly, we must notice the delusive idea of obtain- 
ing immediate effects. No one, perhaps, deliberately 
thinks that his landscape is to be realized at once. 
Yet many act wholly without reference to the future, 
haste blinding their eyes. There are three ways in 
which the mischief appears. First, men are in such 
a hurry to plant, that the question whether the soil 
is fit for plantations is quite disregarded. Hence 
arise the starved and sickly specimens everywhere 
visible. Second, of all the characteristics of a tree, 
