THE HOUSE THAT WAS BUILT 

 FOR A GARDEN 



H 



ARTHUR W. COLTON 



[OME BUILDING is no longer merely a matter of mortar and shingles; nowadays we build with living 

 flowers and trees as well — witness the steadily growing group of landscape architects. 

 Past the pioneer period where shelter was the sole consideration, and having mercifully survived the ter- 

 rible years when architecture lost its early innocence and awakened to a crude and blatant self-consciousness 

 that struggled for expression in "ginger-bread" ornament and innumerable angles, we have emerged into more 

 gracious days with the leisure and the learning to look about and determine what sort of homes we really want, and why. 



Nowadays a house is not arbitrarily set down anywhere on a plot of land and then followed by a query as to where the garden shall go. Quite 

 the contrary — the particular piece of ground in question is first carefully studied. 



For it is the land, its character and spirit, that determines what the house shall be. When this fundamental principle is disregarded we at 

 once sense the "something wrong." Grievous to see are great residences perched bleakly in unsuitable environment with no appearance of be- 

 longing, with a futile air of having been temporarily set down upon the earth rather than of being there comfortably at ease and at one with it. 



A dwelling may be made or marred by its approach, by the massing of woodland or shrubbery on this side or that, by the disposition of flower- 

 beds and borders, all of which must, for harmony of finished effect, be included in the original plan. 



Because warden and house are so inevitably linked, so essentially interdependent, we believe that gardeners everywhere will find much to 

 interest and inspire in this series of articles, especially prepared for us by Mr. Colton, which presents some happy solutions achieved by Americans 

 of skill and imagination East and West. 



"HAVENWOOD," THE HOME OF MR. EDWARD L. RYERSON AT LAKE 



FOREST, ILLINOIS 



HOWARD VAN DOREN SHAW, ARCHITECT; ROSE STANDISH NICHOLS, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT 



|T may be said — with sufficient qualifications — that the 

 old Italian never did, naturally, like nature. Wild 

 W* nature was as barbarous and repellent to him as Gothic; 

 M5£§j3 and yet his climate called him to live in the open air. 

 Hence his art al fresco, and his garden where he lived in the open 

 air with his culture around him. He inherited his tastes from 

 his Roman predecessors whose villa gardens were something 

 like his city-house atrium, put outside instead of inside. He 

 sought to gratify a similar need and feeling; the atrium was an 

 open air interior, a garden within the house. 



When Browning in Italy expressed his longing for England— 

 "Oh, to be in England now that April's there," it was a long- 

 ing altogether for English flowers and birds, the dew on the 

 grass, and the budding trees. "While up at a villa one lives, 

 I maintain it, no more than a beast", says his " Italian Person 

 of Quality" who thought of the country only with disgust for 

 its inferior interest to a city square. That "the proper study of 

 mankind is man," is an opinion of Mediterranean origin, whereas: 



One instinct from the vernal wood 

 Can teach us more of man 

 Than all the ages can. 



is a purely "Nordic" doctrine. 



The reference of certain features of American landscape gar- 

 dening to such remote sources has its use, if it serves to remind 

 us that, where they have racial and climatic sources so far-reach- 

 ing and fundamental, the taste which produced those features is 

 presumably sound. Except for the Californian coast, ours is no 

 Mediterranean climate or countryside, and ours is a rural more 

 than a civic tradition. Many of us will still find more pleasure 

 when the doors of our familiar outgoing lead into the immediate 

 shadows of the woods than when they open on structurally or- 

 dered gardens. The sense of the woods is in our bones, and the 

 wild meadow flowers are dear to us in some different fashion 

 than pedigreed Roses and all exotic bloom. 



Theorizing, from Piickler to Parsons, seems to maintain that 

 the garden is properly an extension of the house, an intermediary 

 between architecture and nature, between dwelling and park; 

 and in a large estate of many hundred acres something of that 

 kind would be apt to develop; but while all this has interest as 

 an observed phenomenon, it has no authority as a governing 

 formula, to hamper any landscape gardener in his plans or any 



owner of an estate from having his woods at his doors and his 

 gardens beyond his woods, if that arrangement gives him the 

 values which he needs. 



IN MOST Italian or French gardens of any size, the outstanding 

 lesson is that the estate is studied as a unit. Each has its bois 

 or ilex wood, whose mass and freedom and shadows are used as 

 a foil for the intensive cultivation and artificial formality of the 

 forecourt, the garden, the terraces, the tapis vert and the geome- 

 tric allees. The designer places his woods where they will be 

 most effective — if he is planting his woods; or — as is usually the 

 case in this country — he places his gardens, etc., where he wants 

 them in relation to the woods already there. When laying out 

 a big place, one tries for variety, for surprises, for places to walk 

 to, in other words for developing the whole property to get all 

 the possible effects. The programme of the house and garden 

 is but a part of the programme. The estate — not the house- 

 and-garden alone — is the unit. If you see the whole house and 

 garden at a glance so that there is no mystery, "no place to go" 

 — then proximity may be your undoing. The garden can be 

 made a part of the house without being next to it. 



As the unit garden-and-house is a more complex and interest- 

 ing unit than the house alone, so is the estate-unit still more 

 complex and interesting. 



In an estate-unit of no more than twenty-six acres, it seems 

 feasible to make the oneness so intimately felt, that the great 

 garden can be placed five hundred feet away, as at "Havenwood," 

 without loosing its structural relation with the house. Whether 

 a driveway crossing between them is desirable or not is no doubt 

 a matter of personal feeling — not strictly aesthetic — but the feel- 

 ing and choice which places the living parts of the house to look 

 out on forest, lawn, meadow, and ravine, rather than directly on 

 a beautifully composed garden, is, I suspect, a national rather 

 than a personal difference of feeling and choice. 



"Havenwood," the Ryerson estate at Lake Forest, is a con- 

 spicuously successful example of coherent planning. The home 

 is the whole estate, and those who live in it live all over it. The 

 plan embraces the property; and like the larger Italian, the 

 Spanish "Generalife" and all French estates, is all thought out. 

 The woods are used to give mass, to separate and surround the 

 garden rooms like walls, in the manner of Versailles. 



Gardens breathing the personality of their owners are far more 



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