102 



AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 



March, 1908 



the possession of a hanging garden may not sound like an 

 Arabian Night's dream and when indeed the name Roof 

 Garden will no longer carry associations merely of music- 

 hall and vaudeville but will imply a place of pleasaunce for 

 home-loving, quiet people alive at last to the joys of sunshine 

 and the out-of-doors. 



II. — A Successful House-top Garden 



By Adelia Belle Beard 



In Seattle, the city of enthusiasm and progress, there is a 

 house-top garden, a garden on a roof. A real garden with 

 flowers and plants growing in earth beds and a lawn of soft 

 grass in the midst of which stands the hall mark of the garden 

 lover — a sun dial. It is just such a garden as one might 

 have on the ground, only prettier in a way, and decidedly 

 more novel, for the very difficulties to be overcome in 

 planning a garden of this kind result in schemes of arrange- 

 ment one would otherwise never think of. This house-top 

 garden, although on the roof of the "Lincoln," one of Seat- 

 tle's best hotels, is like the grounds of a private residence. 

 There is nothing stiff, nothing stereotyped, for it was not 



planned by a professional for a public roof garden, but by a 

 woman who conceived and carried out the idea because of her 

 great love for flowers. Her home was to be a large hotel 

 without grounds or verandas; with no place where one could 

 sit out in the fresh air to read or sew, and her idea was to 

 make a garden that could be enjoyed without one's realizing 

 that it was on a house-top. 



With the help of her two gardeners, Mrs. Blackwell, part 

 owner and manager of the "Lincoln," created this country 

 garden in the midst of a hustling city far above the rush and 

 noise of the busy streets. Up where the air is purest and 

 the sunshine brightest, in this veritable hanging garden her 

 flowers blossom and her fruit ripens. 



Yes, fruit, for there are trees in the garden, the tallest of 

 which are the mountain ash and the birch. These are twelve 

 feet high, and one very small apple tree bears enormously 

 large apples. There are six or eight maple trees, six holly, 

 four hawthorn, a few evergreens, two laburnums and sev- 

 eral Arabia trees. 



Then there are large shrubs like the lilac, and roses, 

 quantities of roses, three hundred or more bushes. Many of 

 them are of the kind that can be grown only in hothouses in 

 the vicinity of New York. There are a thousand pansy 

 plants in a bed a hundred feet long, there are sixty dahlias, a 



A General View of a House-top Garden, Showin 



