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AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 



December, 1908 



Beneath the dining-room windows, next the garden porch, 

 is a wide and spacious border, reaching quite out to the 

 bounding path. Here are row after row of hardy shrubs 

 and flowering annuals; an inner row of nicotiana is fol- 

 lowed by a low hemlock hedge; then another row of nico- 

 tiana; then Japanese barbery; then nicotiana again, and 

 a final luscious growth of heliotrope. The corresponding 

 border beneath the drawing-room windows is chiefly com- 

 posed of day lilies and hardy phlox, harmonizing with the 

 old rose tones of the bricks. 



But it is the path bordering that seizes the attention and 



most it would be a florist's catalogue, and would convey no 

 sense at all of this planted loveliness, in which so much has 

 been combined to produce so grand an effect. For there is 

 ample spacing everywhere. The beds are wide and the 

 paths are long; they twist a bit and turn some, so that an 

 end is no sooner reached than an opening presents itself with 

 new varieties and new growths. Somewhere in between this 

 beauty a vegetable garden has been contrived, but it is so 

 embedded and decorated that its more useful growths hardly 

 count in the beauty within which it is planted. 



There are few things so difficult to describe as a garden, 



Steps to the lawn by the forecourt 



The long pi 



holds it. The paths out beyond the house are bordered on 

 both sides by wide beds filled with flowers of the most bril- 

 liant sort. One may almost believe that everything that 

 grows and blooms has its place here, and certainly every 

 plant is at home, for the growth is everywhere lusty and the 

 blooming continuous and vigorous throughout the season. 

 Here are huge beds of verbenas; immense clumps of gay pe- 

 tunias, each color in a place of its own; some immensely high 

 lilies; brakes of fern; clumps of hardy phlox; brilliant as- 

 ters; more nicotiana, and other splendid annuals and peren- 

 nials. In other paths the planting changes and there are 

 masses of dahlias, foxgloves, marigolds, snapdragons, chrys- 

 anthemums, salpiglossis — but why continue the list? At the 



and few gardens so untranslatable into words as Mrs. Chan- 

 ler's. A recital of its contents would be a mere list of names 

 and there would be no conveyance at all of its wonderful 

 charm and beauty. It is a garden that would be lovely 

 everywhere, but which is here most lovely of all; since one 

 hardly looks for this floral wealth in the midst of a forest, 

 and the rocks and trees afford so fine a shelter and so beautiful 

 an enclosure. So here it grows and flourishes, like nothing 

 but itself, a beautiful scented garden, so filled with flowers 

 that the air is saturated with their sweet odors, and one carries 

 away from it a lasting sense of its beauty and its perfume. 



Yet it is a garden to linger in as well as to delight in. Its 

 area, as I have already hinted, is sufficiently large that one 



