34 
BUILDING SITES 
which a landscape artist will insist on, may seem like wholesale 
slaughter to the owner. 
Trees which have grown up singly, or in groups of a few only, 
exposed on all sides to the full glow of the sun and air, are worth 
more than a whole catalogue of nursery stuff for immediate and 
permanent adornment. It is surprising how little additional price 
most purchasers are willing to pay for lots that are enriched by 
such native trees, while they willingly expend ten times their cost 
in the little beginnings of trees procured from nurseries. One fine- 
spreading tree, of almost any native variety, is of inestimable value 
in home adornment. Few exotic trees are so beautiful as our 
finest natives, and nothing that we can plant will so well repay the 
most lavish enrichment of the soil to promote its growth as one of 
these trees “to the manor born.” In locating a house with ref- 
erence to fine trees already growing, it is much better to have them 
behind, or overhanging the sides, than to have them in front ; the 
object being to make them a setting, or frame-work, for the house ; 
to have the house embowered in them, rather than shut out behind 
them. 
Let us now consider some different forms of ground surfaces. 
Fig. I. 
A 
B 
Ground which rises from the street, so that where it meets the 
house it is about on a level with the top of an ordinary fence at the 
street line, is a good form of surface. This rise should not, how- 
ever, be on a plane from the street boundary to the dwelling. The 
lawn, and whatever is planted, will show to much better advantage 
if the rise takes the form of the arc of a circle, as shown in Fig. i, 
section A, on which the front steps of the house are indicated at 
the front fence at and the street sidewalk at c. 
Or, for increasing the apparent extent of the ground, the curve 
