144 
PLANS OF RESIDENCES 
the trees approach maturity they will have developed beauties that 
crowded trees never show. 
Plate III. 
Crowded and Open Grounds Compared, on a Cottage Lot of fifty 
feet front. 
Here we have two lots 50 x 200 each. The plan and position 
for a small cottage-house, and the walks, are the same on both. 
The plan on the right is intended to show the common mode of 
cluttering the yard so full of good things that, like an overloaded 
table, it lessens the appetite it is intended to gratify. Let us pic¬ 
ture Mr. and Mrs. A., master and mistress of the house, unskillful 
but enthusiastic, engaged in their first plantings. The lot is a 
bare one. Fruit trees are the first necessities; places are therefore 
found for four cherry, and five pear trees, without trespassing much 
on the “front yard,” which is sacred, in true American homes, 
to floral and sylvan embellishments. It is to fill this ground 
that our proprietors are now to make choice of trees and shrubs. 
Mr. A. and wife are agreed that evergreens are indispensable, and 
that the balsam fir and the Norway spruce are the prettiest of ever¬ 
greens—for “ everybody plants them.” Accordingly a couple of 
Norway spruces flank the gate at a little distance inside, and a pair 
of balsam firs (prettiest of trees as they emerge, fragrant, from the 
nurserymen’s bundles) are placed conspicuously not far from the 
house-steps, on each side the main-walk. Mrs. A. suggests that 
the weeping-willow is the most graceful of all trees. Who can 
gainsay that ? Mr. A. does not, and in go two willows in the two 
front corners of the yard. Then there’s the mountain ash with a 
“ form as perfect as a top, and such showy clusters of red fruit,” 
suggests Mrs. A., “and everybody plants them.” Of course this 
tree is planted, one on each side of the yard, midway between the 
walk and sides of the lot, in that open space above the willows. 
Then the walk is bordered from the gate towards the house 
with rose-bushes of all sorts, while lilacs, honeysuckles, spireas, 
