CHAPTER XI. 
HOW TO beautify the home grounds. 
E VERYONE wants to live in a beautiful home, but few 
understand how to make the surroundings attractive 
with very little expense. 
The object in planting shrubs and flowers is to bring 
out by a living frame of shrubbery, the central feature of 
the picture, the home. 
In order to get the desired effect in planting, three 
simple rules of landscape gardening must be followed: — 
(a) Avoid straight lines and sharp angles. 
( b ) Keep open centers. 
( c ) Plant shrubbery in masses. 
Annual and herbaceous plants alone furnish a frame 
for the picture for only two or three months a year and 
have to be replanted often, while shrubs are permanent, 
and in the end cheaper. 
In the following pages the writer endeavors to show 
how persons unfamiliar with the subject may at little cost 
make their homes picturesque and help to make the town 
or city a City Beautiful. Cleaning back yards means not 
only a more attractive communitjq but a more healthy 
one. Cleaning a single yard and making it into a good 
lawn or garden, especially if it be in a community where 
the homes are not well kept, will do much to change the 
entire neighborhood, not only from an aesthetic, but from 
a moral and sanitary standpoint as well. As disease and 
crime breed largely in filth and darkness, healthy, law- 
abiding citizens develop amid well-kept homes. 
Small beginnings even in the poorly kept homes in a 
city, in time transform barren yards of sand and weeds 
into grassy lawns brightened with foliage and flowers. 
The expense of carrying out the plans here suggested is 
within the means of the day laborer. Owners of large 
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