THE LURE OF THE GARDEN 
planted, as obtains so much here in the suburbs, can 
ever produce the imaginative and suggestive loveliness 
to be gained by surrounding the gardens with walls. 
It is the elusive, the half-revealed, that is always the 
more alluring. And just as the old garden-makers 
insisted that no garden should be so laid out or planted 
as to be visible from any one spot, but should hide 
behind hedges and boskets, have hidden recesses and 
paths curving out of sight, so, too, the .town that hints 
at hidden, lovely places removed from the general ob¬ 
servation, will still prove the more beautiful, though, 
nay, because , so much of its beauty is concealed. 
Many American places upon which both time and 
money have been spent fail in another essential, that 
of harmony. Too often there has been no attempt 
made at suiting the house to the grounds, nor any 
study of the general environment, its possibilities, its 
drawbacks, and its characteristic quality undertaken. 
Yet harmony alone will excuse many a shortcoming. 
Nothing exists solely for itself, and in making a country 
place, the closer the co-relation between the house, the 
garden, and the surrounding lay of the land, the hap¬ 
pier the result. An Italian villa with formal grounds 
set in the middle of a bleak and bare New England 
coast-line, where the embattled rocks are forever fling¬ 
ing back a furious sea, will never create in the beholder 
that feeling of satisfaction which a place, perhaps less 
lovely in itself, but belonging more intimately with its 
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