A SMALL FORMAL GARDEN NEAR PHILADELPHIA 
WHAT IT COST TO BUILD AND THE EXPENSE OK MAINTAINING IT 
“ T'HE best wares come in small packages” 
1 is an adage having a true application to 
many gardens. Manorial acres, long per¬ 
spectives of stately avenues, fountains and 
terraces interweaved into an opulent archi¬ 
tectural setting, the traditional divisions and 
sub-divisions of European gardens, we can¬ 
not but gloat over with enthusiasm ; but this 
should not be the enthusiasm which only 
admires without acting or creating. The 
desire to make for ourselves may indeed be 
within us, but checked by the erroneous 
belief that garden art necessarily requires the 
canvas of a great area of ground on which to 
display itself. Thought and study will solve 
all difficulties of limited acreage. 
Compared with the progress we have made 
in elevating the architectural character of our 
dwellings, we have done but little at improv¬ 
ing their surroundings. This is now to be 
taken up, not with the aim of spotting our 
suburban lots with a few shrubs and speci¬ 
men trees, but to completely develop their 
whole area so that the full length of our 
roads shall be 
as gardens and 
not barren 
reaches b e- 
tween occasion¬ 
al single prop¬ 
erties enriched 
with the de¬ 
signed use of 
leaf and flower. 
Such a de¬ 
velopment has 
been started on 
a small prop¬ 
erty at Elkins 
Park Station, a 
few miles north 
of Philadel¬ 
phia, where the 
trains to New 
York pass 
upon a high 
embankment; 
and from the car window on the right 
the house and garden illustrated in these 
pages can be seen almost at bird’s-eye view. 
The effective house of white-painted clap¬ 
boards stands at the highest and northern 
end of a rectangular plot of land measuring 
one hundred and fifty by two hundred feet. 
The present owner, when coming into pos¬ 
session of it in 1902, wisely set to work to 
improve and to unify the entire ground and 
the house. With the assistance of his archi¬ 
tect, Mr. Lawrence V. Boyd, a stable was built 
back of the house where it could be reached 
by a drive skirting the northern edge of the 
property. This economized space and left 
the remainder of the land intact. A barren 
hillside it lay, sloping off toward a junction 
of roads leading to the station two hundred 
yards away,—sunny and piteously inhospit¬ 
able in summer; in winter, a dreary waste of 
wan, soggy turf. This unbearable lack of 
the beauties for which suburbs are sought 
has now given place to a pleasant garden 
occupying the upper half of the hillside and 
THE GARDEN SEATS 
I 63 
