44 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
B Y square feet or acres — how much 
will you buy? And why will you 
buy that way? Does anyone ever know, 
until he has bought and tried, just how 
much land he wants to own; just how little 
he needs; just what it means to own a 
foot of it; what it demands to own an acre ? 
The more I see people in relation to their 
homes and their gardens, the more is the 
conviction borne in upon me that most 
places are bought hit-or-miss—and oftener 
than not it is a miss rather than a hit. 
And, instead of entering, with ownership, 
upon the state of peaceful contentment 
which imagination has pictured, owners find 
themselves turning to cynics within a period 
ranging from six months to five years from 
the date of their purchase. 
Life is one long series of big and little 
lessons learned through big and little mis¬ 
takes, to be sure; but few mistakes loom 
larger than the one of buying the wrong 
place. This particular error unsettles the 
mental life of the whole family, as well as 
disturbs the economic conditions. For as 
long as one is owner and resident of a 
place which he does not want to own, nor 
to reside in, all the fabric of home life 
builds itself up around the uncertainties of 
“if”: “If we don’t stay here,” and “if we 
can sell out,” or “when we move”—demor¬ 
alizing, all of them. 
The Judgment Impaired 
It is a thankless task to tell any human 
being that he wants this or does not want 
that; no one, of course, knows what anyone 
else wants. And so it is far from my inten¬ 
tion even to consider such an undertaking. 
But it seems to me that I have made a dis¬ 
covery—and the discoverer never lived who 
did not have to go and tell someone! 
It is not a very great discovery, after 
all; and perhaps others have made it. But 
here it is: prospective buyers feed on too 
restricted a diet from the moment the buy¬ 
ing bacillus enters their systems, a diet that 
is combined enthusiasm and excitement. 
Everyone passes some of one or the other 
to them, and the result is just the result 
that always follows the continued adherence 
to an unbalanced ration. Certain functions 
—of the mind, in this case—are over-stim¬ 
ulated, while certain others weaken and 
lose force, or even become altogether reac¬ 
tionary in their workings. 
HOW MUCH LAND IS ENOUGH? 
A Sane Discussion on What It Means 
To Own a Place in the Country 
GRACE TABOR 
Deep in each of us there is what I call 
a soul demand for certain kinds of things: 
certain kinds of food, certain kinds of cloth¬ 
ing, certain kinds of friends, certain kinds 
of amusement, of work, of activity—and a 
certain kind of a house. Sitting on the lid 
of the deep-down inner chamber where 
these soul demands lie, however, are the 
superficial, and perhaps altogether artificial, 
demands that are created and kept alive 
by the accidents of environment. 
As the diet to which circumstances almost 
invariably confine the individual following 
his development of the purchasing fever is 
provided altogether by environment, save in 
those rare cases to which all of this can in 
nowise apply, it is not of his soul demands 
that he becomes aware, but only of that 
lesser, artificial, unreliable crew sitting on 
the lid of his real self. All of the men with 
whom a man who is looking for a home 
comes in contact daily, say: “Buy this!” 
“So-and-so is what you want,” “Go out to 
Dillydale, by all means,” “You want a farm, 
old man!” “You must have a garden,” “For 
Heaven’s sake, don’t bother with raising 
things ! It’s a blamed nuisance !”—and so 
on and on, the same thing over and over. 
The Meat in the Cocoanut 
All different, you say? Ah, yes, in a 
way, if you will; but all alike in the common 
enthusiasm—a sort of bully-for-you-go-to-it 
attitude that confuses actualities and injects 
a feverish excitement into the game, cloud¬ 
ing and blurring the judgment. Small 
wonder the real desires, the soul demands, 
are never suspected. A man would not 
know his own soul if it came up on the 
street and spoke to him, under the fever 
and flurry of it all! 
Let us therefore get into the ice-pack of 
this thought as soon as possible: land de¬ 
mands certain things of its owner. It mat¬ 
ters not whether it is a large piece of land 
or a small, it makes certain exactions, and 
penalizes you if they are ignored. 
In addition to these natural demands 
that are inevitable and inseparable from 
land anywhere, there are always special 
demands peculiar to each separate place. 
In this respect, too, the small place is fre¬ 
quently more exacting than the large. 
This is because we are all, generally 
speaking, bound by the conventionalities 
which bind our neighbors, whether we like 
to be or not. We conform, even those of 
us who are by nature rebellious, because to 
do otherwise is to become conspicuous; and 
to be conspicuous is of course intolerable. 
So as our neighbors do at home, and in 
their gardens, so we all do. If our neighbor 
pushes his own lawn mower, for example, 
we push ours; if he hires a neighborhood 
gardener one day a week to do it for him, 
so do we; and if he hires his own private 
gardener month by month, so do we. 
Now in the light of these generalities, 
and without a particle of enthusiasm for any 
place or any kind of a place or any feature 
of any place, let us examine just what it 
will mean to own land under the several 
possible circumstances of ownership. We 
shall eliminate the city proper, for one owns 
land in the city for the purpose of covering 
it up with a building as soon as possible. 
Suburban and country ownership is what 
concerns us—real home ownership, in the 
best and fullest sense. 
Beginning with the 20' x 100' suburban 
lot, sold usually in units of three, we come 
first to those plots that of late years “caught 
on” under the name of the “little farm.” 
Actually they measure to an eighth of an 
acre in some instances, sometimes getting 
inflated to a quarter acre in size. Then 
there is the acre, or what amounts to about 
an acre, featuring “fine shade trees, shrubs 
and flowers.” After this, the small country 
place; then the estate; next the gentleman’s 
farm; and last, the real farming farm. 
What will any one of these give you, if 
you make yourself owner of it? What will 
it demand of you, once it is yours? 
An Economic Question 
It seems to be an economic problem that 
we approach, first of all; or, rather, it is 
from the economic approach that we must 
come at the problem. For, after all, the 
question of what one shall buy is usually 
answered, finally, from the pocketbook. 
The first cost of any piece of land is, 
of course, a definite and positive sum. Land 
is so much a foot, or a lot, or a plot, or an 
acre. The secondary cost, however, apart 
