HOUSE AND GARDEN 
306 
November, 1913 
Looking down from the terrace to the flower and vegetable gardens; the sharp drop in the land is modified by the evergreen arrangement. The line of these which leads to the 
foot of the terrace continues up the latter with trees of decreasing height, thus making the break seem less abrupt and harsh 
down the hill from the service entrance is the vegetable garden, 
occupying about the space alongside the walled flower garden but 
lower than it by from fifteen to twenty feet at the wall. At its 
northern and outer boundary it is still lower, tbe general slope of 
all tbe land about being down in that direction. 
It is therefore easy to understand that from the walled flower 
garden before the house or from any point below the house on the 
southeast lawn, the effect when looking toward the north or 
northwest was desolate and exposed to the last degree. The 
earth absolutely drops away; and so house and north wall were 
standing up against the sky—bleak, barren and forbidding. And 
nothing could be done by planting beyond this wall to enclose or 
“dress” this barrenness, for tbe very good reason that the earth 
lay so far below that even large trees would hardly show their 
tops above the wall. A few had been set out in the service turn¬ 
around, but until these should attain the extremely unlikely height 
of at least 150 to 200 feet, they would have no effect whatsoever; 
for the view is all up-hill, bear in mind, consecpiently it reduces 
everything beyond the wall in diminishing perspective. Detached 
and in freezing isolation, therefore and on the brink of a preci¬ 
pice seemingly, the house site defied softening—and the house, 
long and with all its emphasis on its horizontal lines, looked as if 
it were trying to crawl down and shrink into the earth to hide its 
nakedness but could not. 
The material at hand was a motley assortment of almost every 
kind of “fancy” evergreen. At each corner of the walled garden 
stood one of these dreadful clumps, selected and graded in ap¬ 
proved ( ?) fashion, arborvitses looming up in the rear with re- 
tinosporas, biotas, junipers and all tbe rest marshaled with due 
precision before them until about forty specimens in all were 
stored away in each group. In addition to this most undesirable 
stuff, numerous fugitive spruces, hemlocks, firs and pines in as¬ 
sorted varieties were scattered about the place with utter disregard 
of everything save getting as many as possible into the ground. 
These of course required corralling and reducing to something 
as nearly approaching order and decency as such mixture 
would permit. 
The walled flower garden was curiously adapted to the planting 
arrangement finally decided upon in that it was irregularly shaped 
and longer from its transverse or east-west axis—which was the 
axis of the house—north than it was from this axis south. This 
left fortunately a broad space for a boundary screen within the 
wall along the north, where such a boundary screen was sorely 
needed. It also suggested a special treatment at that end 
of the garden, centering on its north-south axis — but that is 
another story. 
The plan shows what was done better than words can explain, 
I think. The work was started by removing the tallest of the 
arborvitaes from its place in one of the south groups to a position 
at the very bottom of the terrace slope against the north wall. 
The tallest tree was chosen for this lowest place in order to 
overcome as far as possible the ugly line of this steep, 
sharp terrace, and flatten it out in effect. With the tallest 
tree at the bottom and one a little shorter next above and a 
shorter one still above that, and so on, the tree tops 
as seen against the sky were more nearly on a level; 
