HOUSE AND GARDEN 
OVEMBER, 
I9D 
307 
Looking up the terrace toward the service end of the house from the northern part of the walled flower garden. This picture shows the excellent effect given by the evergreen 
arrangement—arborvitass along the wall and forming the background with the lower growing junipers and shrubs grading down to the foreground 
thus the ground’s unalterable steepness was somewhat nullified. 
Once the top of the terrace was reached, trees of varying 
heights were used as back material until very near the house. As 
the house was approached, however, a rule of tree planting that 
is ordinarily as fixed as a tree itself, was smashed into a million 
pieces, and a group of Nordmann’s fir, with a hemlock and a 
spruce, were put almost against the building itself, within the 
corner made by its juncture with the retaining wall. 
The effect was instantaneous, for they were fairly large trees— 
trees that ranged from fifteen to eighteen feet in height. And 
how that house did take on a pleasant, home-like look—a lived-in, 
warm, human aspect in place of the air of desolate chill which 
it had worn! 
All along the north wall, atop the terrace and within the en¬ 
closed garden too, the evergreen planting was carried, until the 
wall itself was completely hidden, the sharp slope of the terrace 
was altogether moderated, and the barren, drop-off-the-earth- 
beyond look had given way to the cheery limitation of a pro¬ 
tective barrier. 
There were a sufficient number of the evergreens to carry out 
the scheme, but the many varieties were a serious handicap. 
Starting new on such a planting, only one variety would have been 
chosen for the entire mass; but here were at least ten, including 
some of the golden foliaged fancy kinds that are an abomination 
to all honest garden lovers. To use these many kinds in such a 
border so that a real mass effect would result, it was necessary 
to group each kind as far as possible, and yet not to do this so 
rigidly that the mass would appear to be made of small groups. 
On the slope of the terrace the Savin junipers were used to. 
fill before the Siberian arborvitaes that, in their turn, had been 
placed before the taller, slimmer native Thuya occidentalis —for 
the prostrate juniper likes a slope, is eminently suited to it and 
grows naturally thereon. The golden retinosporas, lower and 
broader than any arborvitae, were gathered into two groups or 
clusters in the foreground farther down—clusters which were 
not widely separated and yet were distinct from each other. A 
single silver retinospora was given a place with two or three 
specimens of Retinospora plumosa, which variety it resembles 
in character; and all the plants of which there was only a single 
specimen or two were kept as nearly as possible in little masses 
of near relationship, or of general resemblance where relation¬ 
ship did not exist. In this way the patchy look of the old corner 
groups was overcome, and a long and dignified border mass 
having real continuity in color, form and shadow, was developed. 
Such a problem as this does not occur often perhaps, for the 
original site was unusual, and the original treatment of the site 
had been singularly unfortunate, leaving really no choice in the 
matter of planting. It would have been perfectly possible, before 
any building at all was done, to locate and plan the house and 
grade and lay out the grounds in such a way that all the dreadful, 
barren north exposure with its up-in-the-air effect would have 
been avoided. But with stone walls already built that only 
dynamite and a small fortune could tear out, and with filling and 
cutting done that would have required months to undo, the 
easiest way, as above described, was the best way — and the one 
straight cut to what is, after all, a fairly satisfactory result* 
