HOUSE AND GARDEN 
June, 
DO 
Aj 
corporated both soils and soured it all, so that the grass died 
under the first hot dry spell. 
Here the lady who had charge of the lawns and shrubbery 
made her first mistake, that of spreading a dressing of rotted 
manure on the lawn as we went into the first winter. She had 
been careful to use first-quality lawn seed, for poor, cheap stuff 
is sure to be full of weed seeds and to condemn the unfortunate 
it forth to the greatest advantage as a structure of real charm. 
As our land was as fiat as your hand, we had to make a slope, 
if only of five or six feet in total rise. To get a high cellar floor 
the foundations had only been put down a foot or so, and, after 
surrounding the walls up to the architect’s watertable with a fill, 
and terracing it off in a neat prism, the contractor rested from 
his labors. We at once pulled it down and eased it off into a 
mild, long slope, adding fill where needed. It 
looked at first like a hopeless attempt, requiring 
at least several hundred loads of fill to make 
a job of it; but, as the slope should have the 
same graceful, incurving sweep as the roof, it 
worked out very nicely with not over seventy 
loads of fill added. It was at once seeded to 
stop rain wash, and so came our first lawn into 
being. 
Our next care was the layout of the walks 
and the driveway. If you will look at the plan 
of the grounds you will note what places had 
to be reached by these, for the principal use of 
a path or a road is to get somewhere with it! 
Another feature of the problem for the owner 
of a small place is how to get all this in and 
still have a little land left for planting. The 
main drive must reach the coal hole, and the 
barn or garage, and also permit the ingoing 
wagon or car to turn around and come out with¬ 
out either the horses stepping on the surround¬ 
ing scenery and nibbling off the tops of your 
new pear trees or the car wheels furrowing up 
the adjacent lawn. To do this effectually seems 
to require an acre of ground! The minimum 
width of drive is eight feet and the minimum 
Planting rose bushes at the bases of a hairpin arch. Note roots and tops of these roses as they come 
from the nursery 
sower to a long spell of hand weeding. The grass came 
up fine and uniform, and in less than two weeks we had 
a cool, refreshing greensward under the great forest trees 
that had been left standing for house shade. 
The next year I went at it in the fall and put on three 
hundred pounds of lime, following, a few weeks later, 
when the lime had leached into the soil, with two hundred 
pounds of brown bonemeal fertilizer. This takes a whole 
winter of weathering to become available as plant food. 
However, the results were encouraging; our lawns the 
succeeding summer were weedless and luxuriant and 
“stayed put.” With the help of the hose they weathered 
every drought, and that discouraging dying off of the grass 
shoots, due to sour, unnourishing soil which starved the 
roots underneath, did not appear, except in isolated spots. 
The way that grass grew under the cosmic urge of spring- 
made me, in addition to being the slave of the wheel-hoe, 
the unwilling slave of the lawn mower. But I took an 
unfair advantage of my better half and bought a very 
small mower with the finest of ballbearings, one that she 
and the children could run with all the ease of a safety- 
razor — and left them to their own devices! 
In a house of the Dutch Colonial type, with great sloping One 
roofs and turned-up eaves to stop snow avalanches (the 
Dutch never do anything without a practical reason behind 
it) a site on some sort of slope is almost a necessity. Put the 
same house down in a hollow, with the ground slanting towards 
the porch, and you at once turn it into a most unprepossessing 
and belittled farm cottage. But let it occupy a commanding 
position on a slope, carrying out the sweep of the roof and car¬ 
rying up the eye to its lofty ridge pole, and the Dutch Colonial 
at once assumes a dignity and imposing massiveness which set 
of the weeping mulberries along the drive; showing also concrete porch and built-up 
lawn slope running off from the porch level 
radius of your round turn should be twenty feet. Twice twenty 
is forty feet for the diameter of the central turning bed, an 
impossible size for a place of only 100 or 150 feet of frontage. 
We decided on our round turn to be made at a point about oppo¬ 
site the studio chimney, as the coal window was located just 
beyond it, and a large red maple, left from the original forest 
( Continued, on page 448) 
