HOUSE AND GARDEN 
July, 1910 
hand at planning 
a garden on vari¬ 
ed levels, at de¬ 
veloping the ap¬ 
proach or adding 
to the house. 
Another of the 
type has been 
curiously altered. 
An old farmhouse 
turned into a bun¬ 
galow sounds ab¬ 
surd, yet it has 
been attempted 
(top of page 14) ; 
rough tree-trunks 
are used as col¬ 
umns and a ver¬ 
anda built almost 
around. It is 
rather attractive 
in certain ways, 
with its curious 
crushed - mulber¬ 
ry color that tones 
in with the pink apple blossoms. It is low, with sloping roofs, 
perhaps always an attraction. That is the quality of the old 
Dutch houses with their long curved roofs, a type non-existent 
in this part of 
Fairfield County, 
unless the Mianus 
house (top of 
page 14) is an 
example of it; 
a beautiful old 
house and pa¬ 
thetic withal, for 
Mianus village 
has engulfed it 
with wretched 
houses and it has 
fallen into an ig¬ 
noble old age. 
Immense wistar¬ 
ias that covered 
the entire gable 
end were cut 
down last year, 
dear knows why! 
— when they 
think it worth 
while they will 
“make it up to 
date,” for they are distinctly “practical” in that vicinity. One of 
them bought twenty bed-springs “dirt cheap” in Long Island and 
shipped them across the sound to mend gaps in his stone walls! 
‘The House with the Pine Tree” calls for a solution of the problem presented in the small 
second-story front windows 
A Shrubbery Group of Wild Things 
HOW THE PROBLEM OF HARMONIZING A NEW HOUSE WITH ITS SITE WAS 
SOLV! D BY NATIVE SHRUBS DUG UP FROM THE WOODS AND ROADSIDES 
BY E. P. Cahoon 
P hotographs by N. R. Graves and others 
W HEN the new house in the suburbs was fairly finished 
and they had moved in, not a dollar was left over; in 
fact, the man who came to do some extra tinkering on the cis¬ 
tern had to be paid, for the time being, with a promise. 'Under 
these circumstances, there was nothing of course for shrubs. 
And perhaps it was just as 
well that it was so, for other¬ 
wise they never would have 
found what glories were all 
around them. It was sum¬ 
mer, so of course, nothing 
could be planted until fall. 
Even then the expenditure of 
every cent of the family in¬ 
come had been planned for 
months to come. 
That is how She came to 
say, “We’ll dig up that Thorn- 
apple tree we used to see when 
we came out to watch the 
house grow.” It was on a 
stretch of wild woodland on 
their way to the city, and had 
attracted their attention in the 
spring by its wealth of snowy, 
fragrant bloom. 
And that set them thinking of other lovely things they had 
seen, and set them marking these same shrubs that they might 
distinguish the right ones in the fall when the bloom foliage 
would be lacking, and they should come to transplant them. 
In their Sunday afternoon walks they soon found a fine pink 
Meadow Sweet, which is 
really a beautiful native Spi- 
rea (S. sctlicifolia). They 
marked it, and, at the same 
time, a high-bush Cranberry 
(Viburnum Opulus), with a 
little strip of red cloth, and 
two months later found the 
birds had fancied and had 
carried the strip away to add 
a bright note to their nest- 
dwellings ! So next time the 
two marked the shrubs with 
a bit of shingle tied on with a 
wire. 
“We’ll plant all this end 
of the lot with wild things,” 
said She, “and when we can 
afiford it we’ll plant the west 
end of the place with nursery 
stock,” said He ; and so it was 
An Elderberry bush was one of the shrubs marked for transplanting 
—one of the loveliest though least appreciated native shrubs 
