Making a Garden of the City Back Yard 
RECLAIMING IN A VERY SIMPLE AND ECONOMICAL MANNER THE USUALLY HOPELESS 
EXPANSE OF BAKED DIRT AND BRICK PAVING BACK OF THE HOUSE-IN-A-BLOCK 
by William Draper Brinckle 
Illustrations from the author’s designs 
D ID it ever occur to you that there is a latent potentiality in 
even the most ordinary back yard? 
No, not any feeble insipidities — screening the garbage-cans 
by rows of sunflowers, veneering of back fences with morning 
glories—but the possibility of a well studied bit of garden design; 
some quiet, strong scheme, 
increasing many-fold the 
comfort and charm of your 
home. Llave you ever 
thought of it? 
Let us assume that you 
have an ordinary city lot ; 
thirty feet wide, perhaps, 
with all its fore part cov¬ 
ered by the spreading skirts 
of the yellow-and-white Co¬ 
lonial front, in which you 
live for three quarters of the 
year. A few feet wider or 
narrower ? No matter ; the 
argument will still hold. 
If a Japanese has even 
so much as five square feet 
of soil behind his house, he 
will have a garden — a won¬ 
drous, exquisite bit of beau¬ 
ty, with tiny mountains, 
dwarfed pine trees, rustic 
bridges, and all only a few 
paces, in actual fact, from 
some seething city street, 
yet giving one the sense of 
far-away rest and seclusion. 
Now, I do not advise a 
Japanese garden in an Amer¬ 
ican backyard, but I do in¬ 
dorse again the old Colonial 
doctrine (in reality as old as 
Rome itself), that the true 
front of a home should be 
the back; that there is more 
to life than to pose on a 
front porch, where glitter¬ 
ing shoe-buckles may cover 
out-at-heel socks. Nearly al¬ 
ways behind century - old 
houses, one finds traces of 
a carefully planned formal 
garden, with box alleys lead¬ 
ing to some little summer¬ 
house ; a place for the fam¬ 
ily, with a select friend or 
so — not a place for the 
whole neighborhood. No matter how narrow the lot, this formal 
garden was still provided. 
But we cannot slavishly copy an old Colonial house-plan; we 
must modify it with bathrooms and other things of our modern 
life. So with a garden, the Colonial scheme left no place for 
drying-yard, children's playground, servant's breathing space 
and the many similar needs that have grown up around our 
present-day existence. It is not only sheer nonsense to disre¬ 
gard these things, but it is false art, too. In all times, beauty 
has always been reached by working with existing conditions — - 
never by working against 
them. 
Now to go at it. The 
basic idea in landscape work 
is the vista and the most elab¬ 
orate formal garden ever 
planned is only a collection of 
vistas, with more or less of 
sun-dials, pools and casinos 
threaded upon them. So let 
us take some window or door 
from dining-room or library, 
and, in line with this, run a 
walk straight through to the 
back fence. Let us terminate 
this in a summer-house, to 
give a stopping point to the 
eye, but before we get quite 
so far back, we shall set some 
other point of interest—-a lit¬ 
tle pond, perhaps, to hold the 
eye a moment and, as it were, 
prolong the vista. Bright 
masses of flower-color edge 
the path, and high hedges of 
privet frame the whole, shut¬ 
ting out all unsightly things. 
So much in general; now 
for the definite details. 
The path should be not 
less than five feet wide, so 
that two persons may walk 
abreast. The paving should 
be brick, though a very fair 
substitute may be had by us¬ 
ing ordinary coal ashes. In 
such cases, dig out a couple 
of inches, and fill in the ashes, 
edging them with brick. Af¬ 
ter a good rain, rake them 
down, taking out the clinkers ; 
and later on give them a sec¬ 
ond raking. It is not at all 
necessary to roll them. 
No other walk-material 
is very satis factory. Cement 
is too hard and cold in its 
effect; steam cinders will only 
answer where there is heavy and continuous travel to keep them 
packed; gravel is unpleasant to tread on with thin summer shoes, 
and wood is undesirable for many reasons. The best way of all 
is to lay a concrete foundation, and pave the bricks on top of 
this; a sand base, such as is used in ordinary sidewalk paving, 
The typical city house has an ell-shaped rear end into which it is an 
easy matter to fit the longer axis of a formal garden 
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