April, 19 21 
59 
This tennis house, 
standing at the end of a 
main gat den path, is an 
elaboration of the low 
retaining wall which 
gives a level table for 
the tennis court be¬ 
yond. Ralph M. Wein- 
richter, landscape archi¬ 
tect 
GARDEN WALLS AND SHELTERS 
How the One Can Be the Outgrowth of the Other In 
Completing the Framework of the Garden Picture 
The English example is from the home of 
Thackery Turner at Godaiming, Surrey. The 
site is somewhat exposed, and in designing the 
garden Mr. Turner found that a plentiful sup¬ 
ply of walls and shelters was a necessary pro¬ 
vision against the effects of the wind. He has 
turned this necessity to very good esthetic ends. 
The walls and shelters are built of irregular 
blocks of soft sandstone. This has been 
weathered to a pleasing mellowness. 
The building in this garden is in no sense 
architectural, as in old French and Italian 
gardens. The walls are not meant to impress 
the eye by the fact of their geometrical hard¬ 
ness and symmetry; it is not intended that the 
work of man should be sharply contrasted with 
nature. They are essentially an organic part 
of the nature around them—walls of roughly 
hewn local stone, fledged with living plants. 
The shelters are of the least elaborate 
character—an angle of the wall covered in 
with rough stone roofing serves as protec¬ 
tion from the rain. Another shelter takes 
the form of an arched niche built into a 
bank. In other cases the shelters are built 
out from the walls and roofed with tiles. 
The two American examples have equally 
distinctive character. In the garden shown 
at the top of this page the main garden axis 
terminates in a building which is a natural 
development of the low retaining wall. This 
wall supports the level of a tennis court, and 
the house serves the logical puqwse of spec¬ 
tators’ shelter and tea house. Its heavy tim¬ 
bers and broad, low roof make it very much 
a part of the garden. Herbaceous borders 
line either side of the path and the planting 
is brought up close to the steps of the house. 
More pronouncedly an elaboration of the 
wall is the new garden shelter on the estate 
of H. H. Rogers at Southampton, L. I. A 
level space has been walled in and is called 
the Children’s Garden. At one side brick 
steps lead up to a flat terrace that reaches 
the level of a shelter. Through this one can 
go into the other parts of the garden behind. 
The combination of brick walls and cement 
walls is very pleasing. Hydrangeas in pots 
mark accent points in the garden path, and 
(Continued on page 84) 
W HILE the functions of garden walls 
and garden shelters are quite different, 
the one is so often a part of the other 
that it is advisable to consider them together. 
The garden wall may merely enclose a gar¬ 
den from the wind and the curiosity of out¬ 
siders, or it may divide the different parts of 
the garden, such as the kitchen garden from 
the flower garden, or its presence may be made 
necessary by the contour of the land. 
The garden shelter, on the other hand, is 
a feature more or less architectural, accord¬ 
ing to the nature of the garden. If it is a 
formal garden, laid out with the precision 
and balance one sees in the magnificent work 
of La Noitre at Versailles, then the shelter 
will require a decidedly formal and archi¬ 
tectural character. It may be a garden 
house or a Temple of Love such as the his¬ 
toric example in the garden of the Petit 
Trianon. At the other end of the pole stands 
the rustic summer-house, which is perfectly 
at home in the informal and wild garden 
or in a garden that is laid out in the imme¬ 
diate presence of many trees. Midway are 
those garden shelters of cypress painted 
white and fashioned in delightful designs 
of rose arch, grape arbor, pergola and tea 
house that we find in so many American 
gardens today. The white of their paint 
forms a pleasing contrast to the green grow¬ 
ing things about them. Midway, also, we 
find the various types of garden shelters 
built as part of the garden wall or as an 
elaboration of it, such as those illustrated 
here. These represent more unusual de¬ 
signs and have a value because each is the 
result of a separate landscaping problem. 
The fact that they come from both America 
and England adds further to their interest. 
A new development in the H. H. Rogers garden at 
Southampton, L. I., is marked by a rise in level, 
reached by low brick steps and pronounced by a wall 
