42 
House 
& Garden 
THAT DEVASTATED SUBURBAN LOT 
Reclaiming It Proved a Great Adventure and the Lure of It Made the 
Adventurers Adamant to Bewildering Offers 
MARION MURDOCK 
Little houses of 
every known and un¬ 
known and unguessed 
form of architecture 
rubbed gables smugly 
with ours. Glaring 
electric street lamps 
penetrated the fur¬ 
thermost privacy of 
our porches and bal¬ 
conies, where we had 
been wont to sit in the 
moonlight that fil¬ 
tered through the pine 
trees. 
We spent that first 
desolate evening writ¬ 
ing “FOR SALE” 
advertisements. 
Nobody answered 
them. The'agents said 
that real estate values 
had slumped. It was 
the time when every¬ 
thing was slumping 
except those things 
that were vitally 
needed by our armies 
in the field. Those 
were soaring. 
By the next week 
our blood was up and 
the iron of the war 
got into our veins. We 
sued the company, 
and won back not 
only our ten feet of 
stolen land and an 
additional strip, but 
a not inconsiderable check as hush- 
money, for settling out of court. 
Then Came The Wall 
Snowed in, but 
secure behind 
its wall stands 
the result of 
the adventure- 
home 
That Pink Sidewalk 
DOGWOOD PARK 
RESTRICTED PROPERTY 
DESIRABLE BUILDING LOTS 
FOR SALE. INQUIRE OF- 
The next week-end (we were real 
commuters!) we pulled down the 
embankment. Then we went out and 
bought up a stone-wall and moved it 
bodily to shore up the road and form 
a high garden wall, to be surmounted 
by a hedge. We confessed at this 
juncture, that we had always secretly 
wanted a high garden wall, but that 
it had not seemed appropriate in a 
wood. We built a green gate in it. 
The following summer, we coaxed 
roses and honeysuckle over the gate. 
The dogwood and great hickory 
trees were our special pride, and still 
screened us from our neighbors. That 
winter a terrific storm stripped the 
little place of dogwood trees. In the 
morning, we went out and salvaged 
what we could—shaking off the snow 
and ice, bracing them with poles and 
literally performed surgical operations 
on them, filling their gaping wounds 
with tar and cement, setting their 
fractures in splints secured by adhe¬ 
sive tape and bandages. We saved 
several. But the plot had lost its 
woody character and was destined to 
G 
IVEN: a 
of 
acre 
half¬ 
wood¬ 
dropping off 
two hundred 
a creek, down 
were it deep 
one could 
canoe to 
land, 
some 
feet to 
which, 
enough, 
commute by 
one’s office. 
With the childlike 
innocence of the coun¬ 
try-bred, we built a 
house on it, and 
though numerous 
sign-boards and little 
toad-stool land offices 
would have warned 
the seasoned and so¬ 
phisticated suburban¬ 
ite, we in our igno¬ 
rance only marvelled 
dreamily at the 
philanthropy that 
prompted a real es¬ 
tate company to pre¬ 
sent us with such 
essentials as light, 
water, sewers, gas, a 
some-time road. 
Circumstances up¬ 
rooted us and carried 
us half round the 
globe, before 
house-warming h 
fairly cooled off. 
others we rented 
little corner of 
wood, where aquile- 
gias, wild violets, and 
ferns were already 
scars of blasting and buildin 
True, we had received one 
Our flock of Rhode Island Reds 
been rather ruthlessly suppressed. 
But we were wholly unprepared for 
the dismaying transformation that 
turned to tragedy our 
two years later. 
the 
a d 
To 
the 
the 
The babies 
think the bird 
pool compares 
favorably with 
the Lake of 
The Swans 
the 
jolt. 
had 
home-coming 
A straight, broad, relentless, gut¬ 
tered road, bordered on either side by 
strips of green grass, alternating with 
strips of pink brick sidewalk, had 
supplanted the meandering old wood 
road. Along a dirt embankment which 
drained unpleasantly into our cellar, 
it stalked past our poor little cottage, 
now stripped of its woodland privacy. 
In fact, the brazen pink sidewalk en¬ 
croached on our land by some ten 
feet. Imposing gate-posts waylaid 
one at a half-dozen cross-roads, with 
large signs swinging, over them or 
d angling $ Jronj .-rustic gypsy-kettles, 
bearing tlfe legend: 
