Editorial 
Houses Garden 
Vol. I. 
JUNE, 1901. 
No. 1. 
Wilson 
EDITED BY 
Eyre, Jr., Frank Miles 
Day, 
and Herbert C. Wise. 
Published Monthly by 
The Architectural Publishing Company 
929 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Penna. 
Price 
United States, Canada or Mexico, $5.00 per annum in 
advance; elsewhere in the Postal Union, $6.00. 
Single numbers, 50 cents. 
Copyrighted iqoi, by The Architectural Publishing Company■ 
T HE lively interest in gardens that has 
shown itself in this country within the 
last few years is but another proof of 
the truth of Bacon’s oft quoted words, “ a 
man shall ever see, that, when ages grow to 
civility and elegancy, men come to build 
stately, sooner than to garden finely ; as if 
gardening were the greater perfection.” The 
latter half of the eighteenth century was, as 
far as this country is concerned, the period 
during which civility and elegancy reached 
their finest development; and the stately co¬ 
lonial mansion was thought incomplete with¬ 
out a suitable setting of formal gardening. 
As taste declined with the growing years of 
the nineteenth century, the reasonable unity 
between the house and its surroundings, for¬ 
merly so well considered, fell almost out of 
sight. If any attempt at it were made it gen¬ 
erally resulted in the case of the larger houses, 
in an expanse of cropped lawn, dotted with 
crescent or star-shaped flower beds between 
which and the front gate an Apollo Belve¬ 
dere made cast-iron eyes across the driveway 
at a chaste and unresponsive (because equally 
cast-iron) Diana. As for the smaller house, 
the ideas of the naturalistic school have been 
inculcated for so many years with such ardor, 
that its owner even to-day can scarcely see the 
absurdity of treating its half-acre in imitation 
of a rolling landscape. 
Whether our own age be one of civility 
and elegancy, it might be profitless to inquire; 
but certainly, though we have come in many 
instances to build stately, the art of our gar¬ 
dens has not kept pace with that of our build¬ 
ings. The thought of the fine garden as the 
natural accompaniment of the stately house 
has too seldom presented itself to have been 
realized in many instances. But now we are 
by way of changing all that; and though the 
examples of how the thing ought to be done 
are still all too few, we are not without them. 
Just now they are more easily found in con¬ 
nection with houses of great cost than about 
more modest homes; but signs show that 
better things are at hand, even where the 
grounds are small and the amount to be spent 
very limited. To the fact that the revived 
interest in gardens and gardening is a reality, 
and not an affair of the imagination, many 
things bear witness; as first, the large sale of 
certain recent books, one of the most expen¬ 
sive as well as successful of which deals pure¬ 
ly with garden design, while another still 
more expensive is devoted to horticulture ; 
second, the space which magazines and espe¬ 
cially those of the greatest circulation are giv¬ 
ing to the subject; third, the addition to col¬ 
lege curricula of classes in horticulture and 
gardening, and the foundation of new schools 
of landscape architecture. In short, as Mrs. 
Merritt puts it in her recent article on “ Mak¬ 
ing a Garden,” everybody who can acquire 
land, whether in a window box or in broad 
acres, has caught the infection,—an infection 
of health and happiness. 
H owever real the present interest in the 
subject, there would be no excuse for the 
appearance of House & Garden were it 
merely another added to the list of maga¬ 
zines that treat of gardening from the horti¬ 
culturists’ point of view. Its own point of 
view is that of the architect; but of the 
architect to whom the house and its garden 
seem so intimately related that the attempt 
to design the one without duly considering 
the other is an attempt that can never reach 
the highest level of success. 
16 
