January, 1923 
35 
The 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
BULLETIN BOARD 
T HOUGH we have no intention of publish¬ 
ing a study course with each issue of 
House & Garden, yet the magazine would 
lend itself admirably to such purposes for those 
who wish to study the progress of architecture, 
decoration and gardening. 
The houses in this issue, for example. One is 
authentically Italian, another is obviously a 
direct descendant from the English cottage. Be¬ 
ing a nation composed of many kinds of people, 
it is only natural that our architecture should be 
eclectic. We choose what we want from the 
past and we adapt it to suit our needs. Perhaps 
some of the old masters would stand aghast at 
these adaptations, and yet they serve our pur¬ 
poses, meet the requirements of our kind of life 
and eventually will be the basis of our own 
architectural tradition. 
Or turn to the gardens. Why publish a French 
city garden? Because in it lies the suggestion for 
the treatment of a city garden here. We are 
beginning to appreciate the value of back yards 
in town; here is a novel and fascinating idea of 
such a development. The garden gates illus¬ 
trated show an equally international genesis. 
Although all are found in America their ancestry 
includes France, Italy and England. 
In decoration we are notoriously choosey. We 
mix our periods without a qualm and yet some¬ 
how, our rooms are made more livable than if we 
had stuck strictly to the traditional period style. 
In the article on ceilings and in the Little Port¬ 
folio will be found ample illustrations of this 
international habit in decorating. 
Just as a man with a garden has the map of 
the world at his feet—since his flowers have come 
from every comer of the globe—so does the 
woman with a well-furnished house dwell inter¬ 
nationally. Flowers represent the various cli¬ 
mates of the world, furniture the various nations. 
I N one way, however, we lead the world— 
in household equipment. The article in this 
issue on electricity would perhaps be a 
curiosity, if published in some foreign countries. 
But even we have only begun to scratch the sur¬ 
face of household equipments. In many sections 
electricity is either not available or too expen¬ 
sive for common use. We have still to harness 
our vast water power to the extent with which it 
is harnessed in some countries abroad. 
This insistence on creature comforts—on well- 
equipped bathrooms, on labor-saving devices— 
is not always understood abroad. Some years 
ago a new hotel opened in New York and, to 
gain foreign patronage, it advertised in Continen¬ 
tal papers, saying that it contained a thousand 
bedrooms and a thousand bathrooms. A well- 
known architectural journal, commenting on this, 
wanted to know, “But who ever uses a thousand 
bathrooms?” 
We grow so accustomed to these mechanical 
aids to creature comfort that often we do not 
realize what a blessing they are. Chester Aldrich, 
the learned architect, tells of visiting a Francis¬ 
can monastery in Italy this fall. While there, a 
party of young American Franciscan monks ar¬ 
rived. They had all been accustomed to running 
hot and cold water and other modern conveni¬ 
ences of America. It made an amusing subject 
for speculation, just how they would stand the 
rigors of the life. 
T HE Gardener's Calendar, beginning with 
this issue, shows a new arrangement. For 
several years we have framed it in various 
kinds of photographs—practical pictures showing 
how to do the garden work, glimpses of gardens, 
of prize-winning exhibits at flower shows. Now 
it will exhibit the pictures of those who, from 
the earliest times, have labored for horticulture. 
Perhaps you will say, “But why change?” 
For many reasons. First, we have run out of 
practical garden pictures. We had over 5,000 
taken some years ago. Now they are used up. 
Secondly, we grew tired of that kind of picture 
and perhaps the reader did too. Thirdly we have 
not shown the portraits of those who have done 
great work in gardening and we thought they 
would make an interesting change. So you may 
expect quite an array, ranging from St. Dorothea, 
patron of gardeners, to Peter Barr who collected 
narcissi in Spain. 
W AR would seem to have no possible con¬ 
nection with walnut, and yet, in a recent 
English paper, we find these curious facts: 
“Every collector of old furniture knows that 
walnut was the fashionable wood under William 
and Mary and Queen Anne; till the very end of 
the reign of James II all British dining tables 
were made of oak; and most people know that 
mahogany became the material for fashionable 
furniture under George I. But what hardly any¬ 
body knows is why walnut, that beautiful and 
durable wood, so fashionable from 1689 to 1710 
or so, went so quickly out of use; why was “the 
reign of walnut” so brief? 
“A biographer of Marlborough tells me that 
all the walnut trees in England, and all the ex¬ 
isting English walnut timber, were commandeered 
by the Horse Guards in Marlborough’s day, to 
be made into the muskets which our soldiers car¬ 
ried at Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Mai 
plaquet. I can give the more credence to that 
because of the report from Brussels in 1015, to 
the effect that all the walnut trees and timber in 
Belgium had been looted by the Germans and 
sent to Aix and Essen, to be made into rifle- 
stocks for the Kaiser’s recruits.” 
T HE Garden Club of America lately held an 
exhibition, in the Ferargil Galleries, New 
York, of garden paintings and sculpture. It 
was one of the first concentrated efforts in this 
country to associate gardens with painting, and 
being one of the first it had to rely mainly upon 
paintings that were only indirectly concerned with 
gardens. There were floral still lifes, intimate 
landscapes, outdoor figure studies, and others, 
very decorative and delightful, that merely con¬ 
tained the word “garden” in their titles. A few 
of them expressed gardens in a tangible sense, by 
the suggestion of a bit of planting that the gar¬ 
dener would recognize as authentic both as to the 
plants and the arrangement, and by a compre¬ 
hensive view of the garden’s design. It is of 
this kind of paintings which the ideal exhibition 
of garden paintings will eventually consist, for 
gardens and planting schemes are constantly be¬ 
ing made nowadays which are worthy of such 
artistic interpretation. Many of the floral still 
lifes were splendid examples of how to arrange 
cut flowers for indoor decoration. 
YEN though, during the war, we grew ac¬ 
customed to quoting enormous figures, it is 
somewhat startling to see big figures ap¬ 
plied to matters of peace. One doesn’t ordinarily 
speak of the home in billions. It was arresting, 
then, to pick up a recent report from Roger Bab- 
son and read the prognostication that brilliant 
statistician makes. He says that the total amount 
of new construction in the United States this 
year probably will exceed $5,000,000,000. 
Five billions .—And of this sum it is estimated 
that half will be spent in the building of resi¬ 
dences. Two and a half billion dollars worth 
of homes! 
Then he goes on to say: “The important factor 
from the building standpoint is that a large part 
of the present boom is suburban construction. No 
one can say when the saturation point in this 
new building will be reached. As far as the 
boom in city building is concerned, the time 
probably is not more than a year off when there 
will be as many tenements, stores and offices as 
there are prospective tenants. Suburban build¬ 
ing is different. It is dangerous to forecast the 
saturation point in suburban buildings.” 
It has long been evident that our cities had 
reached the saturation point in population. Street 
traffic has become congested along with congested 
homes and offices. The logical reaction to this 
is growth in the suburbs and the small towns. 
The Main Streets of America have a great future 
ahead of them. 
Building prospects such as this are a depend¬ 
able register of general prosperity. They give 
assurance to prospective home builders. They 
are a signal to go ahead with the erection of that 
house over which the owner has been hesitating. 
E THEL R. Peyser, whose article on elec¬ 
tricity in the home opens this issue, knows 
a powerful lot about kitchens and house¬ 
hold equipment, in addition to knowing enough 
about music to lecture on it and enough about 
children to have edited a magazine for them. Her 
first book, “Cheating the Junk Pile” has just 
been issued by Duttons. It contains many of her 
articles which originally appeared in House & 
Garden. 
Harry Kemp, whose poem “Tree-Doom” ap¬ 
pears on the editoria page, is author of an auto¬ 
biographical novel,, “Tramping on Life”. As a 
poet, Harry Kemp needs no explanation. In his 
novel he has chosen the harder technique of 
prose, and has written a book that should be 
ranked among the leaders of the season. 
Chandler Ireland, who has designed the two 
pages of valances for this issue, and Chamberlain 
Dodds, whose summer house is shown, are both 
decorators practising in New York. Of the other 
decorators whose work is shown, Tate & Hall are 
in New York and Miss Gheen in New York and 
Chicago. 
Mary H. Northend needs no introduction to 
magazine readers, as her name is familiar to 
them as a writer on New England subjects, on 
decoration and architecture. She is author of 
some eight books on these subjects. 
Eugene Clute, who writes on Progress in Deco¬ 
ration has edited several decoration and archi¬ 
tectural magazines, and is at present editor of 
“Pencil Points”. 
