May, 19 2 3 
49 
The 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
BULLETIN BOARD 
T HEY tell a story of a certain missionary 
who, on arriving at his field in the heart 
of Africa, was seized by the natives and 
locked up in a pig sty. He cleaned the sty, built 
him a house of wattles and planted flowers 
around it. When the natives saw these great 
improvements they marveled and forthwith elec¬ 
ted the padre head man of the tribe. 
That desire to surround one’s self with cleanli¬ 
ness and beauty is the mark of departure from 
the savage to the civilized. The savage fails to 
appreciate an important fact—that one’s imme¬ 
diate environment has effect on health and state 
of mind. Ugliness can poison. 
People from time to time revert from the civ¬ 
ilized to the savage. We have our dark ages, 
when standards of beauty are lowered and the 
poison of ugliness enters our being. The era of 
the Centennial was our architectural and decora¬ 
tive pig sty. Perhaps at no time did the standards 
in America fall so low. The awakening to beauty 
has been a long and uphill climb, but at last we 
are approaching the top. While we may not yet 
be elected the head of the world’s people in 
taste, we are competing strenuously for it. Our 
standards of architecture and decoration, our 
taste in garden design, our acceptance of nouse- 
hold equipment that makes for better living, all 
indicate that we as a people are no longer content 
with the pig sty. 
What will be the effect on us? Well, it may- 
lead to a form of national idealism that will 
give us front rank among the nations of the world. 
For you cannot live with beauty without having 
other standards raised. The general appreciation 
of the good lines of a roof, of livable color 
schemes may—who knows ?—find its ultimate 
expression in the distaste for the ugliness of war, 
in the solving of our filthy problem of crime and 
its punishment. 
T HERE is a movement on foot to assure the 
permanence of the splendid work of the 
Arnold Arboretum by providing it with a 
substantial endowment. No cause in the interest 
of trees and shrubs could possibly be more worthy 
than this, and it should claim the interest of every 
reader of House & Garden. The Arboretum was 
established in 1872 by Harvard University from 
a fund left by James Arnold, a merchant of New 
Bedford, who died in 1868. It is located at Ja¬ 
maica Plain, Mass., and is now a part of the 
park system of Boston. The purpose of the Ar¬ 
boretum is to increase the knowledge of trees 
and other woody plants. In it all the trees and 
shrubs of the north temperate zone are arranged 
in such a way that they may be conveniently 
studied, both for their scientific and artistic in¬ 
terest. It would be difficult to imagine a more 
valuable or a more beautiful array'. The insti¬ 
tution also acts as a laboratory in which a scien¬ 
tific study of the plants is carried on. It contains 
a bureau of publication, exploration and exchange 
through which botanical exploration is under¬ 
taken in various parts of the world and the re¬ 
sults and products of these explorations are made 
known and distributed. If the success of all 
these activities can be attributed to any one man, 
that man is Prof. C. S. Sargent, the director, who 
has devoted the greater part of his life and for¬ 
tune to the Arboretum. 
O N THIS page in the February House & 
Garden there were printed some remarks on 
the interest that is being taken in tree 
planting in different parts of the country. The 
paragraphs brought from a reader in Oklahoma 
a letter telling of the establishment in that state, 
by proclamation of the governor, of a Tree 
Planting Week which began on February 22. 
During that week every person in the state was 
urged to select a good tree and plant it. There 
may be other states which are less in need of a 
Tree Planting Week than Oklahoma, but there is 
no state in the country which would not be 
benefited enormously by six days of concen¬ 
trated effort in this direction. The economic and 
artistic reasons for tree planting on a large scale 
are great. A national Tree Planting Week would 
be an institution worth having. 
T HERE are two new names of authors in 
this issue—John G. Hamilton, who writes 
on the furnishing of men’s rooms and who 
is an interior decorator practising in New York; 
and Sir James Yoxall, who writes on hunting 
curios in London, a pastime in which many 
Americans going to London this year may indulge. 
Sir James is a collector of note and, in addition 
to innumerable articles on collecting is author of 
“Collecting Miniatures”, “Collecting Old Glass”, 
etc. Aymar Embury II is an architect well 
known to House & Garden readers. The Italian 
house by Dwight James Baum, on pages 78 and 
79, was one of the designs for which he was 
awarded a gold medal at the recent Architectural 
League Exhibit in New York. Basil Oliver, who 
designed the house on page 77, is an English 
architect practising in London. 
I NCIDENTALLY, House & Garden’s contri¬ 
butors have acquired the book writing habit. 
F. F. Rockwell, whose name is well known to 
our readers, has just had published “Gardening 
Under Glass” and Miss Amelia Leavitt Hill is 
producing “Garden Portraits.” By the time this 
issue is out there will be on sale Minga Pope 
Duryea’s “Gardens In And About Towns” and 
“Flowers for Cutting and Decoration” by Rich¬ 
ardson Wright, editor of House & Garden. 
Meantime Miss Peyser’s “Cheating The Junk 
Pile” is doing nicely and Matlack Price’s “Prac¬ 
tical Book of Architecture” is appealing to ar¬ 
chitects and prospective builders. Both Miss 
Peyser and Mr. Price are on the editorial staff 
of House & Garden. 
I F YOU read architectural criticism, or listen 
to it, you are sure to hear that half-timber 
construction is “exotic” in this country. This 
would be all very well except for its trifling 
defect of not being true. 
Half-timber work is simply the exposed struc¬ 
ture of a wood-framed house, with the spaces 
between the timbers filled in with brick. This 
filling is called by the rather jolly name of “nog- 
ging”, and was either stuccoed or left exposed. 
It was found that a variety of diverting pat¬ 
terns could be contrived in the brick nogging, 
so that it was really a pity to cover it with 
stucco. 
The frame house of today, of course, is a much 
more lightly built affair than the frame house of 
Elizabethan England, and to expose its “timbers” 
to the public gaze would be rather unkind. More¬ 
over, if a two-by-four framed structure were 
nogged with brick, the nogging would probably 
bring the whole thing to the ground. When the 
main timbers of a house were rugged, hand- 
hewn posts 8" or 9" square, and the intermediary 
studding not less than 4" square, the frame of a 
house was something to be proud of, and those 
timbers of sturdy oak mortised and pegged to¬ 
gether and braced with diagonal struts would 
have carried a far heavier load than their brick 
nogging. 
The “half-timber” house which is to be decried 
is the one in which stained boards are nailed to 
the surface of a stucco wall, solely to secure a 
pictorial effect. And these houses are not bad 
because they are “exotic”, but because they are 
imitations of an honest type of actual construc¬ 
tion, and as architecturally immoral as any sham. 
Our national right to half-timber construction, 
moreover, is established by the many actual half¬ 
timber houses still standing in New England, 
where massively framed structures were nogged 
with brick and rubble masonry, but covered over 
with clapboards or shingles. 
An unarchitectural mind might idly speculate 
upon the reason for this, and attribute it to a 
“Puritan complex” which recoiled from exposed 
timbers, and felt a decorous necessity of covering 
these anatomical facts with decent clapboards, 
reaching often to within ankle-length of the 
ground. 
iESk 
D ESPITE the fact that winter sports in 
America have become quite popular and 
despite the fact that a few hardy souls 
have the temerity to say that they prefer winter 
to summer, the average run of people are, by 
now, thankful that winter is over. It has been 
a hard and arduous season. The first few snow 
storms were stimulating, but by the time the 
twenty-seventh began to patter down, they lost 
their charm. It is all very nice to sit indoors in 
a warm room, and read Whittier’s “Snow Bound”, 
but you can’t do it for months on end. In this 
coalless year it has been practically impossible. 
Truly, winter is a snare and a delusion. 
We are often tempted to think that winter is 
the test season for human beings. Old Nature is 
trying to see just how much human nature will 
stand without revolting or going under. We’ve 
stood a powerful lot this year and we’re tired 
of it. Never was spring so welcome. 
One doesn’t feel that way about the other sea¬ 
sons. Spring is a transient; Summer—even the 
hottest—can be tolerated; Autumn offers another 
transition. You never heard anyone yawn and 
hope that Spring would only end or complain 
that they were fed up on Summer or that Au¬ 
tumn bored them to extinction. But you do hear 
countless people say—because most of us do it 
each year—that unless Winter ends soon, they 
will go mad. 
Well, it has ended! 
