TURE.) (A. F. BR.) The plainest yard can be made a lovely garden by planning its arrangement, instead of putting in flower beds, vegetable patches and chicken runs without thought for their relations to each other. The householder should so arrange his plot that the .flowers are a coherent part of the general scheme, not a mere interruption in the lawn, the trees and shrubs form a pleasing composition and the vegetables contribute to the beauty of the whole. In planting a garden, three things need to be considered almost simultaneously: its orientation, its relation to the house, and its relation to the surroundings. It must be so arranged that its flowers and vege tables are not shaded, its paths, lawns and beds have some pleas ing and logical relation to the house, and suitable objects outside its limits, such as a beautiful tree or a neighbouring wall, may be utilized to frame it or make it appear larger, while unsightly ob jects on adjoining property may be shut out by screen planting, or have attention distracted from them.
The simplest way to examine all elements of the design at once is to draw a plan of the garden on paper. For a small piece of property the most convenient scale is that of one quarter of an inch to the foot, but if drawing to scale seems too difficult a sketch plan that maintains the proper proportions between house, lot and adjoining objects is better than none.
The plan of a garden is devised with the entrance as the feature of primary importance. The point of entrance having been estab lished, the walks, the open grass and the beds, whether for flowers or vegetables, will fall into place naturally. A tree should no more be set in the middle of a garden entrance than a chair in the mid dle of a doorway. Just as one arranges furniture so as not to hinder movement in a room, so must paths in a garden be ar ranged to permit easy circulation. To carry the parallel a little further, in placing furniture inside a house its appearance from the adjoining rooms is always considered; so in a garden, the appearance of the garden through the windows of the room most used is important. Any garden, and especially a town garden,
should be considered as an open air extension of the house and the principal axes and openings of the house must be continued or indicated in its arrangement. The plan can then be developed through consideration of its ori entation; i.e., how it lies with re spect to the sun. Trees and high shrubs should not be so placed as to shade flowers or vegetables. Still sunlight is not the only fac tor that determines the placing of trees and light shrubs. Their inherent effectiveness as things of beauty must be taken into ac count also. In the town garden they will almost invariably have a dual function,—that of being part of the garden and that of screening unsightly surroundings. The final element entering into the plan is that of placing archi tectural features,—such as a sundial, a bench, a summer house, a pool, or especially important trees, shrubs or plants,—to attract attention to certain spots, to mark entrances to paths or to strengthen corners of flower beds. Such things have a function like that of ornaments or pictures in a house, and whether the garden be formal or naturalistic it will have some kind of vista or focal point. In winter when there is no foliage nothing en hances the appearance of a small garden so much as well-designed and well-executed architectural ornaments, but they must be care fully placed not to appear to have been dropped in the garden with the intention of putting them somewhere when there was time to consider where. We are all familiar with the old-fashioned Victorian method of placing cast iron dogs, china gnomes and fountains in almost any prominent place regardless of the rela tion of such objects to their surroundings, and of an exactly similar nature is the method of placing specimen trees and shrubs wherever they will grow best regardless of their function as part of the general design.