The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Landscape Gardening

While the house builder gladly puts $5,000 or $50,000 into his house, he regards $50 to $100 as ample outlay for the improvement of the surrounding grounds. And while he is sure to employ an architect and pay him $100 to $5,000 for planning the house, he docs not think of consulting a landscape gardener to design the grades and plantings, but leaves such things to the cheap day laborer who mows the lawn or takes care of the garage.

These things make it obvious that the gentle art of gardening has not yet gained a proper appreciation from all those who should be its votaries. The first great question to be decided, in laying out the grounds of a moderate-sized city home, is whether a fine effect from the street shall be sought or a comfortable outdoor privacy be secured to the residents. On large grounds both these desiderata may be secured; but on small lots one must be sacrificed. The good, old fashioned English style of securing privacy in small places,—a method adopted by many citizens of a former period in America,—is to have a thick, high hedge all along the front. One still occasionally sees such hedges of arbor vitae, or privet, or mulberry, completely screening the house and grounds from the street. Such an arrangement has its very simple and substantial advantages, and i f it is to be adopted there is no further advice to be given, except to choose a thrifty species for the hedge and keep it clean and well pruned.

A practicable modification of this method, but one not often seen, is to plant a somewhat irregular screen of mixed trees and shrubs and herbaceous materials. Such a screen can be arranged in the same general way as an ordinary border planting, except that it will usually face in two directions. This will shield the company on the lawn from the passers along the street, and will, at the same time, give opportunity for the introduction of an indefinite variety of ornamental plants, some of which are visible from the street and some from the house and lawn.

But a great many people do not live much on the lawn, or prefer for other reasons to make the grounds a setting for the house in such a way that the whole shall give the best possible effect from the street. In such cases there come into play all the principles of taste which govern gardening anywhere. As in other gardening operations, unity is most to be regarded. It is often violated to excess. Many city gardens are only aggregations of unrelated and incompatible features picked up here and yonder because they struck the passing fancy of the collector.