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

Landscape Gardening

Other plans are practicable, and on certain land preferable. The old New England style of placing the buildings in a long row has advantages and some disadvantages. But the scattered, hit-or-miss, planless arrangement, seen everywhere, has no advantage and no excuse.

Everyone must have felt a shock sometime at coming upon a city house in the country. Such houses are, fortunately, rare; but they are not unknown. There will be the house of complicated architecture, with gables, and porticoes and loggias, and porte-cochere; and there will be all the other accompaniments to give a thoroughly urban air to the whole place. And most persons will feel instinctively what an impropriety such a composition presents. The country house must have a thoroughly rural air. The owner has hardly the choice of any other plan. And to give a rural atmosphere some sort of naturalistic treatment of the grounds will be necessary.

This naturalistic treatment, on account of the considerations already hinted at, ought to be on a comparatively large scale. This is usually possible, for the farm can commonly snare whatever room is required for the homestead and its immediate dependencies.

In those rather too common cases in which the house and gardens are of mean extent or are crowded into the highway, the trouble has arisen, not through parsimony of room, but simply through thoughtlessness of the needs of the farm home. A farmhouse ought to have plenty of room; and if the grounds have already been laid out so as not to leave ample space, the best thing that can be done is to reconstruct them altogether, or so far as may be necessary to gain a free and roomy farm yard.

A farmhouse ought to be comparatively remote from the road. The distance will vary according to the height of the house, the slope of the land, the taste of the builder, and other circumstances; but the distance ought not to be less than three times the height of the house, or more if the ground slopes upward from the street. If the house is put some distance back into the grounds, as is sometimes very desirable, and has an approach of its own, the main view of the house ought still to be given at a distance something greater than three times the height of the house.

This is not a work on architecture, but it may not be out of place to make a few brief suggestions respecting the farmhouse itself. Generally some very simple plan of architecture is to be preferred. A sharp or much broken roof is especially to be avoided. Porches ought to be wide, and their floors not high from the ground, especially if the place be level. City dwellers affect high porches and second-story balconies for the sake of the privacy they give: but privacy is more easily secured on a farm.