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THE NATURAL GARDEN: SOME THINGS THAT CAN BE DONE WHEN NATURE IS FOLLOWED INSTEAD OF THWARTED
MAKING a garden is not unlike building a home, because the first thing to be considered is the creation of that indefinable feeling of restfulness and harmony which alone makes for permanence. Therefore, in planning a garden that we mean to live with all our lives, it is best to let Nature alone just as far as possible, following her suggestions and helping her to carry out her plans by adjusting our own to them, rather than attempting to introduce a conventional element into the landscape.
We have already explained in detail the importance of building a house so that it becomes a part of its natural surroundings; of planning it so that its form harmonizes with the general contour of the site upon which it stands and also of the surrounding country, and of using local materials and natural colors, wherever it is possible, so that the house may be brought into the closest relationship with its natural surroundings. But no matter how well planned the house may be, or how completely in keeping with the country, the climate and thelife that is to be lived in it, the whole sense of home peace and comfort is gone if the gar-den is left to the mercy of the average gardener, whose chief ambition usually is to achieve trim walks, faultless flower-beds and neatly barbered shrubs, and whose appreciation of wild natural beauty is small.
To give a real sense of peace and satisfaction a garden must be a place in which we can wander and lounge, pick flowers at our will and invite our souls, and we can do none of these if we have the feeling that trees, shrubs and flowers were put there arbitrarily and ac-cording to a set, artificial pattern, instead of being allowed to grow up as Nature meant them to do. Therefore, knowing the vital importance of the right kind of garden to the general scheme, we have given here some examples of the natural treatment of moderate-sized grounds, trusting that they may be suggestive to home builders. The house shown in the illustrations was built by an artist out in a pasture lot and the garden that has been encouraged to grow up around it has more of the
Published in The Craftsman, January, 1908.
A HOME WHERE THE SURROUNDINGS HAVE BEEN LEFT AS NEARLY NATURAL AS POSSIBLE; THE DWELLING OF MR. FREDERICK STYMETZ LAMB.
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