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Presented to the
LIBRARIES of the
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
by
Hugh Anson-Cartwright
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
MV UEARMUOFEHDCRW OOD ooo cube. 2s ceeeesecseestenee Oe Lvol. $1 75
WETADAYSUAT EDGEWOOD coe sson coeas tess asec c- us tense Lvol. 175
REV ERIES OR Al BACHELOR: ..6-snce5 ste secccasuescsescscaaseeee Lvol. 175
SR DREAM PUT see eee ese tec wioe Siete a ee Lvol. 115
| SEVEN STORIES, WITH BASEMENT AND ATTIC....00c00000000 vol. 175
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Copies sent by mail, post paid, on receipt of price.
———— SS aman
es > UU DLES
HINntTs FoR Country PLACEs.
BY THE AUTHOR OF
“MY FARM OF EDGEWOOD.”
NEW YORK;
CHARLES SCRIBNER & CO.
1867.
“=
Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER & CO.,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States, for the
Southern District of New York.
Joun F. Trow & Co.,
PRINTERS, STEREOTYPERS, AND ELECTROTYPERS,
50 Greene Street, New York.
PREEPACE,
HIS little book does not treat exhauttively of any of the
TL fubjects which are brought to view in its pages ; it is
more full of fuggeftion than inftruction. Its aim is to ftim-
ulate thofe who live in the country, or who love the country,
to a fuller and wider range of thinking about the means of
making their homes enjoyable—rather than to lay down‘any
definite rules by which this may be accomplifhed.
I have efpecially fought to excite the ambition of thofe
holders of humbler eftates, who believe that nothing can be
done in the way of adornment cf country property, except
under the eye of accomplifhed gardeners. I have endeavored
fteadily to fhow—whatever may have been the divergence
of topic—that the proper appliance of fmall means will pro-
duce effects whofe charms mutt, in their way, ftand unrivalled,
and that there is no neceflary gulf of diftinction in quality
of beauty between the beft-ordered large eftate and the ju-
dicioufly ordered fuburban home of the mechanic.
iv PREFACE.
When we learn to achieve and appreciate the beauties
that are fimple, we fhall have no difficulty in achieving the
beauties that are complex. The book is a tract for homeli-
nefs; and I hope it may make country profelytes.
EDGEWooD, May, 1867.
CON TEN 2S:
L—AN OLD-STYLE FARM, .
IW—ADVICH FOR LACKLAND.
PoMmoLocists AND ComMOoN PEOPLE, e
LACKLAND MAKES A BEGINNING, e
Lackianpb’s HousE-PLans, é .
LACKLAND’s GARDENER, . F) .
A Pic anv a Cow, : c e
On GATEWAYS, : : 5 e
GATEWAYS AND RuRAL CARPENTRY, e
VILLAGE AND Country Roap-sipE, e
II.— WAY-SIDE HINTS.
TALK ABOUT PonrcHEs, e . °
ON NOT DOING ALL AT ONCE, . °
PiovcHIne AND Dritiep Crops, :
Roavs AND SHADE, : . e
ENGLISH AND AMERICAN HEDGING, :
VILLAGE GREENS, . - c .
RAILWAY GARDENING, . e e
LANDSCAPE TREATMENT OF RAILWAYS, .-
PAGE.
. 1
» 25
- 39
- 44
- 54
- 62
Be ade)
s OL
- 88
- 99
- 109
- 117
- 124
« 129
~ 139
- 47
- 153
vlil
IV.—_LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS.
CONTENTS.
LANDSCAPE GARDENING,
Farm LANDSCAPE,
LAanpDs NoT FARMED,
City AND Town Parks, .
PLACE For Parks,
EqavuIPpMENT OF PuBLIC GARDENS,
Buryine-Growunpbs,
V.—MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE.
REAL EsTaATE PURCHASE, .
Cost AND RETURNS oF Firty AUCREs,
QUESTION OF LOCALITIES,
TESTIMONY OF EXPERTs,
Resutts or Inquiry,
Country Hovsrs anp Repatxs,
Site AND MATERIAL,
Form ANpD CoLor,
Mr. URBAN’S PURCHASE, «
A Sunny Hovss,
CONCLUSION,
PAGE.
- 163
168
- 174
184
- 189
- 194
- 200
209
214
226
- 231
- 244
250
- 257
- 266
274
- 286
- 292
AN OLD- STYLE FARM.
- ma 1
: a, ie
| re)! ute
AN OLDSTYLE FARM.
OME twenty odd years ago—more or less—I
chanced to be the owner of a wild, unkempt,
slatternly farm, of three or four hundred acres in
extent, amid the rocky fastnesses of eastern Connec-
ticut. The township in which it lay was a scattered
wilderness of a settlement, lying along the Hartford
and New London turnpike. There was a toll-gate (I
remember that), and I have a fancy that the toll-gath-
erer was a sallow-faced shoemaker with club-feet, who
sometimes made his appearance with a waxed-end in
his mouth, and a flat-headed hammer in his hand.
He hardly wields the hammer any more; and his last
waxed-end must long ago have been drawn tight, and
clipped away.
There was a wild common over which the Novem-
ber winds swept with a pestilent force, with nothing
to break thein, except a pair of twin churches. One
1
9 RURAL STUDIES.
of these was Congregational—severely doric, with
square-headed windows, painted columns, and a cupola
for ornamentation. The other was Episcopal, with
sharp-headed windows, and three or four crazy-look-
ing turrets; but the paint upon this latter was nearly
worn away by the storm-gusts that beat unbroken
over the Common. I am compelled to say too that
the services were only occasional in this gothic taber-
nacle; and regret exceedingly to add that, after a
fitful and spasmodic life, the Episcopal society which
maintained nominal ownership of this turreted temple
made over its interest and debts to certain worldly
parties, and the sharp-headed windows now shed their
light upon “ town meetings,” and the late church is
abased to the uses of a town hall. It must be said,
that the rural residents of New England have no
large or growing appreciaticn of the beautiful Litany.
They like long sermons and a “talking out” in
prayer. You orI may feel differently ; but the men
of the population in the retired districts, where books
and newspapers rarely come, want to hear on a Sun-
day what the parson will say—not only in his sermon,
but in his invocations.
The doric meeting-house, however, gloried in a
thick, white sheen of paint. The blinds were green
to a fault. No exterior mark of prosperity seemed
wanting but a flanking line of horse-sheds, the lack
AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 3
of which upon that bare waste was a terrible source
of discomfort to the poor brutes who, after a drive
of three, four, or even five miles, stood shivering in
the December weather under the lee of the fences.
A good, kind parson, who presided over the parish
in the days of which I speak, was earnest in his appeals
for shelter to the poor brutes, (my little bay mare
often shivering among them,) but the charitable en-
thusiasm of the good minister counted for nothing ;
and to this day, as I am credibly informed, the “ con-
templated sheds ” remain unbuilt.
There was a tavern, lying to the northward, along
the turnpike ; and if I remember rightly, the tavern-
keeper was a deacon—a staid man, of course, who
kept an orderly house, and whose daughters, in flam-
boyant ribbons, were among the belles of the parish.
The father was, I believe, a most worthy man; but
his rusty brown wig showed badly beside the great
flock of golden curls that flanked him in his meeting-
house pew. His boys were absentees, and addicted
to horse-trading.
There was a cooper’s shop upon the sprawling
street, in which a great clatter and bang were kept
up every work-day upon shad-barrels. There was
a carriage-repairing shop, whose restive proprietor
once brought suit against me for the non-payment
of a bill. (1 am still perfectly satisfied, in my
4 RURAL STUDIES.
own mind, that I paid twice for that “ white-oak
X,”)
There was a green country store, where “ domes-
tics” were sold, and West India sugars, and hoes—
“ Ames’ best cast-steel””—and, I greatly fear, occa-
sional tipple. It was burned down long ago; ten
years after, I saw the yawning, ragged cellar, and a
giant growth of stramonium springing from the door-
step.
There was also somewhere along this dreary street
a manufactory of musical instruments—whether of
harps or organs I cannot justly say ; but I have been
given to understand that the manufactory has since,
under zealous and spirited management, grown into a
great musical institute, where young misses in white
(with blue sashes) woo the muses with a thundering
success. But more distinctly than the manufactory
—whatever it may have been—I remember a little
brook, that stole away in the meadows thereabout
under clumps of alder, under lines of willows, under
plank bridgelets, and how, on many a May day my
line drifted on into dark pools, until some swift strike
gave warning of a venturesome, golden-spotted swim-
mer that presently tossed and flounced in my creel.
I profess no great love for music—no knowledge of
it even; but the whizzing of a reel which a pound
trout will make at the end of thirty feet of taper line
AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 5
is to me very charming—charming in those old days
when the woods and meadows were new, and charm-
ing now when the woods and the meadows are old.
Well, well, I began to tell the story of a farm, and
here I am idling along the borders of a brook!
The toll-gate, the churches, the tavern, the store
lay strewn along a high-road, three miles away from
the valley-farm, of which in those days I was busy
occupant. And yet so bare of trees was the interval,
that from many a nook under the coppices of the
pasture-land I could see the twin churches, the tavern,
and, with a glass, detect even a stray cow, or the lum-
bering coach which from time to time wended along
the high-road of the village.
The farm was suitably divided (as the old adver-
tisements were wont to say) into tillage, meadow, and
pasture-lands. This distribution of parts implied that
the meadows would furnish enough hay in ordinary
seasons for the winter’s keep of such and so many
animals, as the pastures carried in good condition
through the summer; and the arable land was sup-
posed equal to the growth of such grain and vege-
tables as would suffice for man and beast throughout
the year. It was an old, lazy reckoning of capabili-
ties, which implied little or no progress, and which
took no account of any systematic rotation. I never
see a farm advertised under the formula I have named
6 RURAL STUDIES.
—suitably divided into tillage, mowing, and pasture-
land—but I feel sure that the advertiser is a respect-
able, old-fashioned gentleman, who keeps a long-tailed
black coat for Sundays and training-days, and who
has inherited his agricultural opinions from a very
dull and stiffnecked ancestry. ‘Such announcements
—and they are to be seen not unfrequently in the
journals—impress me very much as the advertise-
ment of a desirable dwelling might do— suitably
divided into cooking, eating, and sleeping quarters.”
There are, to be sure, rough pasture-lands strewn
with rocks, or full of startling inequalities of surface,
which must retain for an indefinite period their office
for simple grazing purposes; but, with rare excep-
tions, there are not anywhere in the northeastern
States any considerable stretches of meadow capable
of growing the better English grasses, which are not
susceptible of improvement under occasional tillage.
Draining, indeed, may be first needed, and a scarify-
ing with the harrow, to root out the old mosses and
foul growth; but after this, a clean lift of the plow
and judicious dressing will work wonders.
But, to return, (for I wish to make the picture of
an old-fashioned farm complete,) there were mossy
meadows lying along the borders of a great romping
millstream, which had been mown for forty years
without intermission; here and there, where these
AN OLD-STYLE FARM. "i
meadows lifted into gravelly mounds, patches of plow-
land had been taken up at intervals of five or eight
years, and by dint of heavy, laborious cartage of the
scant manures from the barnyard, over the interven-
ing meadow “swales”, had shown their periodic
growth of corn or potatoes, these followed by oats—
more or less rank as the season was wet or dry—and
again, on the following year by clover, which in its
turn was succeeded by red-top and timothy—upon
which the wild meadow-growth steadily encroached.
There was, of course, the “ barn-lot,” of which all
old farmers boasted, maintained in a certain degree
of foodful succulence and luxuriant fertility by reason
of the leakage and waste which it inevitably secured,
and whose richness was due rather to lack of care
than to skill, There were intervals too of meadow
upland, through which some little rivulet from the
pasture hill-side meandered on its way to the larger
brook of the lowland, and which were kept in verdant
wealth (no thanks to any human manager) by the
refreshing influences of the rivulets alone. Four or
five such straggling brooklets murmured down from
the pasture high-lands, and a Devonshire farmer
would have given to each one a wide and wealth-giv-
ing distribution over acres and acres of the slanting
meadows. But there was nothing of this. They
watered their little rod-wide margin of succulent
8 RURAL STUDIES.
grasses, then dropped away into some marshy flat,
where the flags and rushes grew rampantly, until these
too gave place to alders, poison sumacs, soft maples
and black-ash trees.
The fences were as motley as the militiamen’s
coats on a first Monday of May. From time to time
some previous tenant or owner had devoted “ fall
leisure” to the erection of a wall—mostly in continua-
tion of a great range of barrier which separated the
hill-lands from the flat. In this erection each owner’s
views of economy (no other views being recognized)
had taken wide divergence. Thus, one had given a
circular sweep to his trail, for the sake of inclosing
some tempting smooth spot upon the lowest slope of
the hills ; another had made a flanking movement in
the other direction, for the sake of excluding some
unfortunate little group of imnocent rocks. But the
sinners and the well-doers, on the score of the wall-
ing, must have long before gone to their account,
since the stones were all mossy, and the frequent gaps
had been blocked up by lopping over some vigorous
young hickory or chestnut which had started from
the base of the wall.
But even this rustic device had not given full
security, for with settlements and the “bulging”
under frosts, this great line of barrier was no proof
against the clambering propensities of the sheep; and
AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 9
the whole line of fence had been topped with long
poles, kept in their places by cross stakes firmly
driven into the ground and sustaining the “ riders ”
at the point of intersection. To complete the fence
picture, I have to add to those half-lopped hickories in
the gaps—to those bulging tumors of stone—to those
gaunt over-riding poles—a great array of blackberry
briers, of elders, of dog-willows, of dried stems of
golden-rod, of raspberries, and of pretentious wild-
cherries. Still further, I must mark down a great
sprawling array of the scattered wall, in some half-
dozen spots, where adventurous hunters had made a
mining foray after some unfortunate woodchuck or
rabbit.
So much for the average New England walling in
retired districts twenty years ago. Is it much better
now? As for the wooden fencing, there stretched
across the meadow by the road a staggering line of
“ posts and rails ”»—one post veering southward the
next veering northward—a wholly frightful line,
which was like nothing so much asa file of tipsy
soldiers making vain efforts to keep “ eyes right.” In
the woodlands and upon the borders of the farm,
were old, lichen-covered Virginia fences, sinking rail
by rail into the earth; luxuriant young trees were
shooting up in the angles, brambles were overgrow-
ing them, and poisonous vines—the three-leaved Ampe-
ies
10 RURAL STUDIES.
lopsis among them (which country people call mer-
cury, ivy, and I know not what names beside)—and
this entire range of exterior fence was gone over each
springtime—April being the usual month—and made
effective, by lopping upon it such lusty growth as
may have sprung up the season past. It is afflictive
to think what waste of natural resources is committed
in this way every year by the scrubby farmers of New
England !
The stock equipment of this farm of nearly four
hundred acres, consisted of twelve cows, some six
head of young stock, two yoke of oxen, a pair of
horses, and a hundred and fifty sheep. I blush even
now as I write down the tale of such poor equipment
for a farm which counted at least two hundred and
seventy acres of open land—the residue being wood,
or impenetrable swamp. And it is still more melan-
choly to reflect that the portion of the land which
aided most in the sustenance of this meagre stock,
was that which was most nearly in a state of nature.
I speak of those newly cleared pasture-lands from
which the wood had been removed within ten years.
In giving this description of a farm of twenty years
ago, I feel sure that I am describing the available
surface of a thousand farms in New England to-day.
We boast indeed of our thrift and enterprise, but
these do not work in the direction of land culture—
AN OLD-STYLE FARM. ll
at least not in the way of that liberal and generous
culture which insures the largest product. I doubt
greatly if there be any people on the face of the
earth, equally intelligent, who farm so poorly as ‘the
men of New England; and there are tens of thou-
sands less intelligent who manage their lands infinitely
better. I do not quite understand why the American
character, which has shown such wonderful aptitude
for thrift in other directions, should have shown so
little in the direction of agriculture. I feel quite con-
fident that seven out of ten of the most accomplished
and successful nurserymen, gardeners, and farmers in
the country, are of foreign birth, or of foreign parent-
age. Within the limits of my own experience, I find
it infinitely more difficult to secure a good American
farmer, than to secure a good Scotch or even an Irish
one. And I observe with not a little shame, that
while the American is disposed to make up the tale
of his profits by sharp bargains, the Scotch are as
much disposed to make it up by liberal treatment of
the land. Why is this? The American is not illib-
eral by nature; a thousand proofs lie to the contrary ;
but by an unfortunate traditional belief he is disposed
to count the land only a rigorous step-dame from
which all possible benefit is to be wrested, and the
least possible return made.
Is the Congressional grant for agricultural colleges
12 RURAL STUDIES.
to work a change in this belief in the minds of those
who hold the great mass of the land under control ?
Not surely until the newly started colleges shall have
madesome more vigorous practical demonstration than
they have made thus far. The bearings of science
upon agriculture were well taught previously under
the wing of the established universities; what the
public had reason to hope from the new endowment
was such practical exhibit of the economic value of a
thorough system in tillage and management, as should
carry conviction to the popular mind. As yet we
wait in vain. Looking at results thus far, I am
strongly of the opinion that a few thousands devoted
to the gratuitous distribution of one or two sterling
agricultural newspapers would have worked more
good to the farming interests of the community, than
the millions which have been committed to the wis-
dom of the several State legislatures. I have no hope
that these views will meet the concurrence of those
who have present control of the funds; nor do I
mean to express a doubt of the honesty and good
intentions of those who have become the supervisors
of this great trust ; but I am strongly of the assurance
that the common sense of the country is largely dis-
posed to ask of the scientific gentlemen who have
been so largely the recipients of this congressional
bounty some practical demonstration upon the land,
of the faith they hold and teach.
AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 13
I come back to the old farm, with its meagre
stock and its wide acres. Of course there was some-
thing to be sold. Farmers never get on without that.
First of all, came the “ veals ”—selling in that day
for some two cents a pound, live weight. (They now
sell in the New York market for ten.) This bridged
over the spring costs, until the butter came from the
first growth of the pastures.
—How well I remember tossing myself from bed
at an hour before daylight, Seth (by previous orders)
having the horse and wagon ready, and by candle-
light seeing to the packing of the spring butter—the
firkins being enwrapped in dewy grass, fresh cut—
and then setting forth upon the long drive (twelve
miles) to the nearest market town. What a drive it
was! Five miles on, I saw the early people stirring
and staring at me, as they washed their faces in the
basin at the well. Then came woods, and silence, but
a strange odorous freshness in the air—possibly some
near coal-pit gave its kreosotic fumes, not unpleasant ;
some owl, in the swamps I passed, lifted its melancholy
hoot ; further on I saw some early riser driving his
cows to pasture; still further I caught sight of chil-
dren at play before some farm-house door, and the
sun being fairly risen, I knew their breakfasts were
waiting them within.
After this, I passed occasional teams upon the
3
14 RURAL STUDIES.
road, and gave a “good morning” to the drivers.
Then came the toll-gate: I wondered if the day’s
profits would be equal to the toll? After this came
the milk wagons whisking by me, and I envied them
their short rounds; at last (the sun being now two
hours high) came sight of the market town—city, I
should say; for the legislature had given it long
before the benefit of the title; and on the score of
church spires, and taverns, and shops, and news-
papers, and wickedness, it deserved the name.
I wish I could catch sight once more of the old
gentleman (a good grocer as the times went) who
plunged his thumb-nails into my golden rolls of but-
ter, and said: “ We’re buying pooty fair butter at
twelve and a half cents, but seein’ as it’s you, we'll
say thirteen cents a pound for this,” and he cleaned
his thumb-nail upon the breech of his trowsers.
I am not romancing here, I am only telling a
plain, straightforward story of my advent, some
twenty years ago, upon a summer’s morning into the
city of N—. I recall now vividly the detestably
narrow and muddy strees—the poor horse, (I had
bought it of the son of our deacon,) wheezing with
his twelve-mile drive—my own empty faint stomach
—the glimpses of the beautiful river between the
hills
to my friend the grocer at thirteen cents! I hope he
and the golden butter which I must needs sell
AN OLDSTYLE FARM. 15
had never any qualms of conscience ; but it is a faint
hope to entertain of grocers. I knew a single naively
honest one; but to him I never offered anything for
sale. I feared he might succumb to that temptation.
After the butter, (counting some forty odd pounds
in weight per week,) the next most important sale was
that df the lambs and wool. The lambs counted ordi-
narily—leaving out the losses of the newly dropped
ones by crows* and foxes—some hundred or more.
And nice lambs they were; far better than the half I
find in the markets to-day. Nothing puts sweeter and
more delicate flesh upon young lambs than that luxu-
riant growth of herbage which springs from freshly
cleared high-lying wood-lands. In piquancy and rich-
ness, it is as much beyond the lambs of stall-fed
sheep, as the racy mutton of the Dartmoors is beyond
the turnip-fatted wethers of the downs of Hampshire.
And yet these lambs were delivered to the butcher
at an ignoble price; I think a dollar and a half a head
was all that could be secured for animals which in
* Enthusiastic bird-lovers will learn, may be with surprise, that
crows are capable of this mischief, but it is even true. Their vil-
lainous method is to pluck out the eyes of the newly born innocents,
and then leave their prey until death and putrefaction shall have
ripened it to their taste. Only extreme hunger, however, will drive
the crow to such game. I think I have never felt more murderously
inclined than when I have seen upon a bleak day of April one of
these black harpies perched upon the head of its faintly struggling
victim, and deliberately plucking away the eyes from the socket.
16 RURAL STUDIES.
the city would bring to-day nearly five dollars. The
wool was bought up by speculators in that time, and
the speculators were not extravagant. I remember
very well driving off upon a summer’s afternoon,
mounted upon twelve great sacks of fleeces, and being
rather proud of my receipts, at the rate of twenty-
eight cents per pound. (The same wool would* have
brought two years since eighty cents per pound.)
After we disposed of the butter and the wool, and
during the late autumn months, came the cartage of
wood—some eight miles—to a port upon the river, at
which four dollars per cord was paid for good oak
wood, and five for hickory. At present rates of
labor, these are sums which would not pay for the
cutting and cartage.
I must not forget the swine—two or three vener-
able porkers, and in an adjoiming pen a brood of
young shoats—that would equip themselves in great
layers of fat, from the whey during the hot months,
and the yellow ears of corn with the first harvesting
of October. Day after day, through May, through
June, came the unwearied round of milking, of driy-
ing to pasture, of plowing, of planting; day after day
the sun beat hotter on the meadows, on the plow-
land, on the reeking sty; day after day the buds
unfolded—the pink of orchards hung in flowery sheets
over the scattered apple trees; the dogwood threw
AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 17
out its snowy burden of blossoms from the edges of
the wood; the oaks showed their velvety tufts, and
with midsummer there was a world of green and of
silence—broken only by an occasional “ Gee, Bright!”
of the teamster, or the cluck of a matronly hen, or
hum of bees, or the murmur of the brook. All this
inviting to a very dreamy indolence, which, I must
confess, was somehow vastly enjoyable.
Nothing to see? Lo, the play of light and shade
over the distant hills, or the wind, making tossed and
streaming wavelets on the rye. Nothing to hear?
Wait a moment and you shall listen to the bursting
melodious roundelay of the merriest singer upon
earth—the black and white coated Bob-o’-Lincoln, as
he rises on easy wing, floats in the sunshine, and
overflows with song, then sinks, as if exhausted by
his brilliant solo, to some swaying twig of the alder
bushes. Nothing tohope? The maize leaves through
all their close serried ranks are rustling with the
promise of golden corn. Nothing to conquer? There
are the brambles, the roughnesses, the inequalities,
the chill damp earth, the whole teeming swamp-land.
I have tried to outline the surroundings and ap-
pointments of many a back country farmer of New
England to-day. I am sure the drawing is true,
because it is from the life. I seem to see such an one
now on one of these May mornings an hour before
18 RURAL STUDIES.
sunrise. It is his market day, and the old sorrel mare
is harnessed, and tied to the hitch-post. The wagon
is of antique shape, bulging out in front and rear, and
with half-rounded ends.’ The high-backed seat is sup-
ported upon a V-shaped framework of ash, and coy-
ered over with a yellow buffalo skin, of which the
fur is half worn away. An oaken firkin is presently
lifted in, with a white linen cloth shut down under
its cover, and a corner of the buffalo turned over it
to shield it from the dust and the sunshine. Then
comes a bushel basket of eggs, packed in rowen hay ;
next the great clothes-basket, covered with a table
cloth, in which lie the two hind quarters of a veal
killed yesterday, (the fore quarters being kept for
home consumption.) In the corner of the wagon is
thrust a squat jug—its stopper being a corn-cob
wrapped around with newspaper—which is to be
filled with ‘“ Port o’ reek” molasses, Then, at last,
Jerusha, the wife, in silver spectacles, and Sunday
gown, clambers in—a stout woman, with her waist
belted in, after a loose sausage-like way—who has a
last word for her ‘darter’ Sally Ann, and then
another last word, and who cautions Enos (her hus-
band) about “ turnin’ too short,” and who asks if the
mare “an’t gittin’ kind o’ frisky with the spring
weather ? ”
So they drive away—Enos and Jerushy. They
‘AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 19
talk of the new “ howsen” along the way; they dis-
cuss the last Sunday’s sermon: Enos says, “ Pve
heerd that Hosea Wood is a cortin’ Malviny Smith.”
“Don’t b’lieve a word on’t, Enos. No sich a
thing. Did you put a baitin’ for the hoss in the
wagein, Enos ?”
“No, I vum! I forgot it,” says Enos.
“ What a plaguey careless creeter yow’re a gittin’
to be, Enos!”
And so the good worthy couple jog on. In town,
the jug is filled; the stout matron peers through her
spectacles at tapes, thread, needles, and a stout “ cal-
iker ” gown (fast colors) for Sally Ann. Pater-fami-
lias sees to the filling of the flat jug, he makes a fair
sale of the two quarters of veal, he buys a few “ gard-
ing” seeds, a new rake, a scythe snathe, and dickers
for a grindstone—unavailingly. Two hours before
nightfall, the good couple jog homeward again, with
humdrum quietude.
It is not such a scene of domesticity as I ever
forecast for my own enjoyment. I believed, and still
believe, that the dead life upon the back country
New England farms, is capable of being stirred into
alive life. Over and over I forecast the day when
the inequalities should be smoothed, the swamps
drained, the woodlands cleared up, (leaving only here
and there some clump of giant oaks or chestnuts
20 RURAL STUDIES.
about a loitering brooklet,) the cattle quadrupled in
number, the muck-lands yielding their harvests to be
composted with the concentrated manures of the
town, the very walls to be straightened (of which a
beginning had been made), and such stir and move-
ment and growth and cumulative fertility as should
make the neighborhood open its eyes wide, and stare
toa purpose. I saw the wasting rivulets dammed
and distributing their fertilizing flow over acres of
the side-land ; I saw the maple swamps giving place
to wide stretches of heavy meadow; I saw the wild
growth of the pasture-lands cut and piled and burned,
and all the hillsides glittering with a new wealth of
green.
But it was not to be. In the very heat of the
endeavor, there came a flattering invitation to change
the scene of labor and of observation, a single night
only being given for decision. I remember the night
as if only this morning’s sun broke it, and kindled it
into day. One way, the brooks, the oaks, the crops,
the memories, the homely hopes, lured me; the other
way, I saw splendid and enticing phantasmagoria—
London Bridge, St. Paul’s, Prince Hal, Fleet Street,
Bolt Court, Kenilworth, wild ruins. Next morning
I gave the key of the corn-crib to the foreman, and
bade the farm-land adieu.
Within a month I was strolling over the fields of
AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 21
Lancashire, wondering at that orderly, systematic
cultivation of which New England had not dreamed
—wondering at the grand results of this liberal and
generous culture, and more than ever disgusted at the
pinched and starveling way in which my countrymen
were cheating the land of its opulent privilege of pro-
duction.
I have written this little descriptive episode of
a farm-life in New England to serve as the background
for certain illustrative bints toward the amendment
of rural life—whether in matters of good husbandry,
or of good taste; I have furthermore ventured upon
certain homeliness of detail in these opening pages, to
show that I may have privilege of speech.
There is no manner of work done upon a New
England farm to which some day I have not put my
hand—whether it be chopping wood, laying wall,
sodding a coal-pit, cradling oats, weeding corn, shear-
ing sheep, or sowing turnips. Therefore, in any
future references which I may make in the course of
these papers to farm life, I trust that my good readers
will credit me with a certain connaissance de cause.
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ADVICE FOR LACKLAND.
Pomologists and Common People.
DO not know that the Horticulturists proper are
the best advisers of a man who wishes—as so many
do in these times—to establish his little home in the
country, and to make it charming with fruits and
flowers, and all manner of green things. I think that
the professional tastes or successes of one devoted to
Horticulture might lead him into a great many extrav-
agances of suggestion, in the entertainment of which,
the plain country liver—making lamentable failures—
would lose courage and faith. The Pomologists may
indeed say that there is no reason to make failure if
their suggestions are followed to the letter, and the
proper amount of care bestowed. This may be very
true; but they do not enough consider that nine out
of ten who love the country, and its delights of garden
9
a
26 RURAL STUDIES.
or orchard, can never be brought to that care and
nicety of observation, which, with the devoted Hor-
ticulturist, is a second nature.
Most men goto the country to make an easy thing
of it. If they must commence study of all the later
discoveries in vegetable physiology, and keep a sharp
eye upon all new varieties of fruit—lest they fall be-
hind the age ; and trench their land every third year,
and screen it—may be—in order to ensure the most
perfect comminution of the soil, they find themselves
entering upon the labors of a new profession, instead
of lightening the fatigues of an old one. Any
thorough practice of Horticulture does indeed involve
all this ; but there are plenty of outsiders, who, with-
out any strong ambition in that direction, have yet a
very determined wish to reap what pleasures they can
out of a country life, by such moderate degree of
attention and of Jabor as shall not overtax their time,
or plunge them into the anxieties of a new and en-
grossing pursuit.
What shall be done for them? To talk to such
people—and I dare say scores of them may be reading
these pages now—about the comparative vigor of a
vine grown from a single eye, or a vine grown from a
layer, or about the shades of difference in flavor be-
tween a Vicomtesse berry and a Triomphe de Gand—
is to talk Greek to them; it is as if a druggist were
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 24
to talk about the comparative influences of potash or
of some simple styptic upon an irritated mucous
membrane, to aman who wants simply—something
to cure a sore throat. It is the aim of the Horticul-
turist to push both land and plants to the last limit
of their capacity—to establish new varieties—to pro-
voke nature by incessant pinchings into some abnor-
mal development ; whereas the aim of the mass of
suburban residents is to havea cheery array of flowers
—good fruit and plenty of it, at the smallest possible
cost. If indeed the latter have any hope of winning
what they wish, by simple transfer of their home
from city to country, without any care or cost what-
ever, they are grossly mistaken. Ifa mere, bald love
of fruit-eating, without any love for the means of its
production—calls a man to the country, I would
strongly advise him to stay in town, and buy fruit
at the city markets; and the man who goes into the
country merely to stretch his legs, I would as strongly
advise to do it on Broadway, or in bed. Nature is a
mistress that must be wooed with a will; and there
is no mistress worth the having, that must not be
wooed in the same way.
But the distinction remains which I have laid
down between the aims of the Pomologists and of the
quiet country liver. And I am strongly inclined to
think that the former are a little too much disposed
28 RURAL STUDIES.
to sneer at the simple tastes of the latter. There is a
sturdy professional pride that enters into this, for
something. I have before now been thrown into the
company of breeders of blooded stock who would not
so much as notice the best native animals—no matter
how tenderly cared for, or how assiduously combed
down; and yet a good dish of cream most people
relish, even if the name of the cow is not written in
the Herd-books. Of course that nice discrimination
of tastes which enables a man to detect the minute
shades of difference in flavors, is a thing of growth
and long culture, and every man is inclined to respect
what has cost him long culture. But if I smack my
lips over the old Hovey, or a mahogany colored Wil-
- son, and stick by them, I do not know that the zeal-
ous Pomologist has a right to condemn me utterly,
because I do not root up my strawberry patches and
plant Russell’s Prolific, or the Jocunda in their place.
It is even doubtful if extreme cultivation of taste does
not do away with a great deal of that hearty gusto
with which most men enjoy good fruit. The man
who is all the summer through turning some little
tid-bit of flavor upon the tip of his tongue, and going
off into fits of rumination upon the possible difference
of flavor between a Crimson-Cone when watered from
an oak tub, and a Crimson-Cone when watered from
a chestnut tub, seems to me in a fair way of losing all
ADVICH FOR LACKLAND. 29
the appreciable and honest enjoyment of fruit which
he ever had in his life. There lives about the London-
Dock-Vaults a race of pimpled-faced men whose pro-
fessional service it is to guzzle small draughts of
Chateaux Margaux or of rare Port, which they whip
about with their tongues and expend their tasting
faculties upon, with enormous gravity: but who in
the world supposes that these can have the same
appreciation of an honest bumper of wine, which a
quiet Christian gentleman has, who sits down to his.
dinner with a moderate glass of good, sound Bor-
deaux at his elbow ?
Outsiders may, I think, find a little comfort in
this, and take courage in respect of their old Hovey
patches—if they will keep them only clean and rich.
But I have not said all this out of any want of
regard for Horticulture as an art, demanding both
skill and devotion ; nor have I said it from any want
of respect for those pomologists who are boldly lead-
ing the van in the prosecution of the Art; but I have
wished simply to clear away a little platform from
which to talk about the wants of humble cultivators,
and the way in which those wants are to be met.
And here my old question recurs—what shall be
done for them ?
To give my reply definite shape, I picture to my-
self my old friend Lackland, who has grown tired of
30 RURAL STUDIES.
thumping over the city pavements, who has two or
three young children to whom he wishes to give a
free tumble on the green sward, and who has an in-
tense desire to pick his grapes off his own vine, in-
stead of buying them on Broadway at forty cents the
pound. He comes to me for advice.
“‘ My dear fellow,” I should say, “ there’s no giv-
ing any intelligible advice to aman whose notions
are so crude. Do you want a country home for the
year, or only a half home for six months in the year,
from which you'll be flitting when the leaves are
gone?”
“To be sure,” says he, “it’s worth considering.
And yet what difference could it make with your
suggestions? Once established, I could determine
better.”
“Tt makes this difference :—if you propose to es-
tablish a permanent home for the year, you want to
provide against wintry blasts; you don’t want a hill-
top where a northwester will be driving in your teeth
all November; you want shelter; and you want near
walks for your children through the snow-banks to
school or church ; and you don’t want the sea boom-
ing at the foot of your garden all winter long. If it’s
only a summer stopping place you have your eye
upon, all these matters are of little account.”
?
“Suppose we make it a permanent home,” says
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 31
Lackland, “how much ground do I want to grow all
the fruit and vegetables I may need for my family ? ”
“That depends altogether upon your mode of
culture. If you mean to trench and manure thorough-
ly, and have good soil to start with, and keep it up
to the best possible condition, a half acre will more
than supply you.”
“ Call it two acres,” says he, “and what shall I
plant upon it?”
What shall a man plant upon his two acres of
ground, on which he wishes to establish a cozy home,
where his children can romp to their hearts’ content,
and he—take a serene pleasure in plucking his own
fruit, pulling his own vegetables, smelling at his own
rose-tree and smoking under his own vine? If he
goes up with the question to some high court of Hor-
ticulture, he comes away with a list as long as my
arm—in which are remontants that must be strawed
over, vines that must be laid down, vegetables that
must be coaxed by a fortnight of forcing, rare shrubs
that must have their monthly pinching, monster ber-
ries that must have their semi-weekly swash of guano
water, and companies of rare bulbs that, after wilting
of the leaves, must be dug, and dried, and watched,
and put out of reach, and found again, and replanted.
And my friend Lackland reporting such a list to
me, sees a broad grin gradually spreading over my face,
392 RURAL STUDIES.
“You think it a poor list, then ?” says he.
“T beg your pardon; it’s a most capital one;
there are the newest things of every sort in it; and
if you cultivate them as they ought to be cultivated,
yowll make a fine show; they'll elect you member of
a Horticultural Society; heaven only knows but
they’ll name you on a tasting committee.”
“That would be jolly,” says he.
“ And yowll need plenty of bass-matting, and
patent labels, and lead wire, and a box of grafting
instruments, and brass syringes of different capacities,
and gauze netting for some of your more delicate
fruits, and porcelain saucers to float your big goose-
berries in, and forcing beds, and guano tanks, and a
small propagating house, and a padlock on your
garden, and a Scotchman to keep the key at seventy
dollars a month, and a fag to work the compost-heaps
at forty-five more.”
“The devil I will! ” he says.
“Don’t be profane,” I should say, “or if you
needs must, you'll have better occasion for it when
you get fairly into the traces.”
And then—more seriously—“ My dear fellow, the
list, as I have said, is a capital one; but it supposes
most careful culture, extreme attention, and a love for
all the niceties of the art—which you have not got.
You want to take things easy; you don’t want to
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 33
torment yourself with the idea that your children
may be plucking unaware your specimen berries; you
don’t want to lock them out of the garden. As sure
as you undertake such a venture you'll be at odds
with your Scotchman ; you'll lose the names of your
own trees; you'll forget the hyacinths; your ‘ half-
hardys’ will all be scotched by the second winter ;
your dwarf ‘ Vicars’ that need such careful nursing
and high dressing will dwindle into lean shanks of
pears that have no flavor. My advice to you is—to
throw the fine list in the fire; to limit yourself, until
you have felt your way, to some ten or a dozen of
the best established varieties ; don’t be afraid of old
things if they are good; if a gaunt Rhode Island
Greening tree is struggling in your hedge-row, trim
it, scrape it, soap it, dig about it, pull away the turf
from it, lime it, and then if you can keep up a fair
fight against the bugs and the worms, you will have
fine fruit from it; if you can’t, cut it down. Ifa
veteran mossy pear tree is in your door-yard, groom
it as you would a horse—just in from a summering
in briary pastures—put scions of Bartlett, of Win-
ter Nelis, of Rostiezer into its top and sides. In an
unctuous spot of your garden, plant your dwarf
Duchess, Bonne de Jersey, Beurre Diel, and your
Glout Morceau. If either don’t do well, pull it up
and burn it; don’t waste labor on a sickly young
O%*
34 RURAL STUDIES.
tree. Save some sheltered spot for a trellis, where
you may plant a Delaware, an Iona or two, a Re-
becca, and a Diana. Put a Concord at your south-
side door—its rampant growth will cover your
trellised porch ina pair of seasons: it will give
you some fine clusters, even though you allow it to
tangle: the pomologists will laugh at you; but let
them: you will have your shade and the wilderness
of frolicsome tendrils, and at least a fair show of
purple bunches. Scatter here and there hardy her-
baceous flowers that shall care for themselves, and
which the children may pluck with a will. Don’t
distress yourself if your half acre of lawn shows
some hummocks, or dandelions, or butter-cups. And ,
if a wild clump of bushes intrude in a corner, don’t
condemn it too hastily ; it may be well to enliven it
with an evergreen or two—to dig about it, and paint
its edges with a few summer phloxes or roses. You
will want neither Scotchman nor forcing houses for
this.”
This is the way in which I should have talked to
my friend Lackland, who would want to take things
easy.
I should not wonder if he were to buy his place
of two acres, and make trial. God bless him if he
does.
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 35
Lackland Makes a Beginning.
Y friend Lackland—as I suspected he would—
has purchased a little place of two and a half
acres, some thirty or forty miles from the city by the
New Haven railway. He makes his trips to and
fro with a little badly-disguised fear of decayed
‘ sleepers,” it is true ; and suffers from the still more
all
the seats being occupied, and the company being
frequent embarrassment of riding upon his feet
unfortunately too much straitened in their circum-
stances to add to the number of their carriages.
He was disposed to resent such things at the start,
and was even stirred into writing a brief and indig-
nant appeal to an independent morning journal ; but
upon being answered by an attorney for the company
or a road commissioner, who called him names and
abused him, as if he had been a witness before a
court of justice, he subsided into that meek respect
for corporations, and awe of all their procedure,
which are the characteristics of a good American
citizen, and of most well-ordered newspapers.
New Yorkers learn how to bear such things ;
there is no better schooling for submission than a
two or three years course of travel upon the city
railways; Lackland is submissive. And after a
36 RURAL STUDIES.
fatiguing day in Maiden Lane, having come up
Fourth Avenue with a stout woman in his lap, he
is grateful for even a standpoint upon one of the
New Haven cars.
But this is all by the way.
My friend Lackland has, as I said, bought a small
country place within a mile of village and station,
for which the purchase-money, in round numbers, was
six thousand dollars. A certain proportion of this
sum was paid in view of a projected horse railway,
which is to pass the door, and to unfold building
sites over his whole area of land. As yet, however,
it is in the rough. There is indeed “a brand-new
house upon it—two stories, and only three years
built,” as he writes me, “ with ell wash-room, and
all well painted with two coats of white lead. - The
property is distributed into six different enclosures,
of which I send you a draught.”
And herewith I give the exhibit of Mr. Lack-
land’s little place, with its condition at time of pur-
chase.
“ You will observe,” he continues, “ that there is
rather a cramped aspect about the door-yard and
entrance, these being hemmed in by a white picket
fence on either side and in front. It is unfortunately
the only sound fence about the premises; the garden
(c) showing a tottering remnant of one of the same
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 37
<—XONONE
pattern, and the other enclosures never having boasted
anything finer than ‘post and rail’ fixtures, with a
half-wall to prop them upon some of the exterior
lines. The enclosure (¢@) is what the previous owner
called his back yard ; it was traversed, as you see, by
a cart-path leading straight to the barn court, and
was encumbered with a prodigious array of old wood,
brush heaps, a broken cart or two, and one of the
most luxurious thickets of burdock and stramonium
which I ever remember to have seen. He (former
owner) tells me stramonium is good for ‘biles.’ Is it ?
“The buildings around the little enclosure marked
(7) will explain themselves—a barn, a hog-pen, a cow-
shed—all in most dilapidated condition, so much so
that I shall have to make a new investment in the
38 RURAL STUDIES.
way of stable room. There is the remnant of an old
orchard upon the plot marked (4), with only three or
four ragged and disorderly looking trees; at (/)
again, there is a patch which has been in potatoes and
corn for an indefinite number of years, and which has
a terrible bit of ledge in the corner (marked 7) over-
run with briars and stunted cedars, that I fear will
cost a round sum to reduce to a level. The fields (¢)
and (h) are pieces of mangy grass scattered over with
occasional bushes, but I do not despair of putting a
smooth face upon them. The only view from the
premises that is worth considering, is rather a pretty
one (indicated by a dotted line) of the village spire,
and a few of the village roofs peeping out from the
trees, and back of them a glimpse of the Sound. I
send a rough sketch of it.
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 39
“ But the misfortune is, the view is only to
be seen to advantage from my wash-room door, or
from one spot in the garden just now encumber-
ed with enormous Lawton briars. The first posi-
tion is soapy and damp for visitors, and the last—
tedious.
“ What I wish of you,”—my friend Lackland con-
tinues to write,—“ is to give me a hint or two about
the combing of this rough little home of mine into
shape. And in order to a more definite understand-
ing I will tell you briefly what I don’t want, and next
what I do want.
“ And first, being a plain man, I don’t want
crooked walks, for the mere sake of having them
crooked ; I don’t want to go into my gate in a hurry
—when I know dinner is already smoking on the
table—and yet, after entrance, be compelled to describe
a circle planted with I know not what barbarian ever-
greens, before I can get to my door.
“T don’t want my stable yard absolutely in sight ;
least of all do I wish to be compelled to traverse it,
before I can get sight of my pet mare.
“T don’t wish a carriage drive to my door-step,
when my door is only fifty feet from the road by a
tape-line.
**T don’t want to pull down or to move the present
house, because in so doing I should sacrifice a capital
40 RURAL STUDIES.
cellar, which I must do the previous owner the justice
to say, has been capitally arranged.
“T don’t want such a great array of fences; I
don’t want a labyrinth of walks; I don’t want my
garden so near the street as that chance passers-by
shall see me in my shirt sleeves and hail me with:
Hello! Squire, what you goin’ to ask a peck for them
pasnips ?’
“TI do want a little of good elbow-room about the
house and entrance, as if I were not in momentary
fear of an incursion of pigs from the back yard; I do
want a garden of somewhat larger area, where I can
grub away at my will; and if you draw me a plan,
put at least a fourth of the whole land into herbs and
garden stuff. I want the view kept of the village
spire, and the background of sea, and some lounging
place from which I may look upon it at my leisure.
I want a poultry-yard of such dimensions that I may
count upon a fresh egg every day to my breakfast ; I
want provision for a salad on Easter Sunday ; and if
you could contrive me some cheap fashion of a cold
grapery to try my hand upon, I should be thankful ;
only let it be so situated that I may (if grapes fail)
turn it into a winter room for my hens. I want you
to tell me what I can do with the rock I must blast
away from the edge in the corner of the potatoe-
patch. I want something I may cail a lawn—to
ADVICE TO LACKLAND. 4]
satisfy my wife’s pride—and a bit or two of shrub-
bery in it. But above all, I want at least a third of
the land in good wholesome greensward, with no
encumbering trees—whether fruit or exotic—where I
may turn my mare for a run, or play at base ball with
my boys, or cut a bit of hay, or—if the humor takes
me—try my hand at a premium crop of something.”
> ee
eRe ings
Sxteen.ce os
X82 NAGE
Upon this I made a little study of Lackland’s plot
of land, and furnished him with this design.
And I furthermore said to him, your ledge (which
I have marked g) is one of the most picturesque
features about your place; so I have thrown it boldly
into your garden, in such way that it will be in full
view from the gate, and I advise you to cherish it—
49 RURAL STUDIES.
to plant columbines on its ledges, and your Tom
Thumb geraniums along its lower edge, in such sort
that in autumn they will seem like a running flame
of fire skirting the cliff and blending with the crimson
verbenas upon the circle in the centre of the garden.
In (f) you have a map of the garden and your work
place, and to make the privacy of it entire, you may
plant a hedge for a barrier along the line (A) or you
may set a trellis there and cover it with vines. At
(e) you have a hot-bed to provide your Easter salad,
and you may multiply the hot-beds if you like along
the border (7) which is made under shelter of a high
fence to the north. At (c) you have your cheap
grapery built against the south-side of the barn, and
convenient for the transmutation you suggest; at (0)
is your stable, and at (7) your poultry house with a
sunny stable court to the south of it. At (mm) you
have your paddock for the mare, or your mall for
base-ball, or your plow-ground for a premium crop—
utterly free from shrubbery, and communicating with
barn and with street alike. The lawn explains and
describes itself; but I would only suggest that the
shrubbery marked (7) will be a capital spot, under
shade from south, for your Rhododendrons;* and the
* Various horticulturists have discussed the method of isolating
a border of rhododendrons from the influences of a forest screen to
the south—one suggesting simple amputation of the roots of the
ADVICE TO LACKLAND. 43
circle (7) I would advise you to fill with a dense cop-
pice of hemlock spruce to break the wind from the
north. Along the border marked (%) you can either
plant apple trees, and at fifteen feet of distance, a
thicker line of dwarf pears (being careful to trench or
subsoil the ground), or you can stock it with a pro-
tecting belt of evergreens. In either case, give
thorough cultivation, if you wish the best results.
At (a) is the “ brand-new ” house remodelled in
such fashion that you have a southern porch, a
kitchen in the rear, and a bay-window in your dining-
room, which commands (by the dotted line) the same
view which now wastes its charm upon the stout
woman at your wash-tub.
It is possible that my friend Lackland may report
progress to me some time in the course of the sum-
mer.
trees forming the screen, and the other the interposition of a wall.
The last is expensive and the former liable to be neglected. An
open ditch, some two feet deep by eighteen inches wide, I have seen
most effectively employed for the end proposed, by a very successful
southern horticulturist, who succeeded, year after year, in securing
a magnificent bloom of some ten or twelve varieties of Azaleas,
within twenty feet of gigantic cypresses and magnolias. The ditch
may also serve as a convenient receptacle for leaves and the rakings
of the borders.
44 RURAL STUDIES.
Lackland’s House Plans.
; NFORTUNATELY, almost every city gentle-
man who comes into possession—whether by
purchase or otherwise—of a plain country house,
from which some honest well-to-do farmer has just
decamped, puzzles his brain first of all, to know how
he shall make a “fine thing” of it. My advice to
such puzzled gentlemen, in nine cases out of ten,
would be—“ not to do it.”
If the ceilings are low, and the beams show here
and there the generous breadth and depth of timber
which old-time builders put into their frames, cherish
these remembrances of a sturdier stock than ours ;
scrub and paint and paper as you will, but if the
skeleton be stanch, and no dry rot shake the joints
or give a sway to the floors and ceiling—try, for a
few years at least, the moral effect of an old house.
It can do no harm to a dapper man from the city. It
may teach his wife possibly some of the humilities
which she cannot learn on Broadway. With a free,
bracing air whistling around the house corners, and
here and there an open fire within, low rooms are by
no means poisonous; and if the trees do not so far
shade the roof as to keep away the fierce outpourings
of a summer’s sun, and the low chambers carry a
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 45
stifling air in August, it is only necessary, in many
instances, to tear away the garret flooring, and to run
up the chamber ceilings into tent-like canopies, with
a ventilator in their peak—to have as free circulation
as in the town attics. And such tented ceilings may
be prettily hung with French striped papers, with a
fringe-like border at the line of junction of the verti-
cal with the sloping wall—in such sort that your
military friend, if he comes to pass a July night with
you, may wake with the illusion of the camp upon
him, and listen to such réveille as the crowing of a
cock, or the piping of a wren.
But a monstrous and intolerable grievance to all
people of taste lies in the attempt to set off one of
those grave exteriors, at which I have hinted, by
some of the more current architectural cockneyisms.
Thus, an ancient door, with the dark green paint in
blisters upon it, and opening in the middle, perhaps,
is torn away to give place to the newest fancy from
the sash factories, and a glazing of red and blue.
For my part, I have great respect for a door that has
banged back and forth its welcomes and its good-
byes for half acentury ; the very blisters on it seem to
me only the exuding humors of a jovial hospitality ;
and all the weather-stains are but honorable scars of
a host of battles against wind and rain. I would no
more barter such an old-time door against the new-
46 RURAL STUDIES.
ness of the joiners, than I would barter old-time
honesty against that of Oil Creek, or of Wall Street.
Then again, your cockney must tear away the
homely sheltering porch, with its plank “ settles ” on
either side, for some stupendous affair, with columns
for which all heathenism has been sacked to supply
the capitals.
If renovation must be made, it should be made in
keeping with the original style of the house—except
indeed change go so far as to divest it altogether of
the old aspect. In some farm-houses that may be
taken in hand for repairs, it might be well even to
strain a point in the direction of antiquity, and to
replace a swagging door by a stanch one of double-
battened oak or chestnut, with its wrought nails show-
ing their heads in checkered diamond lines up and
down, and its hinges, worked into some fanciful pat-
tern of a dragon’s tail, exposed. Then there should
be a ponderous iron knocker, whose din should reach
all over the house, and the iron thumb-latch—not cast
and japanned, but showing stroke of the hammer,
and taking on rust where the maid cannot reach with
her brick-dust. Of course, too, there should be the
two diamond lights like two great eyes peering from
under the frontlet of the old-fashioned stoop. All
these, if the house be so ancient and weather-stained
as to admit of it, will demonstrate that the occupant
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 47
is among the few who are left in these days of petro-
leum, who make a merit of homeliness, and cherish
tenderly its simplest features. If the house be really
weak in the joints, the sooner it comes down the
better; but if it has snugness and stiffness and com-
fort, let not the owner be persuaded of the carpenters
to graft upon it the modernisms of their tricksy
joinery. I can well understand how a dashing buck
of two or three and thirty should prefer a young
woman in her furbelows, to an old one in her bomb-
azine; but if the fates put him in leash with an
ancient lady, let him think twice before he bedizens
her gray head with preposterous frontlets, and puts a
mesh of girl’s curls upon the nape of her old neck.
I have said all this asa prelude to a little talk
about certain changes which my friend Lackland has
wrought in his country place—thirty miles away by
the New Haven road. The house he purchased could
boast no respectability of age. The height of its
rooms was of that medium degree which neither sug-
gested any notion of quaintness nor of airiness. Its
entrance-hall was pinched and narrow ; its stairway
inhospitably lean, and altogether its appointments
had that cribbed and confined aspect, which, to one
used to width and sunshine, was almost revolting.
The wash-room was positively the only apartment
below stairs which had a southern aspect. I give his
48 RURAL STUDIES.
drawing of it, and it is a good type of a great many
‘small and convenient houses” scattered through our
country towns.
“Of course, this will never do,” wrote Lackland
to me, “and yet the skin of the house (as our car-
penter calls it) is very good, and I wish to make the
needed changes, so far as possible, without disturbing
the exterior outline of the main building. But how
shall I rid myself of that preposterously narrow en-
trance-way in which I can almost fancy Mrs. L., (who
is something large) getting wedged on some warm
day? How shall I throw sunlight into that dismal
parlor? You will perceive that along the whole
south front there is not a single available window
below. Now, half the charm of a country place, to
my notion, lies in the possession of some sunny porch
upon which the early vines will clamber, and under
whose eaves the Phebe birds will make their nests.
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 49
I want, too, my after-dinner lounges at a sunny door,
where I can smoke my pipe, basking in the yellow
light, as I watch the shadows chasing over the grass.
About the stupid little design I send you, there is
neither hope nor possibility of this.
“ Again, even with a dining-room, or library
added, and perhaps a kitchen, I shall be still in want
of further chamber range, which if I gain (as our
carpenter suggests) by piling on a story more, it
appears to me that I should give to the narrow front
of the house an absurd cock-loft look that would be
unendurable.
“Mrs. L. and myself have scored out an incredible
number of diagrams—all which have been discussed,
slept on, admired, and eventually condemned. Some-
times it is the old pinched entrance way that works
3
50 RURAL STUDIES.
condemnation ; sometimes (on my part) the lack of
sunny exposure; and oftenest (on hers) the lack of
closets. She insists that no man yet ever planned a
house properly on this score. She doesn’t see clearly
(being deficient in mathematics) why a closet shouldn’t
be made in every partition wall. She don’t definitely
understand, I think, why a person should thwack his
head in a closet under the stairs. She sometimes (our
carpenter tells us) insists upon putting a window
through a chimney; and on one occasion (it was
really a very pretty plan) contrived so as to conduct
a chimney through the middle of the best bed room ;
and the nicest scheme of all, to my thinking, post-
tively had the stairs left out entirely.
“In this dilemma, I want you to tell us what can
be done with the old shell, so as to make it passably
habitable, until we find out if this new passion for
country life is to hold good.”
Upon this I ventured to send him this little plan
of adaptation, which, though not without a good
many faults that could be obviated in building anew,
yet promised to meet very many of their wants, and
gave to Lackland his sunny frontage.
“Here you have,” I wrote him, “ your south door,
and porch to lounge upon, and your south bow win-
dow to your library, which, if the rural tastes grow
upon you, you can extend into a conservatory, cover-
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 51
ing the whole southern flank of the apartment. The
“parlor, too, has its two south windows, and although
I should have preferred to place the chimney upon
_ the northern side, to the exclusion of the window
there, yet it seemed best to make use of the flue
already established. The hall is well lighted from
the north, and will give room for the hanging of any
of your great-aunt’s portraits, if you have any.
“There is an objection to traversing the dining-
room in going from the kitchen to the hall-door ; but
it could not well be obviated, with the existing shell
of your house, without reducing the size of the dining-
room too much, or (another resource) without increas-
ing largely the dimensions of the hall—throwing the
intervening space between it and kitchen into store
52 RURAL STUDIES.
rooms and making the library do duty for the spread
of your table.
“The dining-room, moreover, having only north
exposure, you may condemn as dismal. I propose to
obviate this and to give it a cheerful south light by
an extravagance which I dare say the architects will
condemn, but which will have its novelty and possi-
ble convenience.
“The fireplaces of library and of dining-room, are,
you observe, back to back. Now I would suggest
that the two flues be carried up with a sweep to
either side (uniting in the garret) in such sort, that a
broad arched opening shall be left above the mantel
from one room into the other. This may be draped,
if you like, with some tasteful upholstery ; but not so
far as to forbid a broad flow of the warm light from
the bow window of the library; while upon the
mantels of even height, you may place a Wardian
case that shall show its delicate plumes of fern
between your table and the southern sunlight all
winter long. It would moreover be quite possible,
owing to the breadth of partition wall afforded by
the two flues, to arrange folding shutters for the
complete closing of the arch-way whenever desired.
For my own part, I love such little novelties of ar-
rangement, which mark a man’s house as his own, how-
ever much they may put the carpenters to the gape.
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 53
“ As for the additional chamber-room, never think
of putting a third story upon so narrow-throated a
house, or you will give it an irredeemable gawkyness.
If the space be needed, find it by throwing a mansard
roof over all, and lighting your cock-lofts with dormer
windows. Then paint with discretion ; avoid white,
and all shades of lilace—the most abominable color
that was ever put upon a house—you can’t match the
flowers, and don’t try, I beg. A mellow brown or a
cool gray are the best for the principal surfaces. In
i i
H all | | f
the trimmings, study narrowly the gradients of color.
Let there be no forced contrasts, and no indecisive
mingling of tones; above all, remember that with
54 RURAL STUDIES.
your elevations, you want to aim to reduce the ap-
parent height ; work in, therefore, as many horizontal
lines of decisive color as your exterior carpentry will
allow; give dark hoods, if you will, to your front
parlor windows, and let the cornice-finish below your
mansard roof reach well down, and carry dark shad-
ing. ;
“¢ When you are fairly in, I will come and see how
you look.”
Lackland’s Gardener.
ITH his grounds laid out and his house in
fairly habitable condition—according to the
plans already laid before the reader—Lackiand holds
various consultations in regard to a proper gardener
—consults as in duty bound, first of all, Mrs. Lack-
land.
Mrs. Lackland wishes an industrious, sober man,
who will keep the walks neat and tidy, who knows
enough of flowers not to hoe up any of her choice
annuals,—(whose seeds she dots about in all direc-
tions, marking the places with fragments of twigs
thrust in at all possible angles) ; she wishes moreover,
a good-natured man, who shall be willing to come
and pot a flower for her at a moment’s notice; one
who will not forget the sweet marjoram or the sage,
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 55
and who will not allow the thyme to die in the
winter. .
He consults the city seedsmen, who refer him to
a half-dozen of stout men who may be lounging upon
the barrels in the front of their sales-rooms on almost
any fine morning in April; but, on entering into
parley with them, he is so confounded with their
talk about ranges, and pits, and bottom heat, and
Pelargoniums, and Orchids, that he withdraws in
disgust.
He consults the newspapers, where he finds a con-
siderable array of advertisements of “ steady, capable
men, willing to make themselves useful upon a gentle-
> he communicates with some two or
man’s place ;’
three of the most promising advertisers, and arranges
for an interview with them. Lackland has great faith,
like almost all the men J ever met, in his study of
physiognomy. About a man’s temper or his honesty,
he can hardly be mistaken, he thinks, if he can once
set eyes upon him. He is therefore strongly disposed
in favor of a stout, jolly-faced Irishman, who assures
him he can grow as good “ vigitables as enny man in
Ameriky.”
“ And flowers, Patrick (Patrick O’Donohue is his
name), you could take care of the flowers ? ”
“Oh, flowers, and begorra, yis, sir—roses, pinks,
vi lets—roses—whativer you wish, sir.”
o*
56 RURAL STUDIES.
“ And, Patrick, you could harness a horse some-
times if it were necessary.”
“ Horses, and indade, yis, sir; ye may jist say ’m
at home in a stable, sir.”
“And the poultry, Patrick, you could look after
the poultry, couldn’t you?”
‘“« And indade, sir, that’s what I can ; there’s niver
aman in the counthry can make hens lay as I can
make ’em lay.”
In short, Lackland bargains with Patrick, and
reports him at the home-quarters “a perfect jewel of
aman.”
The best of implements are provided, and a great
stock of garden seeds—the choice of the latter being
determined on after family consultation, in which all
the vegetables ever heard of by either party to the
counsel, have been added to the list. If a man have
a garden, why not enjoy all that a garden can pro-
duce—egeg-plants, and okra, and globe artichokes, and
salsify, and white Naples radishes, and Brussels
sprouts? The seed of all these are handed over to
the willing Patrick, who, as Mrs. Lackland im-
pressively enumerates the different labels (Patrick
not being competent to the reading of fine print,
as he freely confesses), repeats after her, “ Naples
radish, yis, m’am}; artichokes, yis, m’am; okra, yis,
m’am.”
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. E74
Lackland provides frames and glass for the early
salads he covets so much, and Patrick, with the fresh
sweepings of the stables, has presently a bed all
a-steam. At the mere sight of it the Lacklands regale
themselves with thoughts of crisp radishes, and the
mammoth purple fruit of the egg-plants. The seeds
are all put in—early cabbage, cauliflower, peppers,
radishes—under the same frame by the judicious
O’Donohue. The cabbages and the radishes come
forward with a jump. Their expedition forms a
pleasant theme for the physiological meditation of
Lackland. He is delighted with the stable manure,
with the cabbage seed, and with the O’Donohue. He
is inclined to think disrespectfully of the seed of
peppers and of egg plants in the comparison. But
the bland O’Donohue says, ‘‘ We must give ’em a little
more hate.”
And after some three or four days, Lackland is
stupefied, on one of his visits to his hot bed, to find
all his fine radishes and cabbages fairly wilted away ;
there is nothing left of them but a few sun-blackened
stumps ; the peppers and egg-plants show no signs of
germination.
“What does all this mean?” says Lackland ;
“the cabbages are dead, Patrick.”
“Yis, sir—it’s the hate, sir. The sun is very strong
here, sir; we must give ’em a little more air, sir.”
58 RURAL STUDIES.
And they get the air—get the air (by a little for-
getfulness on the part of Patrick) night as well as
day; the peppers and egg-plants, after a fortnight
more of expectation, do not appear.
“ How’s this, Patrick ? no start yet.”
“‘ And are ye sure the seed’s good, sir?”
“Tt’s all Thorburn’s seed.”
“Then, of course, it ought to be good, sir; but,
ye see, there’s a dale o’ chatery now-a-days, sir.”
In short, Lackland’s man Patrick is a good-natured
blunder-head, who knows no better than to submit
his young cauliflowers and peppers to the same
atmospheric conditions in the forcing frame. The
result is that Lackland buys his first salads in the
market, and his first peas in the market, and his first
beets in the market. All these creep along very
slowly under Patrick’s supervision, and the onion seed
is fairly past hope, being buried too deep for the sun
to have any influence upon its germinating proper-
ties.
“ But how is this,” says the long-suffermg Lack-
land, at last, “‘ our neighbors are all before us, Pat-
mick? 2?
“ Well, sir, it?s me opinion that the land is a bit
cowld, sir. Wait till July, sir, and you'll see vigi-
tables.”
And Patrick grubs away with a great deal of
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 59
misdirected energy—slicing off, in the heat of his
endeavor, two or three of Mrs. Lackland’s choicest
rocket larkspurs; whereupon that lady comes down
upon him with some zeal.
“Larkspur! and that’s a larkspur, is it, m’am
(scratching his head reflectingly) ? and, begorra, I
niver once thought ’twas a larkspur. Pity, pity ; and
so it was, indade, a larkspur? Well, well, but it’s
lucky it wa’nt a rose-bush, m’am.”
And yet the good-natured blunder-head in the
shape of a gardener is far more endurable, to one
thoroughly interested in country life, than the surly
fellow who, if he gives you early vegetables, resents
a suggestion, and who will take a pride in making
any particular scheme of the proprietor miscarry by
a studied neglect of its details.
Upon the whole, I should lay down as sound
advice for any one who, like Lackland, is beginning
to establish for himself a home in the country that
shall be completely enjoyable, the following rules
with respect to the pursuit and employment of a
gardener :
First, if your notion of country enjoyment is
limited by thought of a good place where you may
lie down under the trees, and frolic with your chil-
dren, or smoke a pipe under your vine, or clambering
rose-tree at evening—find a gardener whois thorough-
60 RURAL STUDIES.
ly taught, and who can place upon your table every
day the freshest and crispest of the vegetables and
fruits of the season, leaving you no care, but the care
of bills for superphosphates and trenching. If you
stroll into his domain of the garden, take your walk-
ing-stick or your pipe there, if you choose—but never
a hoe or a pruning knife. Joke with him, if you like,
but never advise him. Take measure of his fitness by
the fruits he puts upon your table, the order of your
grounds, and the total of your bills. If these are
satisfactory—keep him: if not, discharge him, as you
would a lawyer who managed your case badly, or a
doctor who bled or purged you toa sad state of
depletion.
If, on the other hand, in establishing a country
home, you have a wish to identify yourself with its
growth into fertility and comeliness, in such sort that
you may feel that every growing shrub is a little
companion for you and yours—every vine a friend—
every patch of herbs, of vegetables, or of flowers, an
aid to the common weal and pleasures of home, in
which you take, and will never cease to take, a per-
sonal interest and pride—if all this be true, and you
have as good as three hours a day to devote to per-
sonal superintendence—then, by all means, forswear
all gardeners who come to you with great recom-
mendations of their proficiency. However just these
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 61
may be, all their accomplishments, ten to one, will be
only a grievance to you. It is far better, if you be
really in earnest to taste ruralities to the full, to find
some honest, industrious fellow—not unwilling to be
taught—who will lend a cheerful hand to your efforts
to work out the problem of life in the country for
yourself.
You will blunder; but in such event you will
enjoy the blunders. You will burn your young cab-
bages, but you will know better another year. Your
first grafts will fail, but you will find out why they
fail. You will put too much guano to your sweet
corn, but you will have a pungent agricultural fact
made clear to you. You will leave your turnips and
beets standing too thickly in the rows; but you will
learn by the best of teaching—never to do so again.
You will buy all manner of fertilizing nostrums—and
of this it may require a year or two to cure you.
You will believe in every new grape, or strawberry,
—and of this it may require many years to cure you.
You will put faith, at the first, in all the horticultural
advices you find in the newspapers,—and of this you
will speedily be cured.
In short, whoever is serious about this matter, of
taking a home in the country (if his rural taste be a
native sentiment, and not a whim), should abjure the
presence of a surly master in the shape of a gardener,
62 RURAL STUDIES.
who can tell him how the Duke of Buccleugh (or any
other) managed such matters.
God manages all of nature’s growth and bloom in
such way, that every earnest man with an observant
eye can so far trace the laws of His Providence, as to
insure to himself a harvest of fruit, or grain, or
flowers. And whatever errors may be made are only
so many instructors, to teach, and to quicken love by
their lesson.
Let us not then despair of our friend Lackland,
though his cabbages are burnt, and his beets are
behind the time. I shall visit him again, and trust
that I may find his verbenas and lilies in bloom,
though his larkspurs have been cut down.
A Pig anda Cow.
{ PROPOSE an odd horticultural subject ; but the
man who plants a garden, and builds a cottage,
and carries in his thought the hope of shaking off the
dust of the city under green trees upon his own
sward-land, where some—nameless party—in white
lawn, with blue ribbon of a sash (as in Mr. Irving’s
pretty picture of a wife), stands ready to greet him,
after an hour of torture .at the hands of our humane
railroad directors—the man, I say, who looks forward
to all this, and enters upon the experience, thinks,
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 63
sooner or later, of a cow and a pig—the pig to con-
sume the waste growth of his garden, and the cow to
supply such tender food for his growing ones as they
most need.
The pig can hardly be regarded as a classic ani-
mal; Virgil, indeed, introduces him as crunching
acorns under elm-trees—which account I cannot help
reckoning as apocryphal. But he is a very jolly and
frisky little animal in his young days, not without a
good deal of clumsy grace in his movements, and
showing a most human zeal for the full end of the
trough.
There is almost the same diversity of opinion with
respect to the different races of pigs, which our horti-
cultural friends indulge in with respect to fruits. It
is always an awkward matter to discuss the merits of
different families, whether of animals who talk, or
animals who only grunt or bellow. If the raw sub-
urban resident, in whose interest I make these notes,
has an ambition to rear a prize hog that shall out-
weigh anything his neighbors can show, and intends
to keep his bin full of rank material, I should cer-
tainly advise the great-boned Chester County race,
which, with judicious feeding, come to most elephan-
tine proportions. If, on the other hand, he should
prefer a dapper, snug-jointed beast, that shall not be
particular in regard to food, and which will yield him
64 RURAL STUDIES.
cutlets in which the muscular material shall not be
utterly overlaid and lost in fatty adipose matter, I
should counsel the sleek Berkshire. Or if, uniting the
two, he should desire a delicate limbed, well-rounded,
contented little animal, that shall browse with equa-
namity upon the purslane and the spare beet-tops
from his garden, I know none safer to commend than
the Suffolks. Nor is it essential that he be thorough
bred, since the tokens of pur sang are a red baldness,
and a possible twisting away of the beast’s own tail,
which do not contribute to good looks.*
All this is but preparatory to my reply to Lack-
land, who writes to me: ‘ We have voted to have a
pig and a cow; what kinds shall I get, and how shall -
I keep them, and what shall I do with them ? ”
And I wrote back to him: ‘“ Buy what the dealers
will sell you for a Suffolk; if he lack somewhat in
purity of blood (as he probably will), don’t be punc-
tilious in the matter. Let his sleeping and eating
quarters be high and dry; and if you can manage
beyond this a little forage ground for him to disport
himself in, and wallow (if he will) on wet days—so
much the better. The forage, if you keep him sup-
* T must drop, in a note, commendatory mention of the Earl of
Sefton Stock, of which a few animals have latterly found their way
to this country—a trim, sound, long-bodied breed, easy keepers, and
giving, with proper care, delicious rashers of bacon,
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 65
plied with raw material in the shape of muck, or old
turfs from your hedge-rows, will add largely to your
compost heap, and in this way he will make up any
possible sacrifice in his flesh. Miss Martineau, I
know, in her ‘Two Acre Farming,’ advises severe
cleanliness; and if the only aim were a roaster for
your table and accumulation of fat, there might be
virtue in the recommendation. But a pig’s work
among your turfs is worth half of his pork. He will
thrive very likely upon the waste from your table and
your garden. But, against any possible shortness of
food supply, it were well to provide a bag of what
the grain people will sell you as ‘ship stuff;’ and
this, stirred into the kitchen wash, will make an
unctuous holiday gruel for your little beast, for which
he will be clamorously grateful.
“ Again; the stye should be convenient to the
garden (a hemlock spruce or two will shut off the
sight of it, and a sweet honey-suckle subdue the odors
of it) ; then you may throw over chance bits of purs-
lane, or the suckers from your sweet corn, or a gone-
by salad, and find thanks in the noisy smacking of his
chops. I would not give a fig for a country house
where no such homely addenda are allowed, and
where a starched air of propriety must always reign,
to the complete exclusion of every stray weed, and to
the exclusion of the rollicking Suffolk grunter in its
66 RURAL STUDIES.
corner, who squeals his entreaty, and declares thanks
with the click-clack of his active jaws.
“ He will take on larger and clumsier proportions
month by month, and will be none the worse for the
occasional carding which your zealous Irishman can
afford him in spare hours; and when, in the month
of October or November, the waste growth of the
garden is abating, and the frost has nipped the bean-
tops, and laid your tomatoes in a black sprawl upon
the ground, your Suffolk (with, say, one or two addi-
tional bags of mixed feed) should be ripe for the
knife.
“My advice, at this conjuncture, would be—sell
him to the butcher. Those who like pig flesh better
would give you rules for cut and curing. But, while
I have considerable respect for the pork family when
fairly afoot and showing grateful appreciation of the
delights of life and of a full trough, I have very little
consideration for the same animals when baked or
stewed. Charles Lamb’s pleasant eulogium on roast
pig is one of the most terrible instigators of indiges-
tion that I know; and I want no better theory for
that charming writer’s occasional periods of bitter
despondency, than to suppose him to have dined ‘ at
seven, sharp,’ upon the dish he has so pleasantly and
fearfully extolled.
“T do not mean to say that exception is not to be
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 67
made in favor of a good rasher of bacon at breakfast,
with a fresh egg (from the cock—as a city friend
once suggested in a flow of cheery, rural exuberance) ;
nor do I think anything can be righteously said
against a snug bit of clear pork in a dish of boiled
corned brisket of beef; nay, I would still further
extend the exception to a crisp fry of delicate slices
as an accompaniment of grilled trout, where the latter
fall below a half-pound in weight; nor do I think
great harm of a thin blanket of the same condiment
to enwrap a roasted quail, or slivers of it to enlard
delicately a fricandeau of veal. But, as for pork
chops, or pork roast, or pork boiled, to be eaten as
the chief piece nutritive of a dinner—it is an abomi-
nation! Our friends the Jews have not only Scrip-
tural reason in the thing, but reasons physiological.
“ And now, my dear fellow, having despatched
your pig (who should be bought for five or six dollars
at seven weeks old, and should be sold at twenty—
from the growth of your garden and a splicing bag
of ship stuff), you will have, if you have used proper
vigilance, some three to four loads of choice compost
to contribute to the vegetable growth of the next
season. There is a notion that manure from such a
source provokes the growth of club-foot in cabbages
and cauliflowers; but after repeated trials with a
view to fix this averment, I am unable to do so.
68 RURAL STUDIES.
Club-foot is not lacking with awkward frequency ;
but appears quite as often, so far as my experience
goes, with other fertilizers as with that from the pig
stye. A good liming and fresh-turned soil are, so far
as I can determine, the best preventives. Another
precaution, which, in my view, should never be neg-
lected, is to remove and destroy at once all plants
which show symptoms of this ailment.
“The cow is a more tractable subject. Of course,
you wish one that never kicks, that any one can milk,
that will not resent indignities, and will yield you all
the milk and the butter you need, and possibly the
cheese.
“‘T remember that a city gentleman of great horti-
cultural (and other) ability called upon me not many
years ago, and after descanting upon the absurdity
of planting two acres for a crop which could be easily
grown from half an acre, he asked me how many
quarts of milk my cows averaged per diem? ‘ Four-
teen to fifteen quarts,’ said I, ‘in the flush season.’
“¢ But that is very small,’ said he; ‘there is no
more reason why you should not have cows giving
twenty to twenty-four quarts a day, than why you
should not have strawberries giving two quarts to
the plant.’
“T was not prepared to gainsay the proposition.
The truth is, I feel a certain awe of distinguished
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND, 69
horticulturists that blinds me even to their wildest
assertions. What has an humble cultivator to do, or
to say, in the presence of a man who has bagged his
premiums at a New York Horticultural Society, and
is taster ex-officio at the Farmer’s Club ?
“T did not argue the matter with him; I sub-
mitted ; I acknowledged my mediocrity humbly. *
“Now, my dear fellow, there are cows which
yield their twenty to twenty-five quarts a day, but
they are very exceptional. Many such, whose private
history I have known, have been fed upon their own
milk with the cream taken off. This involves, as you
will admit, I think, a quick reconversion of capital,
which, with children in the family, is not always
practicable.
“In a general way, I should say, it would be far
safer to count upon an average of twelve to fifteen
quarts per day, even with the best of care. And as
regards your actual purchase of an animal, I dare say
you will have Wall Street friends, who will talk
grandly of the short horns, and suggest some Daisy,
(1397, A. H. B.,) at a cost of six or seven hundred
dollars, and—viewing her pedigree—cheap at that.
My advice to you is, don’t buy any such, unless you
intend to turn breeder, and enter the lists with the
herd book people. I say this, not because the short-
horns are not admirable animals; but admirable ani-
0 RURAL STUDIES.
mals are not always the best domestic animals,—as
some of your recently married friends may possibly
be able to testify.
“But a man who, like yourself, comes to the
country for a leisurely enjoyment of all country boun-
ties, does not wish an animal that must invariably be
“kept under the best possible condition; he wishes a
docile, adaptable creature. Even a snug native beast
might meet all the ends you would have in view,
without figuring largely upon the cash book.
“Or, still better, a sleek Ayrshire, that shall carry
in her air and horn a little show of better breeding
and full returns to the milk pail. But if you have a
fancy for cream that is fairly golden, and for occa-
sional conversion of excess of milk into a little paté
of golden butter, nothing will suit your purpose bet-
ter than a dainty Alderney, with her fawn-like eyes
and yellow skin. |
“JT am aware that the short-horn people—who can
see nothing good in a cow, except her figure show
mathematical straightness of line from tail to the set-
ting of her horn—sneer at the comparatively diminu-
tive Alderneys. It is true, moreover, that there may
be in them a hollow of the back, and an undue droop
to the head, and possibly an angular projection of the
hip-bones; but their nose is of the fineness of a
fawn’s, their eyes bright and quick as a doe’s; their
ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. al
skin soft and silken, and with a golden hue (if of
good family), which gives best of promise for the
cream-pot. Above all they have a tractability which,
in a domestic pet, is a most admirable quality. ‘Spot,’
(the black and white Alderney,) the children can
fondle; she can be tethered to a stake upon the lawn,
and will feed as quietly as if she were in a field of
lucerne: she is grateful for a bonne bouche from the
garden, and takes it from the hand as kindly as a
dog. This docility is a thing of great consequence
upon a little country place where every animal is
made more or less of a pet. It is not every cow that
will bear tethering upon a lawn; there are those
indeed who can never be taught to submit to the
confinement. The sleek Alderneys inherit a capacity
for this thing, and I have seen upon the green
orchards near to St. Hiliers, (Isle of Jersey,) scores
of them, each cropping its little circlets of turf as
closely and cleanly as if it had been shorn. In way
of convenience for this service, it is well to have an
old harrow tooth with a ring adjusted to its top,
and revolving freely, upon which ring an iron swivel
should be attached. To such a fixture, easily moved,
and made fast in the ground by a blow or two of a
wooden mallet, a halter may be tied without fear of
any untwisting of the rope, or of any winding up or
other entrapment of the poor beast. I give these
72 RURAL STUDIES.
hints because it is often convenient to furnish a pet
cow, from time to time, some detached feeding ground,
where the shrubbery will not admit of free rambling ;
and there are none whose habit is better adapted to
such indulgence upon the lawn than the Alderneys.
“If your cow be kept up constantly for stall-feed-
ing, an earthen floor is desirable, and by all means a
half hour’s run in the barn yard of a morning. A
darkened shed will be a great luxury to her in fly
time, and will largely promote the quiet under which
she works out the most bountiful returns from the
succulent food of the garden. ]
_
:
:
Il.
WAY-SIDE HINTS.
Talk about Porches.
COUNTRY house without a porch is like a
-\ man without an eyebrow; it gives expression,
and gives expression where you most want it. The
least office of a porch is that of affording protection
against the rain-beat and the sun-beat. It is an inter-
preter of character; it humanizes bald walls and
windows; it emphasizes architectural tone; it gives
hint of hospitality ; it is a hand stretched out (figura-
tively and lumberingly, often) from the world within
to the world without.
At a church door even, a porch seems to me to be
a blessed thing, and a most worthy and patent
demonstration of the overflowing Christian charity,
and of the wish to give shelter. Of all the images of
wayside country churches which keep in my mind,
100 RURAL STUDIES.
those hang most persistently and agreeably, which
show their jutting, defensive rooflets to keep the
brunt of the storm from the church-goer while he yet
fingers at the latch of entrance.
I doubt if there be not something beguiling in a
porch over the door of a country shop—something
that relieves the odium of bargaining, and imbues
even the small grocer with a flavor of cheap hospitali-
ties. The verandas (which is but a long translation
of porch) that stretch along the great river front
of the Bellevue Hospital, diffuse somehow a gladsome
cheer over that prodigious caravansery of the sick ;
and I never see the poor creatures in their bandaged
heads and their flannel gowns enjoying their conva-
lescence in the sunshine of those exterior corridors,
but I reckon the old corridors for as much as the
young doctors, in bringing them from convalescence
into strength, and a new fight with the bedevilments
of the world.
What shall we say, too, of inn porches? Does
anybody doubt their fitness? Is there any question
of the fact—with any person of reasonably imagina-
tive mood—that Falstaff and Nym and Bardolph,
and the rest, once lolled upon the benches of the
porch that overhung the door of the Boar’s Head
Tavern, Eastcheap? Any question about a porch,
and a generous one, at the Taberd, Southwark—pre-
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 101
sided over by that wonderful host who so quickened
the story-telling humors of the Canterbury pilgrims
of Master Chaucer ?
Then again, in our time, if one were to peel away
the verandas and the exterior corridors from our vast
watering-place hostelries, what an arid baldness of
wall and of character would be left! All sentiment,
all glowing memories, all the music of girlish foot-
falls, all echoes of laughter and banter and rollicking
mirth, and tenderly uttered vows would be gone.
King David, when he gave out to his son Solomon
the designs for the building of the Temple, included
among the very first of them (1 Chron. xxviii. 11)
the “pattern of a porch.” It is not, however, of
porches of shittim-wood and of gold that I mean to
talk just now—nor even of those elaborate architec-
tural features which will belong of necessity to the
entrance-way of every complete study of a country
house. I plead only for some little mantling hood
about every exterior door-way, however humble.
There are hundreds of naked, vulgar-looking
dwellings, scattered up and down our country high-
roads, which only need a little deft and adroit adap-
tation of the hospitable feature which I have made
the sub;ect of this paper, to assume an air of modest
grace, in place of the present indecorous exposure of
“a wanton.
102 RURAL STUDIES.
But let no one suppose that porch-building, as
applied to the homely lines of a staid old house of
thirty or fifty years since, can be safely given over to
the judgment of our present ambitious carpenters.
Ten to one, they will equip a barren simplicity with
an odious tawdriness. A town-bred girl will slip
into the millinery bedizenment of the town haber-
dasher without making show of any odious incon-
gruity ; but let some buxom, round-cheeked, stout-
ankled lass of the back country adopt the same, and
we laugh at the enormity. In the same way, every
man of a discerning taste must smile derisively at the
adornment of an unpretentious farm-house with the
startling decorative features of the shop joinery of
the day—the endless scroll-work (done cheaply, by
new methods of machine sawing)—the portentous
moulding—the arches, whose outlines are from By-
zantium or the new Louvre—columns whose propor-
tions are improved from the Greeks—capitals whose
fretting sculpture outranks the acanthus. Seriously,
I think the carpenters, if left to their own efflo-
rescence, now-a-days, can out-match Demorest or any
of the wide-hooped milliners. We seem to have
drifted into an epoch of the largest and crudest flam-
boyance—in morals, in brokerage, in carpentry, in
(may I not say ?) congressional eloquence. A sober,
simple-minded man is worse than lost in the new
hand Af mnrovers
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 103
Notwithstanding all this, I venture to plead for a
wholesome severity of taste; if simple material is to
be dealt with, it should be dealt with simply. If we
have a homely old-style house to modify and render
attractive, do not let us make its modification a
mockery by the blazon of Chinese scroll-work. There
is a way of dealing with what is old, in keeping with
what is old, and of dealing with what is homely, in
keeping with what is homely. A sensible middle-
aged lady of the old school, if she have occasion to
present herself afresh in society, and assert her pre-
rogatives once more, will not surely do so by tying
tow-bags at the back of her head and widening her
skirts indecorously. But she will bring her old man-
ner with her, and so equip the old manner by the
devices of a judicious art that we shall wonder and
admire in spite of ourselves.
In illustration of my views about homely porches,
I venture to give upon the next page a rough drawing
of one of the plainest conceivable. It is a sort of cross
between the Dutch stoop and the lumbering rooflet
which in old times overhung many a doorway of a
New England farm-house. It offers shelter and rest ;
it is in no way pretentious ; it declares its character
at a glance; you cannot laugh at it for any air of
assumption that it carries; you can find no such
shapen thing in any of the architectural books,
104 RURAL STUDIES.
What then? Must it needs be condemned for this
reason ? %
I do not, indeed, commend it for any beauty, per
se, but as being an honest, well-intended shelter and
resting-place, which could be grafted upon many an
fr
ANNAN
old-style farm-house, with bare door, and set off its
barrenness, with quaint, simple lines of hospitality,
that would add more to the real effect of the home
than a cumbrous series of joiner’s arches of tenfold its
cost. In the door itself I have dropped a hint of
many an ancient door which confronts the high-road
in a score of New England villages. People do not
instruct their carpenters to build such doors now;
yet I can conceive of worse ones, glazed up and
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 105
down, with blue and yellow and green glass, in most
irritating conjunction. Ido not know that I would
absolutely advise the building of those ancient divided
doors with their diamond “lights ;” but wherever
they show their quaint faces, looking out tranquilly
upon the clash and turmoil of our latter half of the
century, [ would certainly cherish them ; or if [hung a
porch over them, it would be such a one as should be
in keeping with their quaintness, and yet offer all
promise—which a sensible porch should offer—of
shelter and rest. There is a village I never pass
through but I ache to clap over one or more of its
old-time doors (now battling without vestige of roof-
let, with sun and rain) some such quaint, overhang-
ing beacon of hospitality as I have pictured; I am
sure the houses would take on a double homeliness,
and I should think of all the inmates as growing
thenceforth, every day, more kindly, and every day
mellower in their charities.
I next give a sketch of a little stone porch, which,
if I do not mistake, is taken from some stone cottage
in Cumberland County, England. It belongs, certain-
ly, by its whole air and by its arrangement, to a
country where stones of good, straight-splitting qual-
ity (such as gneiss) are plentiful, and are used for
unpretending cottage architecture. It would seem to
have pertained to a house of very modest character
5*
106 RURAL STUDIES.
and to one whose position and exposure demanded
special shelter. I think it may offer a hint, at least,
of the proper use of similar material in our country.
We have not half learned yet all that may be accom-
plished in domestic architecture, with the wealth of
stones scattered over our fields. Dear lumber is
teaching us somewhat; but necessity will presently
teach us more. The great cost of mason-work is in
the way of any present large use of stone for building
purposes, least of all such purpose as a cottage porch.
But with straight-cleaving stone at hand, such a
porch as I have drawn could be put together, with
all its real effect (though not perhaps a great nicety),
by common wall-layers; and it is for this reason I
have introduced it, hoping that some intelligent pro-
prietor who is in the neighborhood of quarries will
put his hands to the task of imitation.
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 107
I give still another design copied rudely from
an actual porch at Ambleside (Westmoreland) ; it
was shading the door, some fifteen years since, of
a village curate. There were vines clambering over
it, which I have omitted, in order to give a full idea
of the simplicity of its construction. I know it is the
way of the grand architects to sneer at all rustic
work as child’s play ; but I cannot see the pertinence
of. their sneers; it is quite true that rustic work will
not last forever—neither will we; house-holders and
architects, and all the rest of us, have the worms
gnawing at our vitals, and the bark falling away, and
108 RURAL STUDIES,
the end coming swift. But a good, stanch tree trunk,
cut in its best season (late autumn), is a very toler-
able sort of God’s work, and, seems to me, can be put
to very picturesque uses. I don’t think the curate’s
porch is a bad one; as a hint for better ones, I think
it is specially good.
Upon the question of the use of right material for
rustic work, there is very much to be said; here, I
have only space for a suggestion or two. There are
some trees which hold their bark wonderfully well;
of such is the sassafras, which, after its tenth year,
takes on a picturesque roughness and a rhinoceros-
like thickness of skin, which admirably fits it for
rustic use. The white ash, assuming after fifteen
years a similar thickness of outer covering, holds its
coat with almost equal tenacity. The ordinary “ pig-
nut ” hickory holds its bark well; the oak does not ;
neither does the chestnut. The cedar is perhaps most
commonly employed for rustic decoration ; cut in the
proper season, and due precaution being taken, by
coating of oil or varnish, against the ravages of the
grubs (which have an uncommon appetite for the
sapwood of cedar), it may hold its shaggy epidermis
for along time. I would suggest to those using it
for architectural purposes a wash of crude petroleum ;
it is a wash that, so far as I know, is proof against
the appetite of all insects. Its objectionable odor
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 109
soon passes away. Very many of the smooth-barked
trees, such as beech, birch, maple, and sycamore, will
hold their bark firmly if precautions be taken to
exclude the air by varnishing the ends and all such cuts
as have been made by the excision of a limb. Old
and slow-growing wood will, it must be observed,
have less shrinkage, and maintain a better bark sur-
face, than young saplings or trees of rapid growth.
But, irrespective of all questions of durability, is
there not something rurally attractive in this unpre-
tending porch, whose columns have come from the
forest, and whose overarching arms are the arms that
overarch God’s temples of the wood? Not lacking,
surely, some elements of the beautiful in itself; and
at the door of a village clergyman, with the ivy show-
ing its glossy leaflets in wealthy labyrinth, and the
convolvulus twining up at the base upon whatever
vine-hold may offer, and handing out its purple chali-
ces to catch the dews of the morning—is there noth-
ing to be emulated in this? Let those who love
God’s simplest graces, answer.
On Not Doing All at Once.
HERE are a great many ardently progressive
people who will be shocked by the caption
under which I write. The current American theory
110 RURAL STUDIES.
is, that if a thing needs to be done, it should be done
‘at once,—with railroad speed, no matter whether it
regards politics, morals, religion, or horticulture. And
I wantonly take the risk of being condemned for an
arrant conservative, when I express my belief that
there are a great many good objects in life which
are accomplished better by gradual progression to-
ward them than by sudden seizure. I shall not stay
to argue the point with respect to negro suffrage, or
female suffrage, or a temperance reformation, or the
clearing out of Maximilian’s Mexican Imperialism—
which are a little removed from the horticultural
arena, where our humbler questions are discussed—
but I shall urge a graduation and culmination of
triumphs in what relates to rural life and its charms.
One meets, from time to time, with a gentleman
from the city, smitten with a sudden rural faney, who
is in eager search for a place ‘“‘made to his hand,”
with the walks all laid down, the entrance-ways es-
tablished, the dwarf trees regularly planted, the con-
servatory a-steam, and the crocheted turrets fretting
the sky-line of the suburban villa. But I never heard
of any such seeker after perfected beauties who was
an enthusiast in country pursuits, or who did not
speedily grow weary of his phantasy. He may take
a pride in his cheap bargain; he may regale himself
with the fruits and enjoy the vistas of his arbor; but
WAY-SIDE HINTS. ital
he has none of that exquisitely-wrought satisfaction
which belongs to the man who has planted his own
trees, who has laid down his own walks, and who
has seen, year after year, successive features of beauty
in shrub, or flower, or pathway, mature under his
‘ministering hand, and lend their attractions to the
cumulating charms of his home. The man of
capital, who buys into an established business,
where the system is perfected, the trade regular
and constant, the details unvaried, may very pos-
sibly congratulate himself upon the security of his
gains; but he knows nothing of that ardent and in-
toxicating enthralment which belongs to one who
has grown up with the business—suggested its en-
terprises—shared its anxieties, and by thought, and
struggle, and adventure, made himself a part of its
successes.
A man may enjoy a little complacency in wearing
the coat of another, (if he gets it cheap,) but there
can hardly be much pride init. Therefore, I would
say to any one who is thoroughly in earnest about
a country home—make it for yourself. Xenophon,
who lived in a time when Greeks were Greeks,
advised people in search of a country place to buy
of a slatternly and careless farmer, since in that
event they might be sure of seeing the worst,
and of making their labor and care work the lar-
112 RURAL STUDIES.
gest results. Cato,* on the other hand, who rep-
resented a more effeminate and scheming race,
advised the purchase of a country home from a
good farmer and judicious house-builder, so that the
buyer might be sure of nice culture and equipments,
—possibly at a bargain. It illustrates, I think, rather
finely, an essential difference between the two races
and ages :—the Greek, earnest to make his gwn brain
tell, and the Latin, eager to make as much as he could
out of the brains of other people.
I must say that I like the Greek view best. I
never knew of an enthusiast in any pursuit,—whether
grape-growing, or literature, or ballooning, or poli-
tics,—who did not find his chiefest pleasure in fore-
casting successes, not yet made, but only dimly con-
ceived of, and ardently struggled for. The more
enthusiasm, the more evidence, I should say, in a
general way, of incompletion and apparent confusion.
Show me a cultivator whose vines are well
trained by plumb and line, whose trees are every one
planted mathematically in quincunx order, whose
dwarfs are all clipped and braced after the best pyra-
midal pattern, and I feel somehow that he is a fash-
ionist, that he reposes upon certain formulas beyond
* T shall make no apology for the introduction of these two
heathen names, since both authors have written capitally well on
subjects connected with husbandry and rural life.
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 113
which he does not think it necessary to explore. But
where I see, with an equal degree of attention, irreg-
ularity and variety of treatment,—tendrils a-droop
and fruit-spurs apparently neglected,—I am not un-
frequently impressed with the belief that the cultiva-
tor is regardless of old and patent truths, because
their truth is proven, and because his eye and mind
are on the strain toward some new development.
When a good, kind horticultural gentleman takes
me by the button-hole, and tells me by the hour of
what length it is necessary to cut the new wood in
order to insure a good start for the buds at the base,
and how the sap has a tendency to flow strongest into
the taller shoots, and other such truisms, which have
been in the books these ten years, I listen respect-
fully, but cannot help thinking,—“ my dear good sir,
you will never set the river a-fire.”
Nor indeed do we want the river set on fire; but
we want progress. And all I have said thus far is
but preliminary to the truth on which I wish to insist,
—that a graduated progress is essential to all rational
enjoyment, whether in things rural, Christian, or com-
mercial.
And for this reason I allege that all things which
are proper to be done about a country house, are not
to be done at once. Half the charm of life in such a
home is in every week’s and every season’s succeed-
114 RURAL STUDIES.
ing developments. If, for instance, my friend Lack-
land, whose place I have described in previous pages,
had found a landscape gardener capable of inaugurat-
ing all the changes I have described, and had estab-
lished his garden, his mall, his shrubberies, and had
made the cliff in the corner nod with its blooming
columbines, within a month after occupation, and
established his dwarf pears in full growth and fruit-
age, there may have been a glad surprise; but the
very completeness of the change would have left no
room for that exhilaration of spirits, with which we
pursue favorite aims to their attainment. No trout-
fisher, who is worthy the name, wants his creel
loaded in the beginning ; he wants the pursuit—the
alternations of hope and fear; the coy rest of his fly
upon this pool—the whisk of its brown hackle down
yonder rapid—its play upon the eddies where possi-
bly some swift strike may be made—the sway of his
rod, and the whiz of his reel under the dash of some
strugeling victim.
It is a mistake, therefore, I think, to aim at the
completion of a country home in a season, or in two,
or some half a dozen. Its attractiveness les, or
should lie, in its prospective growth of charms. Your
city home—when once the architect, and plumber,
and upholsterer have done their work—is in a sense
complete, and the added charms must lie in the genial
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 115
socialities and hospitalities with which you can invest
it; but with a country home, the fields, the flowers,
the paths, the hundred rural embellishments, may be
made to develop a constantly recurring succession of
attractive features. This year, a new thicket of shrub-
bery, or a new gate-way on some foot-path; next
year, the investment of some out-lying ledge with
floral wonders ; the season after may come the estab-
lishment of a meadow (by judicious drainage) where
some ugly marsh has offended the eye; and the suc-
ceeding summer may show the redemption of the
harsh briary up-land that you have scourged into
fertility and greenness. This year, a thatched rooflet
to some out-lying stile; next year, a rustic seat under
the trees which have begun to offer a tempting shade.
This year, the curbing of the limbs of some over-
growing poplar; and next year—if need be—a lop-
ping away of the tree itself to expose a fresher
beauty in the shrubbery beneath.
Most planters about a country home are too much
afraid of the axe; yet judicious cutting is of as much
importance as planting; and I have seen charming
thickets shoot up into raw, lank assemblage of boles
of trees without grace or comeliness, for lack of cour-
age to cut trees at the root. For all good effects of
foliage in landscape gardening—after the fifth year—
the axe is quite as important an implement as the
116 RURAL STUDIES.
spade. Even young trees of eight or ten years
growth which stool freely—(such as the soft maple,
birch, chestnut, and locust,) when planted upon de-
clivities, may often be cut away entirely, with the
assurance that the young sprouts, within a season,
will more than supply their efficiency. Due care,
however, should be taken that such trees be cut
either in winter or in early spring, in order to ensure
free stooling or (as we say) sprouting. The black
birch, which I have named, and which is a very beau-
tiful tree—not as yet, I think, fairly appreciated by
our landscapists—will not stool with vigor, if cut
after it has attained considerable size; but the sap-
lings of three or four years, if cut within a foot of
the ground, will branch off into a rampant growth of
boughs, whose fine spray, even in the winter, is
almost equal to its glossy show of summer foliage.
I do not know if I have made my case clear; but
what I have wished has been to guard purchasers,
who are really in earnest, against being disturbed or
rebuffed by the rough aspect of such country places
as commend themselves in other respects. The sub-
jugation of roughness, or rather, the alleviation of it
by a thousand little daintinesses of treatment, is what
serves chiefly to keep alive interest in a country
homestead.
I must say, for my own part, that I enjoy often
WAY-SIDE HINTS. nal
for months together some startling defect in my
grounds—so deep is my assurance, that two days of
honest labor will remove it all, and startle on-lookers
by the change.
But let no rural enthusiast hope to up-root all the
ill-growth, or to smooth all the roughnesses in a year.
He would be none the happier if he could. We find
our highest pleasure in conquest of difficulties. And
he who has none to conquer, or does not meet them,
must be either fool or craven.
Ploughing and Drilled Crops.
NE of the most striking of those contrasts which
arrest the attention of an intelligent agricul-
tural observer, between the tillage of English fields
and those of New England, as well as of America
generally, is in the matter of plowing. In England,
bad plowing is rare ; in New England, good plowing
is even rarer. Something is to be allowed, of course,
for the irregular and rocky surface of new lands, but
even upon the best meadow bottoms along our river
courses, a clean, straight furrow, well turned, so as to
offer the largest possible amount of friable mould for
a seed-bed, is a sight so unusual, that in the month of
spring travel we might count the number on our
fingers. I go still farther, and say—though doubtless
118 RURAL STUDIES.
offending the patriotic susceptibilities of a great
many—tbat not one American farmer in twenty knows
what really good plowing is. Over and over, the
wiseacres at the county fairs give their first pre-
miums to the man who, by a little deft handling of
the plow, can turn a flat furrow, and who wins his
honors by his capacity to hide every vestige of the
stubble, and to leave an utterly level surface. Buta
flat furrow, with ordinary implements, involves a
broad cut and a consequent diminution of depth.
The perfection ofplowing upon sward-land implies, on
the contrary, little pyramidal ridgelets of mould, run-
ning like an arrow’s flight the full length of the field,
—all which a good cross-harrowing will break down
into fine and even tilth, like a garden-bed. Yet again
and again, I have seen such plowing, by Scotch
adepts, condemned by the county wise men for its
unevenness. The flat furrow is not, indeed, without
its uses under certain conditions of the land, and with
special objects in view—as, for instance, where, by a
fall plowing, one wishes a partial disintegration of
the turf, in view of a “ turning under” of the whole
surface upon the succeeding spring for a crop of
roots. This is practised upon the island of Jersey (so
famous for its dairy stock) with great success. The
sod is “skimmed ” (such is their term) in the month
of November or December, and with the opening of
%
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 119
spring all is turned under by a plow, which, so far as
I have observed, is peculiar to that island, and which
works ten inches in depth, and requires a team of
four horses for its effective use.
I must have a word or two to say here in regard
to American plows, which, from the fact that they
have received occasional commendatory prizes from
foreign committees, have been counted by the san-
guine superior to all other implements of the name,
and gushing orators have lavished brilliant periods
upon our superiority. to the world in this branch of
agricultural mechanism. Nothing surely can exceed
the best American plows in their adaptation to present
American needs. They are light, compact, strong,
and in rough lands are by half more manageable than
the best English implements. But supposing a great
reach of well-tilled and perfectly cleared field, and
the improved iron Scotch plow will lay a far more
true and even furrow with one half the expendi-
ture of manual force. Under such circumstances, the
great weight of the Scotch implement, added to its
carefully adjusted poise, counts in its favor. We shall
gain nothing by denying this and by exaggerating
the value of our wooden framework, which has been
suggested at once by the cheapness of timber material
and by the exigencies of a rough country. Nor have
I any manner of doubt that as our culture ripens into
*
120 RURAL STUDIES.
seizure of all economic methods, our implement
makers will adapt themselves to the new demands
with that shrewdness which has thus far been so
characteristic of their efforts.
Again, we have no regularly educated plowmen
in America. Every man who farms five acres of land
thinks he can plow—nay, he is in doubt if anybody
in the world can do it better. But good plowing is
a thing of education, as much as good preaching, or
carpentering, or shoemaking, or writing. Nothing
but experience gives the final and effective vis manu-
tigii. With the wonderful division of labor in all
old countries, every agricultural laborer has his special
province and domain of work. And it is quite absurd
to suppose that a man who plows only a month out of
the twelve can have anything like that due knowledge
of the craft, which one acquires by handling the plow-
stilts every day, for a hundred days in succession. It
is quite true that under a European sky—whether of
Belgium, France, or England—tillage can be carried
on far into the winter, and that, therefore, there is
more occasion that a man be educated for the special
office of plowing. But whatever occasion may be,
the fact remains the same that, while in Belgium and
in Great Britain there is an annual crop of appren-
tices to the plow, in America there is none. Every
man who can use a hoe or a pitch-fork is supposed to
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 121
be a competent tailsman for the plow. The result is
—execrably bad work. And I would respectfully
suggest as a subject to which the newly inaugurated
Agricultural Colleges may fitly turn a portion of their
attention, the indoctrination of a certain number of
ambitious young farmers (every fall time) into the
merits of good plowing. I have not, indeed, the
slightest idea that the purveyors of this Congres-
sional agricultural charity would, in most instances,
be capable of giving the requisite instruction, but
they might avail themselves of the offices of here
and there a Scotch farmer who would be competent
to fulfil the trust, and there are always young Ameri-
cans willing to learn.
Another noticeable feature in European field man-
agement, which contrasts strongly with much of
our helter skelter planting, is the almost universal
adoption of the drill system in the culture of all hoed
crops, by virtue of which fertilizing material is ap-
plied directly to the plants, and the same distributed
—by a transverse plowing the succeeding season—for
the benefit of the cereal which comes next in rota-
tion. It may be questionable if our corn crop (maize)
will not succeed best under so-called “ hill” culture,
and with a broadcast application of manure, since it
is a gross and wide feeder, and demands full flow of
sun and air; but in respect to most other hoed crops
6
122 RURAL STUDIES.
there can be no doubt of the superior economy, as
well as the more orderly appearance of the drill
system.
Take for instance our ordinary crop of potatoes,
(and I think the details of its management were never
before subject of discussion in a similar context ;) four
out of ten patches of this worthy esculent, are, in
New England soil, put down in wavy lines of hills—
irregular in distance, slatternly in culture, and yet
involving per bushel a far larger expense for tillage
and harvesting, than if dressed, planted, cleaned, and
earthed up according to some system which would
demand trim lines, even distances, and a complete
shading of the whole ground in the season of their
most rampant growth. Perhaps I shall not be counted
too intolerably practical, if I indicate the actual
method of procedure which has been sometimes fol-
lowed under my own observation. We will suppose
that a good surface of sward-land (requiring a lift by
reason of its weediness) is turned over lightly, (and
flatly, if you please,) in the month of October. Noth-
ing offers better pabulum for potatoes, or indeed
almost any crop, than decaying turf. In April the
raw surface is levelled with a light Scotch harrow,
and thereupon all is turned under seven inches by the
best plow at command with three horses abreast ;
(two will weary of the work.) After this the harrow
WAY-SIDH HINTS. 123
is put on again, up and down, and across. There is
no fear of harrowing too much. This being accom-
plished, and the manure disposed (since March) in
huge heaps at either end of the field, three deep fur-
rows are opened at, say, two to three rods apart, by
a plowman who can drive his furrow across as straight
as the flight of an arrow. Immediately upon the
opening of the first, the cart follows, and two men
strew the open furrow with the half-rotted manure.
Another hand follows with a sprinkling of guano and
plaster: and still another follows to drop the seed.
Upon this the plowman laps a furrow in way of
cover: two furrows follow as in ordinary plowing,
and every fourth one is treated as we have described
with ample dressing and seed. Three series of fur-
rows being opened at the start, permit the plowman
to go his rounds without interfering with the plant-
ing and dressing. When the whole field is gone over
after this system it has simply the appearance of a
thoroughly plowed surface. Nothing more is done
until the young shoots begin to appear; at this time
the Scotch harrow is put on, and the land completely
weeded and levelled, little or no harm being done by
this procedure to the starting crop. The whole field
has thus the evenness and the cleanness of a garden.
Three weeks later, especially if the season be favor-
able to weed growth, it may be necessary to go be-
124 RURAL STUDIES.
tween the rows—now most distinctly and luxuriantly
marked with tufts of green—with the cultivator; and
no future culture is needed until the “ earthing-
up” process is accomplished with a double-mould-
board plow. This done, the crop takes care of itself
until harvesting time ; no hand hoe, or further culture
being essential. I venture to say that the cost per
bushel is twenty per cent. less than that by the ordi-
nary, hap-hazard hand tillage. In addition to this
there is the delight to the eye of trim rows of luxu-
riant foliage, interlacing by degrees, and covering the
whole surface with a rich mat of green. If the
experts in the growth of this old esculent—whether
in Maine or on the Bergen flats—have any fault to
find with the method, I will be a patient listener.
Roads and Shade.
LEAVE potatoes and their culture for a further
consideration of the more striking contrasts be-
tween European and American landscape. Not the
least noticeable of these contrasts springs from the
vast difference in the outlay and treatment of the
public roads. A neat and well-ordered public road
in any of the rural districts of America is altogether
exceptional. Throughout Great Britain a slatternly
and ill-kept one is most rare. There is no particular
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 125
reason why a cross-country road for farm traflic only
should have the width of a village street; yet one
uniform turnpike rule of breadth seems to have pre-
vailed in the laying down of all country thorough-
fares in America: of course, did the disposition exist,
it would by no means be so easy a matter to keep a
rambling highway of forty or fifty feet in width, in
such orderly condition as a narrower one which would
amply suffice for the traffic. Neither towns nor tarn-
pike companies, who mostly have American roads in
charge, have any system in their management or any
regard for appearances. Exception is to be made in
favor of a few public-spirited townships (in Massa-
chusetts mostly) which have taken this matter boldly
in hand and encouraged order and thrift by whole-
some regulations in regard to encroachments upon
the highway, and the judicious planting of trees.
For the most part, however, American highroads,
throughout the rural districts, offer to the eye two
great slovenly stretches of land, cumbered with stones,
offal, wood-yards, and gaping with yellow chasms of
earth, from which, every spring-time and autumn, a
few shovelfuls of clay are withdrawn to patch the
road-bed which lies between. Under such conditions
the utmost neatness and regularity which the farmer
may bestow upon his fields and crops lose half their
effect, and the landscape lacks that completed charm
126 RURAL STUDIES.
which regales the eye along the rural by-roads of
England.
While town authorities continue to be appointed
for their political aptitude, it is useless to hope for
any mending of such defects, or for any deliberate
scheme of improvement. The most that can be done
is by the combination of adjoining proprietors, in
which they will have little to hope from the coépera-
tion of any town board of advisers. As an instance
in point—I have repeatedly offered to undertake full
charge of the half-mile of highroad leading through
farm lands of my own, guaranteeing amore serviceable
condition than the road has yet known, and a dimi-
nution of cost to the town of at least twenty per
cent., yet the proposition is ignored. The selectmen
would lose their little private jobbing in way of
repairs, and some future board might annul any such
disorderly and unheard of contract.
IT have alluded to the planting of trees along high-
ways—a practice which many towns have favored by
public action, and one contributing largely to the
enjoyment of a summer’s drive, as well as adding to
the inviting aspect of our country villages. The same
practice obtains along the great public highways of
France, but not so generally in England where the
sunshine is not so common or so fierce as to call for
special protection. Even the country houses of Great
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 127
Britain are by no means so shaded as our own; and
the most considerable piles of buildings, such as Eaton
Hall, Blenheim, Dalkeith, and Burghley House, have
hardly a noticeable tree within stone’s throw of their
walls. The flower patches, and coppices of shrubbery
approach more nearly, and to the garden fronts of
those magnificent homes you walk through walls of
blooming shrubs. But the full flow of the sunshine
upon the window is a thing courted. Allowing for
all difference in climate, I think there may be a ques-
tion if we do not err in this country by over-much
shading. A cottage in a wood is a pretty subject for
poetry, but it is apt to be uncomfortably damp. And
there are village streets with us so embowered that
scarce a ray of sunshine can play fairly upon the roofs
or fronts of the village houses, from June to October.
A summer’s life under such screen cannot contribute
to the growth of roses in the cheeks any more than
to the growth of roses at the door. There is no pro-
vision against agues—whether moral or physical—
like a good flow of sunshine.
In the establishment of new country houses with
us I often observe infinite pains bestowed upon the
elaboration of flower-patches, and banks of shrubbery
within enjoyable distance of the door, while in the
midst of them, or at such little remove as works the
same result, a great array of shade trees is planted.
128 RURAL STUDIES.
After only a few years, these gross feeders have seized
upon all the available plant-food within reach, and
with the great lusty boughs of the maples waving
over his cherished parterres, the proprietor is amazed
at the shrinkage of his flower-growth. It should be
fairly understood that about a densely shaded door-
step, the conditions of vigorous and healthful flower-
growth can never be maintained.
But far worse, and more to be deprecated than a
starvation of the flowers in the immediate neighbor-
hood of a country house, is the starvation of the turf;
yet in many of the old established village yards, and
about many suburban homes where the fancy for
dense overhanging shade has had full sway, even the
grasses maintain a doubtful livelihood, and their place
is taken by the wild mosses. It may be laid down, I
think, as a safe rule, and of universal application in
our Northern latitudes, that wherever shade immedi-
ately contiguous to the house is too dense for the vig-
orous growth of the ordinary lawn grasses, it is too
dense for proper conditions of health; and I would
recommend to the invalid tenants of such a house—in
place of nostrums—the axe.
Of course, we can hardly venture to expose our
whole frontage to the sun, in the generous way in
which the British country liver is wont to do; but
sunshine on the roof should, I think, be religiously
+
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 129
guarded, whatever may become of our old favorites,
the trees.
There is another condition of English country
life—aside from the climate—which admits of a freer
play of sunshine than we may be disposed to admit :
it lies in the fact that British houses, whether of
brick or stone, are thick-walled (covered, many times,
with lichens, if not ivy), and so ward off very effect-
ually the fiercest blasts of July. The thatched roofs
of Devon and of Somerset are an even greater pro-
tection from the sun.
English and American Hedging.
NOTHER striking subject of contrast between
British and Ainerican country road-side, is
offered by the numberless array of live hedges which
belong to the former, and which probably for genera-
tions to come will be wanting in America. In the
best-cultivated districts of England, however, hedges
are rapidly losing favor for the partition of arable
lands, as engrossing too much space, stealing some-
what from the productive capacity of the soil, and
offering shelter for noxious weeds. The system of
soiling is moreover doing away with the necessity for
them, and such ground-feeding as is permitted, is
more closely and economically controlled by the
GS |
150 RURAL STUDIES.
adoption of movable hurdles. The clearing up of
those old lines of hawthorn may give delight to the
agricultural eye, but the lover of the picturesque will
lament their destruction. The cumbrous hedge-rows,
too, of Devon and of the Channel Isles (huge dykes
of earth with hedge and trees springing from their
top) are yielding to the demands of new and progres-
sive culture. I recall many a loitering of a summer’s
day between these huge banks of green, within sound
of the Dart, or of the Exe, or of the beat of the
water in La Fyret—the primroses dotting the close
sward, the hedges shutting out the light, the scattered
boles wound round with cloaks of ivy, the scant,
scraggy limbs interlacing above, and a constant mois-
ture upon the macadamized way, giving life to little
truant mats of mosses. But near to the centres of
travel and improvement, all these delightful old ridgy
banks of moss, and earth, and hedges, and trees,
have disappeared. The keen tenants, with the per-
mission of the landlords, are hunting them down in
the retired districts. And no wonder; they occupied
full twenty feet in width ; every rod of them shaded
a good perch of grain land; they offered capital
breeding places for scores of rabbits. But though a
great change is going on in this respect, as well as in
the removal of many of the hedges which mark the
interior divisions of the farms, the border lines, and
WA Y-SIDE HINTS. 131
the way-side still show, throughout the month of
“April, that wondrous wealth of white hawthorn bloom
which is so associated in the thoughts of all with
English rural landscape. Not always trim, it is true,
are the hawthorn hedges ; not without an occasional
interlacing of rampant brambles; not without some
stray sapling of other growth cropping out, and
lording it over the line of hedge; but gnarled, stiff,
strong, waving with the undulations of the hills,
twining with the curves of the road-way—unbroken,
save by here and there a stile or a cumbrous farm-
gate—with a fine spray of interlacing branchlets from
ground to top—white, and noisy with bees in all the
season of bloom—green, and wavy, and flowing in
the flush of the summer’s growth—carrying their red
haws through all the early winter, and when the light
snows {as they do, rare times) veil the ground, show-
ing their creeping lines of brown up the hills, and
athwart the hills, and in soldierly array flanking every
country by-road.
When I think of those long billows of green skirt-
ing the paths, and look upon my prosaic posts and
rails, it seems to me plain enough that a great bit of
the warp upon which have been woven so many of
the charming rural pictures in British art and song,
is forever wanting to us here. Fancy a trim line of
yosts running across the clayey ground of one of
S (=)
ce
132 RURAL STUDIES.
Gainsborough’s landscapes! Fancy old Walton sit-
ting under the ‘rails ” for a little chit-chat with his
blooming milk-maid! Fancy Milton planting his
Russet lawns and fallows gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray,
under the lee of a well-morticed rail-fence !
Yet, poetry apart, we shall probably keep by our
timber fences for many generations to come in Ameri-
ca; first, because, in most parts of the country, it is
good economy to do so; and next, because we have
as yet no hedge-plant which can thoroughly make
good the place of the hawthorn in England.
We are able to grow the hawthorn indeed; but
it must be done daintily. It will never bear the
rough usage which its ordinary use as-a hedge-plant
for farm purposes involves. The same is true to an
equal extent of the buckthorn, which, in addition, has
the bad habit of dying in many of our hard winters ;
and hoth these thorns are liable to the attacks of
insects (far more pestiferous with us, it would seem,
than in Europe), which seriously abridge their use.
The white-willow, so trumpeted by bagmen through-
out the country is thoroughly a humbug. It is indeed
sadly derogatory to the good sense of our rural popu-
lation that pretenders could ever foist a claim in
favor of a willow, of any known habit of growth,
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 133
upon their acceptance. The osage orange in certain
portions of the West, and of the Southwest, promises
to be very effective. It starts late in the spring, but
holds its foliage until the frost withers it. In the
extreme North, and in the Northeast, its shoots are
liable to be winter-killed, and its own rampant growth
is also against it, as an economic plant for hedging.
For effective treatment it requires two or three clip-
pings in the year. This is more, we fancy, than the
holders of Western prairie farms will be willing to
bestow. After mature years it may possibly show a
more tractable disposition in this respect. The honey-
locust has been adopted in many quarters, and has its
sturdy advocates. But it is open to the same objec-
tion of a too luxuriant growth on congenial soils, and
of the still more odious objection of a disposition to
“sucker,” or send up shoots from the roots at a long
remove from the parent stem.
The barberry (Berberis vulgaris) is strongly com-
mended by many, but it has never yet had, so far as
I am aware, fair field trial. A strong objection to it
appears to me to lie in the fact that, like the willow,
it never inclines to branch from near the root. It
sends up indeed a great number of shoots; but shoots
of this kind, growing parallel, and showing few leaf:
lets, or little side-spray, can never make a compact,
or even a graceful hedge. The old-fashioned farmers
134 RURAL STUDIES.
of the East have still another objection, as firmly
cherished as any dogma they listen to on Sunday, to
wit,—the barberry “blasts the rye.” This faith is
indeed so firmly and persistently cherished that I have
been disposed to look for the source of it in some
tribe of aphides peculiar to the barberry, which by
juxtaposition may transfer its labors to the cereal.
The native white-thorn remains—and it has always
seemed to me that with proper nursing, education,
and development, much might be made of this as a
hedge-plant. The hornbeam, also, of our forests, is a
small tree, of profuse spray, bearing the shears ad-
mirably ; but, so far as I know, never as yet adopted
on a large scale for hedges. The green walks of the
gardens of Versailles demonstrate amply what its
European congener will suffer in way of clipping.
In the way of evergreen hedge-plants we have
nothing to ask for from the nurserymen of Great
Britain. Both the arbor-vite and the hemlock spruce
are admirably adapted to the purpose. The beauty
of this latter nothing can exceed, particularly in the
season of its first growth (early June), when its flossy
light green tufts hang over it like a great shower of
golden bloom. The arbor-vite is perhaps more man-
ageable, and certainly less impatient of removal ; but
it can never become so effective. The Norway spruce
is also admirably adapted to hedge uses, and will
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 135
bear (if treated early) the closest clipping of the
shears. The grand error in its employment hitherto
has been in allowing it to gain some three or four
feet in height before resorting to the clipping pro-
cess.
In fact, the general failure of our hedge experi-
ments throughout the country—whether for service
or ornamentation—may be summed up in one word,
a lack of care. Farmers have bought hedge-plants
by the thousand, and plowing a single furrow or two
along. the lines of their fields, have set them down
under the absurdly ill-founded opinion, that thence-
forward they would take care of themselves. But
the young and tender hedge-plant, like the young
growth of corn, needs culture. And the man who is
too indolent or too short-sighted to bestow it, will
surely never reap any considerable reward. It is
amazing—the short-sightedness which prevails in this
regard, not only with respect to hedging, but or-
charding, and tree-planting of all kinds. I count it
as necessary to the vigorous establishment of a newly-
set tree or shrub, that all foreign growth should be
kept away from an inclosing circle of from two to
four feet radius, as to bestow the like attention upon
a hill of corn or of melons. The little fibrous root-
lets, such as give nursing to the transplanted stock,
are as impatient of any robbery of those sources of
136 RURAL STUDIES.
sustenance, which find their way through the ground,
as the annual plants. We should have heard far less
lament in this country over the failure of hedges if
there had been more considerate treatment of them
during the early years of their establishment.
If this careful nurture be requisite in respect to
stock from the nurseries, it is ten-fold more important
with respect to young plants transferred directly from
the forest. Scores of failures I have known on the
part of those, who—being delighted with the appear-
ance of some lusty screen of hemlocks—have under-
taken to rival it by direct transfer of the wild growth
to some lean streak of plowed land, and have there-
after left the shivering field-pensioners to struggle for
themselves. The half would very likely or very prop-
erly die; the rest maintain only a meagre semblance
of life,and show none of that rampant vigor which is
essential to the beauty of a hedge. Indeed, except in
fully kept garden-ground, I would advise no one to
make this direct transfer. A season or two in the
nursery rows develops an enormous stock of rootlets,
and thereafter, with ordinary care, every plant may
be counted on.
I doubt very greatly the serviceableness of any of
the evergreen hedges for farm purposes; both the
hemlock and Norway spruce, for full development,
demand considerable width, more than would be con-
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 137
sistent with farm-economy, and much greater than
would be ordinarily accorded to the hawthorn ; be-
sides which, they are by no means proof against the
mischievous forays of cattle, who love nothing better
than to tangle their horns in a wall of soft green and
twist away the branchlets. The thorn-bearing shrubs
are by no means so inviting to their ventures of this
sort.
I have not spoken of the holly—of which many
charming hedges are to be found on English estates
—because the British plant has not proved itself
wholly equal to our climate, and the American holly
(besides being somewhat inferior in glossiness and
density of foliage) has not yet been commonly intro-
duced even among nurserymen. In the way, how-
ever, of leafy screens for garden parterres and ter-
races, I have great hopes of what may yet be accom-
plished with our Rhododendron and Kalmia latifolia.
The lank, lean habit of this latter under its ordinary
transplanting is no measure of its capacity for making
a full, rounded, dense wall of green. Whoever has
wandered over high-lying pasture-lands of New
England which have recently been cleared of their
forest growth, and has seen the wanton, luxuriant,
crowded tufts of Kalmia shooting from the old roots,
can form some measure of the capacity of the shrub
for good screen effects. The lank growth, too, of the
138 RURAL STUDIES.
Rhododendron in a few shaded swamp-lands where it
finds its habitat in New England, is no indication of
what may be done with it under fairer conditions of
growth.
And this mention of the laurel family (I like that
old popular naming of these shrubs) reminds me of
the screens and coppices which greet the eye so often
in English gardens and in English landscape. It is
quite possible that with our climate, we can never
equal their variety. The Bay, the Spanish laurel, the
Laurestina, will very likely be fastidious in adjusting
themselves to our winters. But with our narrow-
leaved laurel, our Latifolia, our Rhododendrons, we
can pile up a wealth of glossy green against the
northern sides of our gardens, which even the best
British farmers might envy. Add to these our
spruces (hemlock and others), our white pine (Stro-
bus), for background, and we have nothing to covet.
But if we have nothing to covet, we have very
much to learn in the adjustment of our leafy screens.
Over and over I observe some ambitious gentleman
(at the hands of his gardener) attempting to establish
a protective coppice, and after careful and expensive
preparation of the ground (there is nothing lacking
on that score), placing his rare evergreens where they
will be presently overgrown and lost, or putting out
his Rhododendrons where they will have no room for
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 159
full and rounded development, or crowding his
spruces, and his Deodars, and Scotch pines, so that in
afew years there is but a thicket of close-growing
boles—offering no shelter from the wind, and graded
by no forecast of the relative measure of growth.
Or if, by accident, the planting be judicious, there
follows none of that resolute trimming and bold use
of the axe, under which only a protective group of
trees can be made to maintain’ its rounded symmetry
and its artistic agreement with the landscape.
Indeed, we are as yet only beginning to learn
what the real worth of screening banks of foliage are
to fruit, to gardens, and even to grain-fields. It is
doubtful if it be not the last lesson—but certainly not
the least important—which is learned in ornamental
or economic arboriculture.
Village Greens.
FI enter a little quiet plea for the old-fashioned
Village Greens, I hope I shall not be decried by
the reformers. Village Greens are not quotable at
the “ Board.” Our friend of the Avenue cannot dash
through them with his equipage. There are no
patches of choice exotics upon the village green—
possibly not even a serpentine path ; no fountain, I
am sure, that shows the spasmodic gush of the city
140 RURAL STUDIES.
fountains. And yet the name—Village Green, is,
somehow, tenderly cherished ; it rallies to my thought
a great cycle of rural memories belonging to song, to
childhood, to story and to travel—wherein I see, in
bountiful procession, broad-armed elms, dancing peas-
ants, flocks of snowy geese, shadows of church
spires, boys with satchels, bonfires of fallen leaves,
militia “ trainings,” and some irate Betsey Trotwood,
making a soldierly dash at intruding donkeys. It is
quite possible that these il-assorted memories may
confound public and private Greens, as well as Eng-
lish and American, but all have their spring in that
good old name of the Village Green. I hope that it
is not a strange name, and that it will never grow
strange while grass is green, and.villages are founded.
In old days of stage-coach travel, one came, after
a tedious, lumbering drag over hills, and through
swampy flats, (where, if season favored, wild grape-
vines, or white azalias, tossed their rich fragrance into
coach windows,) upon some lifted plateau of land,
where the white houses shone among trees, flanking a
level bit of greensward, and geese grazed the com-
mon; and where was a whipping-post, may be—pos-
sibly a decaying pair of oaken stocks, and a court-
house with its belfry. I do not think such old village
commons of New England, (and I suspect they were
rarely to be seen in other parts of the country,) were
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 141
ever very nicely kept. The geese cropped the grass
short, to be sure; but geese are not a tidy animal ;
the pool, too—if any pondlet of water broke the
surface of the level—was apt to show the stamp of
adventurous hoofs and a muddy margin ; for all this,
however, such eyelets of green space in the centre of
country towns, around which and upon which all the
gayety and cheer of the settlement might disport
itself, were very charming. I do not know but I
would rejoice to see the village stocks brought into
use again, for the sake of the broad common where
they stood: certain it is, that if they were ever ser-
viceable (I speak of the stocks), they would be ser-
viceable now. I think I could mention a fat grocer
or two, and two or three editors, or more, who
would look well—sitting in the stocks. And as for
the whipping-posts, who would not rejoice to see
their revival, provided only he could name the incum-
bents of the post-office ?
But I have no right to speak of the Village Green
as wholly a thing of the past, although such symbols
of order and discipline as the stocks and the whip-
ping-post have gone by.
Travellers rarely meet with them, it is true; but
we do not travel by stage-coach nowadays. We do
not face the old orderly frontage of quiet, outlying
towns, as we did when we clattered down the main
142 RURAL STUDIES.
street to the common and the tavern and the pump.
If we travel thitherward, we are thrust into the back-
sides of towns upon some raw cut of a railway, amid
all manner of debris and noisome smells. Now I
suppose that old-time villagers took a pride in their
common, with its stately trees—in their court-house,
their breadth and neatness of high-road, as being the
objects which must of necessity fasten the regard of
those from the outside world who paid their town a
visit. The two deacons who lived opposite, would
never coquette in their door-yards, or fences, for the
entertainment of each other, but rather for the ad-
miration of the public, which must needs pass their
doors. But yet—and it is a curious fact in the his-
tory of public taste—in these times, when old villages
are disembowelled by the railway, and all their showi-
ness turned inside out, there seems very little regard
paid to the observation of that larger public which is
hurtling by every day in the cars.
The former traveller along the high-road, was cau-
tiously placated with orderly palings, neat door-yards,
an array of grass and flowering shrubs, with a church
in imposing position ; but the larger public that now
visits the locality is greeted with a terrific array of
backsides, of lumbering styes, disorderly fences, and
no token that the village world is cognizant of their
presence, or careful of their judgment. Of course, the
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 143
habit of a village life cannot be changed so quickly
as a railway cutting is made—the new world of pro-
gress may be upon them before they are aware ; but
when actually present, why not meet it with some-
thing of the old tidiness and pride ?
Can any rural philosopher explain us this matter ?
Does the whirl of the world into sudden sight of all
our disorderly domesticity, break up self-respect, and
weaken faith in appearances ?
Here, and there indeed, I observe one who newly
paints his rear door, and trims his hedges, and plants
his arbors, and gravels his walks, so as to impress
favorably the new passers-by of the rail; but for one
who shows this solicitude respecting the new public,
a dozen keep to a stolid indifference, and living with
their faces the other way, leave the pigs and a mangy
dog to squeal and bark a reception to the world of
the railway.
I cannot quite explain this. Most of us love to
carry a name for respectability and good order and
decency, and do not like to be discovered kicking the
cat or indulging in any similar personal gratifications
or wants. It is true we do not know one in a thou-
sand of the ten thousand who hurtle past our home-
stead; but how many of those who make up the
body of that public opinion, in the eye of which we
wish to live with decency and order, do we know ?
144 RURAL STUDIES.
What all this may have to do with the topic of
Village Greens, may be not quite clear to the reader ;
but I will try and develop its bearings. All the lesser
towns through which or near to which a railway
passes, have virtually changed face; they confront
the outside world no longer upon their embowered
street or quiet common, but at the “station.” There
lies the point of contact, and there it must remain
until the mechanicians shall have devised some airy
carriage which shall drop visitants from the clouds
upon the threshold of the cosy old hostelrie. There
being thus, as it were, a new focal point of the town
life, it wants its special illustration and adornment.
The village cannot ignore the railway: it is the com-
mon carrier ; it is the bond of the town with civiliza-
tion; it lays its iron fingers upon the lap of a hundred
quiet valleys, and steals away their tranquillity like a
ravisher.
What then? Every village station wants its little
outlying Green to give character and dignity to the
new approach. Is there any good reason against
this? Nay, are there not a thousand reasons in its
favor? In nine out of ten wayside towns, such space
could be easily secured, easily held in reserve, easily
made attractive; and if there were no -room for a
broad expanse of sward, at least there might be
planted some attractive copse of evergreens or shrub-
WAY-SIDE HINTS.- 145
bery, to declare by graceful type the rural pride of
the place. He would be counted a sorry curmudgeon
who should allow all visitors to make their way to
his entrance-hall, through wastes of dust and piles of
offal; cannot the corporate authorities of a town be
taught some measure of self-respect, and welcome the
outside world with indications of orderly thrift, bloom-
ing and carrying greeting to the very threshold of
the place ?
First impressions count for a great deal—whether
in our meeting with a woman, or with a village. Slip-
shoddiness is bad economy in towns, as is people.
Every season there is a whirl] of citizens, tired of city
heats and costs, traversing the country in half hope
of being wooed to some summer home, where the
trees and the order invite tranquillity and promise
enjoyment. A captivating air about a village station
will count for very much in the decision. There will
be growth, to be sure, in favored localities, in spite
of disorder. I could name a score of little towns
along the line of the New Jersey and Erie and Hud-
son Railways, with their charming suburban retreats
near by, to which the occupant must wade his way
through all manner of filthiness and disorderly debris,
making his landing, as it were, in the very dung-heap
of the place, and smacking with a relish, it would
seem, these prefatory incidents of his country home.
7
146 RURAL STUDIES.
Is there no mending this? Are selectmen all
Swine or swineherds? Do city residents count for
nothing or care for nothing in the health or air of
the railway centre of the towns of their adoption ?
Dram-shops, and oyster-shops, and as dirty land-of-
fices, will, doubtless, in the present civilization, have
position somewhere ; but must they needs be foisted
upon the area about the village station? Is no re-
demption possible? Must we always confront the
town with its worst side foremost? Suppose for a
moment that the old Village Green were translated to
the neighborhood of the station, or a companion spot
of rural attractiveness established there, around
which the waiting equipages might circle in attend-
ance—suppose a pleasant shade of elms spreading
itself upon that now dusty area—suppose the corpo-
rate authorities keenly alive to the aspect which their
town and its approaches may wear in the eye of the
world which looks on, and forms its judgment every
day by thousands—suppose an inviting inn, duly li-
censed, swings its sign under some near bower of
trees, will all this count nothing toward the growth,
the reputation, the dignity of a country locality? I
know I am writing in advance of the current practice
in these respects; but Iam equally sure that Iam
not writing in advance of the current practice fifty
years hence, if only the schools are kept open. The
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 147
reputation of a town for order, for neatness, for liber-
ality, or taste, is even now worth something, and it
is coming to be worth more, year by year.
Railway: Gardening.
HAVE alluded to the railway station and its
surroundings, because it seems to me that—in
the lessons of public taste which are being read from
time to time by those competent to teach on such
topics—this new junction of the world with country
localities is being sadly overlooked. Where indeed
can there be a hopeful opening for any zesthetic teach-
ing, if this inoculation and grafting-point of the busi-
ness world with the world ruminant and rural, is al-
lowed to fix, with all its ugly swell of swathing band-
ages and pitch and mud, uncared for ?
The question of proprietorship might give some
difficulty, but it is one whose difficulties would vanish,
if only the corporate authorities of town and road
could be brought to act in harmony. Nor is there
any reason in the economies of the matter why they
should not. The road secures a limited area for the
establishment of its station, and some outlying
grounds, in most cases, to guard against future con-
tingencies—which grounds usually rest in a most
1423 RURAL STUDIES.
forlorn condition, giving refuge, may be, to con-
demned sleepers or wreck of wheels—possibly ten-
anted by some burly night porter, who thrusts his
stove-pipe through the roof of a dismantled car—
showing just that disarray, in short, which declares
no pride or proof of ownership. If there chance to
be any half-filled pits upon the premises, enterprising
Celtic citizens of the neighborhood count them good
spots into which to shoot their garbarge. All this
the town authorities regard as a matter which con-
cerns only the distinguished corporation of the road.
Thus, between them, the most unkempt and noisome
wilderness about the half of such of our country
towns as are pierced by railways is apt to lie in the
purlieus of the station. Yet railway directors are,
some of them, professing Christians, and so are town
authorities—at times. What now if these good peo-
ple (hee verbi magnificentia !) would lay their heads
together to compass what might prove a gain to the
town thrift, and so indirectly to the road, without
positive loss to either? What if the town were to
extend the area of the corporation lands at its own
cost, so far as to establish a little bowling green, that
should give piquant welcome to every stranger, and
grow to be an object of town pride? What if care
of all grounds adjoining the station should be subject
to some custodian, bound to control them after some
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 149
simple prescribed rules of order, whose fulfilment
would work an economy to the company, and add a
grace to that portion of the village ?
I cannot help recalling to mind here some of
those charming wayside stations upon the Continent
--in France, Germany, and Switzerland—where the
station-master is also manager of a blooming garden
(the property of the company), which he manages
with such tender care that the blush of the roses and
the mufiled scent of the heliotropes come to me again
as I read the name of the station upon the Guide
Book. And yet those French, those German, those
Swiss corporators, who encourage their station-mas-
ters to such handicraft, are shrewd money men.
They find their account in all this; they like to make
their roads attractive ; the way-side villagers encour-
age them in it to the full bent of their capacity.
In one quarter (among those stations of which I
speak, but I cannot now just say where) I was pro-
voked into special inquiries: “This nice treatment
involved a great bill of expense doubtless ? ”
“ Very great care—grand labor!”
“Tt must make a heavy bill for the company to
foot ?”
“ Pardon, monsieur, the work is mine and the
gain is mine.”
‘“ Not very much, it is to be feared.”
150 RURAL STUDIES.
“ Pardon” again; the station-master (it was only
an out of the way country station) has sold enough
of bouquets to passing travellers to establish his boy
at a pension: he hopes everything for his boy. The
story gave anew fragrance to the roses, and to the
marguerites which he handed me.
Now, Iam afraid our station-masters, whether in
Massachusetts or along the Hudson, will not be ca-
pable of making themselves good florists at a bound ;
but yet the hint has its value. What objection can
there possibly be to the careful culture of such strips
of land as come within the jurisdiction of every sta-
tion-master upon our iron roads? In not infrequent
instances he has the lea of some deep cutting for
shelter ; he has the eyes of an observing crowd (who
are debarred from pilfering) for an incentive; he may
have his thousand customers for floral offerings every
summer’s day. Could not the townsfolk aid, with
prudent foresight, in any such diversion of the waste
strips of railway lands? The area in gross is not
small; miles upon miles of bank cutting, of marsh
land, of embankment, of green level, each one of
which will grow its own crop after methods which a
wealthy and intelligent railway corporation might
surely direct. Osiers upon the low lands, shrubs
upon the raw cuttings (binding them against wash),
grasses upon the verdant lands, a flame of flowers
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 15l
around every station. Does anybody doubt that this
thing is to be in the years to come? Does anybody
doubt (who believes in progress) that some day the
directors, now so stolid and indifferent, will make a
merit of it, and take a pride in pointing out their
horticultural successes upon their league-long strips
of garden ?
One very great advantage in that nice culture
which is to be observed about many of the British
and Continental railway stations lies in the fact, that
the culture and its success are submitted every day to
thousands of eyes. What you or I may do very suc-
cessfully, and in obedience to the best laws of taste
and vegetable physiology on some back country prop-
erty, may really benefit the public very little, for the
reason that the public will never put eye upon it;
but what our horticultural friend at a railway station
may do (if done well) is of vastly more profit. It is
in the way of being seen; it is in the way of being
seen of those who are not immediately engrossed
with other care than the easy care of travel; it gives
suggestions to them in their most accessible moods.
To this day I think I have fixed in my mind many a
little gracefully arranged parterre of bloom, only
petunias and pansies and four o’clocks, may be, which
I saw only a few moments on some day, now far
gone, in other latitudes, and of which the scant
152 RURAL STUDIES.
memorial is but some jotting down upon a foreign
note-book, followed by a scant pencilling of the actual
adjustment, so far as the brief stay allowed of tran-
script.
The chemists tell us that the air of cities and their
neighborhood is richer in available nitrogen (in shape
of ammonia or nitric acid) than the air of the country,
by reason of the outpourings trom so many chimney-
tops, and the attendant processes of combustion. May
not the cinders and the fine ash and the gases
evolved from a great highway of engines always
puffing and smoking in the lower strata of the atmo-
sphere contribute somewhat, and that not inconsider-
ably, to the plants found along the lines of such high-
way? Iam not aware that experiment has as yet
determined anything on this score; and whatever
such determination might be, it is certain that abund-
ant sources of fertilization might be secured at every
country station, sufficient amply to equip an invest-
ing garden. Upon the oldest roads very much could
be done still in way of this charming investiture, and
in way of the adjoining bowling-green, under encour-
agement of the town, or of neighboring property-
holders ; and upon all new lines of railway, wherever
new stations are established, everything could be
done. To make a township attractive, the approach
to it must be attractive. Will not our Western
WAY-SIDH HINTS. 1538
burghers who are interested in the growth of town-
ships make a note of this fact, and do somewhat for
the benefit of the coming generation as well as for
their own advantage, by so ordering the establish-
ment of railway stations as to determine and insure
the attractive features I have named ?
Landscape Treatment of Railways.
HILE upon this subject of railway gardens
and culture, I have a word to say to all who
have lands adjoining upon these iron clamps of our
present civilization. A great accession of responsi-
bility comes to them by reason of their position. A
slatternly wall, a disgraceful method of tillage, a reek-
ing level of undrained land, in far away districts, may
corrupt but few young farmers and confirm them in
bad practices, by reason of their isolation. But upon
a great highway of travel, where a thousand eyes
measure the shortcomings day by day, a good or a
bad example will have a hundred-fold force.
It would seem, indeed, as if a shrewd business
economy would commend care and nicety of tillage.
The adventurous hair-dressers and fabricators of a
myriad nostrums, paint their advertisements on the
rocks; what better advertisement of a farm or garden,
fh .
154 RURAL STUDIES.
or nursery or wood or meadow, than such equipment
of them all with the best results of thorough care
and culture, as to fasten the eye and pique investiga-
tion? I know a suburban architect who, by the har-
monies and order of a homestead, in full view of a
thousand travellers a day, has doubled his business.
So the grace of a parterre or the artistic arrangement
of aterrace or a walk in the eye of so many, may
make the reputation of a gardener. Every dweller,
indeed, upon a line of railway, has a reputation to
make or lose in all that relates to his treatment of
ground, whether as woodland, farm, or garden.
If the homestead be so near the clatter of the
trains as to give too great exposure of the domestic
offices, good taste, as well as the quiet which most
country-livers enjoy, will suggest a planting out of
the line of traffic by thickets of evergreens; and
these, by their careful adjustment, and occasional
openings for a glimpse at the more attractive features
of the situation, will themselves give such a place a
character. If, however, the house be so remote as to
admit of all desired seclusion about the dooryard
and to yield only distant views of the trail of carri-
ages whirling up their white curls of steam, a mere
hedge may mark the dividing-line, or some simple
paling, and the lands between, whether in lawn or
tillage, may be so ordered as to greet the eye of
WAY-SIDE HINTS. 155
every intelligent traveller, or impress upon him such
rural lessons as every adjoining proprietor should
make it a virtue to teach.
When a farm or country-seat is traversed by a
deep cutting for the railway bed—so deep as to for-
bid any extended side views—a tasteful proprietor
may still mark his lands noticeably, and well, by
arranging—in concert with the railway officials—an
easily graded slope upon either side of the cutting,
which, by a few simple dressings, shall be brought
into a grassy surface—telling a good story for the
flats above, and showing upon their extreme height a
skirting hedge-row or coppice, or possibly the trellis
of some rustic paling, blooming with flowers, and (if
convenience of pathway require it) stretching upon
either side of a bridgelet, across the chasm of the
road. Even where such cutting is through cliff, noth-
ing is to forbid the dressing of the higher ledges with
a few crimson bunches of columbines, to nod their
heads between the eye of the traveller and the sky,
and make good report, from their little corners, of the
people whose every-day walk skirts the cliffs. Ifa
gradual slope, or terraces, are admissible by the
nature of the cutting, it is a question if these may not
be made to carry their parterres of flowers, or of
blooming shrubs, to give charm to the borders of an
estate. I have somewhere seen such slope, whereon
156 RURAL STUDIES.
an adventurous nurseryman had given advertisement
of his name and calling by an ingenious arrangement
of his box-borders in gigantic lettering—not, perhaps,
a very legitimate rural decoration, or such as a severe
taste would commend—and yet I cannot but think
that a little trail of fiery flowers, scattered, as it were,
upon a bank of lawn, and spelling out some graceful
name (of the homestead), which should be discerni-
ble only one swift moment as the train flashed by,
while to one looking forward or backward, it should
be only a careless ribbon of flowers flecking the green
—TI say I can hardly fancy that this would smack of
tawdriness. However this may be, devices there are,
innumerable, for conferring grace upon such sudden
slopes as I have hinted at: a slope to the north will
carry admirably its tufts of rhododendron and of
kalmia, or its confused tangle of hemlocks and Deodar
cedars.
The English ivy, too, will grow admirably in such
situations, upon a ground surface, taking root here
and there, and covering all the lesser imequalities
with its glossy network of leaves. Such condition
of growth, moreover, (trailing over the surface of the
ground,) insures protection by snows; or, if that be
wanting, a thin coating of litter spread over the
creeper will be an ample defence, The ivy is winter-
killed, not so much by extreme cold, as by sudden
WAY-SIDH HINTS. 157
alernations of temperature, and exposure of its stiff
ened leaves to the scalding sunbeams which some-
times belong even to a northern winter. Protection
from the January sun is, I believe, as important as
protection from extreme cold.
Where the railway passes through a country prop-
erty upon the same general level with a lawn surface
or farm lands, the rules for adjustment—of crops or
of decorative features—so as to carry their best land-
scape effects, will be comparatively easy. All right
lines—whether of annual crops, hedge-rows, or ave-
nues—will, of a surety, lose effect by being established
parallel to the line of road. At what angle they
should touch upon it, will be best determined by the
nature of the surface, and by the conditions of the
background,
I know that it is the habit of many who control
large estates adjoining railways, to ignore, so far as
possible, this iron neighbor, and to make all their
plans of improvement with a contemptuous disregard
of the travelling observers, who count by thousands,
considering only the few who look on from the old
high-road, or those, still fewer, who have the privilege
of the grounds. But in a republican country, this is
monstrous ; monstrous, indeed, in any country where
a man properly reckons his responsibilities to his fel-
lows. If he has conceived new lessons of taste, it is
158 RURAL STUDIES.
his duty so to illustrate them as to make them command
the acceptance of the multitude. He has no right to
ignore the onlook of the world, and be careless if the
world condemns or approves.
A high railway embankment traversing the low
lands of a country estate, if at a good remove from
the homestead, is not so awkward a matter to deal
with as might at first be supposed. A few years of
well-tended growth in a forest screen may be made
to exclude it altogether; but care should be taken
lest such screen, by its uniformity, should present the
same tame outlines with the embankment itself. To
avoid this, the woody plantation should flow down in
little promontories of shrubbery upon the flat; it
should have its open bays upon the embankment it-
self, disclosing at intervals a glimpse of the passing
trains; and, above all, the bridge or culvert, which
keeps good the water-courses of the land, should be
distinctly indicated, and might have its simple deco-
rative features.
All this, if picturesque effect only is aimed at:
but if it be desirable to utilize such monster embank-
ment, it may be remembered that its shelter, if look-
ing to the south, would almost create a summer cli-
mate of its own, and would make admirable lee for
the forcing-houses of the gardeners, and for the
growth of whatever plants or vegetables crave the
WAY.SIDE HINTS. 159
first heats of the spring sun. The traveller will recall
the “little Provence,” in the garden of the Tuileries,
where, by the mere shelter of a twelve-foot terrace wall
circling around against cool winds, a summer balmi-
ness is given to the locality even in winter, and phthi-
sical old men and feeble children find their way
thither to luxuriate in the sunshine.
If, on the other hand, such embankment flank the
north, its shadow will offer capital nursery-ground for
the rhododendrons, ivies, and all such plants as are
impatient of the free blast of the sun.
And, after all, if these happy accidents of posi-
tion and opportunity did not favor such special culture,
it should be the duty and the pride of the true artist
in land-work to ascertain what other growths would
be promoted by exceptional disturbances of surface.
The finest and highest triumphs in landscape art are
wrought out in dealing with portentous features of
ugliness, and so enleashing them with the harmonies
of a given plan as to extort admiration.
The railway, with its present bald embankments,
and its baldness of all sorts, is a prominent feature in
many of our suburban landscapes. It cannot be
ignored, and the study must be to harmonize its
sweep of level line, its barren slopes, its ugly scars,
its deep cuttings, with the order and grace of our
fields and homes. Rains and weather-stains and wild
160 RURAL STUDIES.
growths are doing somewhat to mend the harshness ;
but a little artistic handling of its screening foliage,
and adroit seizure of the opportunities furnished for
special culture, will quicken the work. And it is to
this end that I have thrown out these hints upon so
novel a subject as that of railway gardening.
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS.
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS.
Landscape Gardening.
“Sit an art or a trade that I propose for discus-
sion? I think it is an art. The backwoodsman
would not agree with me; there are many plethoric
citizens who would not agree. Good roads, and paths
laid where you want them, and plenty of shade trees
—is there anything more than this in the laying out
of grounds? Is there any finesse, any special aptitude
requisite, or anything that approaches the domain of
art in managing the matter, as such matter should be
managed ?
I think there is; and that it is an art as yet, in
this country, almost in its infancy; and yet an art
instinctively appreciated by cultivated persons wher-
ever it declares itself, whether upon a small or a large
area.
164 RURAL STUDIES.
We have admirable engineers who can lay down
an approach road, or other, with easy grades, and
great grace—so far as the curves count for grace ; and
we have gardeners who shall lay down your flower-
beds and grounds for shrubbery according to the
newest rules, and with great independent beauties in
themselves ; but it is quite possible that both these
classes of workers may fill their designs admirably,
and yet steer clear of the great principles of the art I
purpose to discuss. It is an art which takes within
its purview good engineering and good architectural
work, and good gardening, and good farming, if you
please ; but which looks to their perfect accordance—
which dominates, in a sense, the individual arts
named, and accomplishes out of the labors of each a
congruous and captivating whole.
Good farming, good gardening, good engineering,
and good architecture may stand side by side upon a
given estate, and yet, for want of due conception of
what the landscape really demands for its completed
charm, the effect may be incongruous and unsatisfy-
ing. Over and over again a wealthy proprietor seeks
to supply the somewhat that is lacking by inordina-
tive and cumulative expenditure: he may thus make
outsiders wonder and gape; he may also secure a
great assemblage of individual beauties; but the
charming oneness of effect which shall make his place
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 165
an exemplar of taste and a perpetual delight is some-
how wanting.
The true art of landscape gardening lies in such
disposition of roadways, plantations, walks, and build-
ings as shall most effectively develop all the natural
beauties of the land under treatment, without con-
flicting (or rather in harmony) with the uses to which
such lands may be devoted. Thus, in a private estate,
home interests and conveniences must be kept steadily
in view, and these must never be sacrificed for the
production of a pictuesque effect, however striking in
itself. Again, in a public park the same law obtains,
and any good design for such must show great ampli-
tude of roadway, and broad, open spaces for the dis-
port of the multitude. Upon farm-lands, which I
hold to be not without the domain of landscape treat-
ment, there must be due regard to the offices of rural
economy, and the decorative features may be safely
brought out in the shape of gateways, belts of pro-
tecting shrubbery, or scattered coppices upon the
pasture-lands. Upon ground entirely level, the range
of possible treatment is, of course, very much limited ;
but the true artist in landscape effects can do some-
thing even with this; no architect worthy of the
name despairs if he is confined to four walls of even
height ; in his own art, if he loves it, he finds deco-
rative resources.
166 RURAL STUDIES.
I have alluded to the possibility of artistic land-
scape treatment in connection with farm-lands ; this
opinion is, ] am aware, opposed to the traditional
theory of the British writers upon the subject ; but
we are living in advance of a good many traditions
of that sort. The Duke of Marlborough keeps the
open glades of his park-land short and velvety by his
herd of fallow deer. Our wealthy citizen, on the
other hand, will probably keep his largest stretch of
level land in presentable condition with a Buckeye
Mower, and will depend upon the cutting as a win-
ter’s baiting for his Alderney heifers; but this will
not forbid an occasional group of oaks or maples, or
the massing of some graceful shrubbery around an
intruding cliff. It will never do, indeed, for us as
Americans to sanction the divorce of landscape from
.our humbler rural intentions—else the great bulk of
our wayside will be left without law of improvement.
Not only those broad and striking effects which
belong to a great range of field and wood, or to bold
scenery, come within the domain of landscape art, but
those lesser and orderly graces that may be com-
passed within stone’s throw of a man’s door. We do
not measure an artist by the width of his canvas.
The panoramas that take in mountains are well, if the
life and the mists of the mountains are in them; but
they do not blind us to the merit of a cabinet gem.
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 167
I question very much if that subtle apprehension of
the finer beauties which may be made to appear about
a given locality does not express itself more pointedly
and winningly in the management of a three or five
acre lawn, than upon such reach of meadow and
upland as bounds the view. The watchful care for a
single hoary boulder that lifts its seared and lichened
hulk out of a sweet level of greensward; the auda-
cious protection of some wild vine flinging its tendrils
carelessly over a bit of wall, girt with a savage
hedge-growth—these are indications of an artist feel-
ing that will be riotous of its wealth upon a bare acre
of ground. Nay, I do not know but I have seen
about a laborer’s cottage of Devonshire such adroit
adjustment of a few flowering plants upon a window-
shelf, and such tender and judicious care for the little
matlet of turf around which the gravel path swept to
his door, as showed as keen an artistic sense of the
beauties of nature, and of the way in which they may
be enchained for human gratification, as could be set
forth in a park of a thousand acres. Of course, I do
not mean to imply that the man who could fill a
peasant’s rood of ground with charms of shrub or
flower, would, by virtue of so humble attainment, be
competent to produce the larger effects of landscape
gardening. This would, of course, involve a wider
knowledge and a different order of experience ; but
168 RURAL STUDIES.
the eye and the taste, which are the final judges, must
be much the same.
Farm Landscape.
N further reference to the possible connection of
landscape art with lands submitted every year to
agricultural and economic uses, I propose to examine
the matter in detail. If all farm-lands showed only
the method of Alderman Mechi’s, and his system
of pumping dirty water by steam into the middle of
any field—to be distributed thence by hose and
sprinklers—should prevail, we should have, of course,
only flat surfaces and rectangular fields to deal with.
But it is safe to say that it will not prevail upon most
of our American farms for many years to come; yet
it is none the less true that farm-lands are chiefly
valued for the crops they will carry, and for the
annual return they will make. Are lands under such
rule of management susceptible of an esthetic goy-
ernance as well? Will treatment with a view to
profit, discard of necessity all consideration of taste-
ful arrangement? I think not, and for reasons
among which I may adduce the following: Judicious
location of a farm-steading, with a view to profit
simply, will be always near the centre of the lands
farmed: this is agreeable, moreover, to every land-
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 169
seape-ruling in the matter. The ricks, the chimney,
the barn-roofs, the dove-cots, the door-yard, with its
skirting array of shrubbery and shade trees,—if only
order and neatness belong to them, as good economy
would dictate,—form a charming nucleus for any
stretch of fields. If there be a stream whose power for
mechanical purposes can be made available, economy
dictates a location of the farm buildings near to its
banks: taste does the same. If there be a hill whose
sheltering slope will offer a warm lee from the north-
westers, a due regard for the comfort of laborers
and of beasts, to say nothing of early garden crops,
‘will dictate the occupancy of such sheltered position
by the group of farm buildings: taste will do the
same. If such slope has its rocky fastness, incapable
of tillage, and of little value for pasture, economy will
suggest that it be allowed to develop its own wanton
wild growth of forest: a just landscape taste will
suggest the same. If there bea broad stretch of
meadow or of marsh land, subject to occasional over-
flow, or by the necessity of its position not capable
of thorough drainage, good farming will demand that
it be kept in grass: good landscape gardening will
do the same.
Again, such rolling hillsides as belong to most
farms of the East, and which by reason of their
declivity or impracticable nature are not readily sub-
8
170 RURAL STUDIES.
ject to any course of tillage, will be kept in pasture,
and will have their little modicum of shade. The
good farmer will be desirous of establishing this
shade around the brooklet or the spring which waters
his herd, or as a sheltering belt to the northward and
westward of his lands: the landscapist cannot surely
object to this. The same shelter along the wayside
is agreeable to all zesthetic laws, and does not surely
militate against any of the economies of farming.
Indeed, I may remark here, as I have already done in
the progress of these pages, that the value of a shel-
tering belt of trees is not sufficiently appreciated as_
yet by practical farmers; but those who are not
insensible to the quick spring growth under the lee
of a northern garden-fence, will one day learn that an
evergreen belt along the northern line of their farms
will show as decisive a gain in their fields or their
orcharding.
Again, in the disposition of roadways, there is no
rule in landscape gardening which is not applicable
to a farm. Declivities are to be overcome by the
easiest practicable grades, and the curves which will
insure this in most landscapes are those which are
justified at a glance by the economic eye, as well as
by the eye of taste. A straight walk up and down a
hill, is a monstrosity in park scenery; and it is a
monstrosity that cannot be found in pasture-lands,
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. eal
where cattle beat their own paths. Even sheep, who
are good climbers in search of food, whenever they
wend their way to the fold, take the declivities by
zigzag, and give us a lesson in landscape art. An
ox-team, in worming its way through woodland and
down successive slopes, will describe curves which
would not vary greatly from the engineering laws of
adjustment.
Once more, there are certain special features about
a farm-steading, which may be led to contribute
largely to landscape effect without violation of econo-
mic law. These are the ventilators upon the barn
roof (which no good barn should be without), the
dove-cots, the chimney-stacks, the ricks (for which a
nice thatch is an economy), the Dutch barns, with
their pointed roofs and rustic base, the windmill (if
one is dependent upon pumps), the orcharding—all
which may be made to contribute their quota to an
effective landscape, without great violation of the
practical aims of the farmer.
I have dwelt upon this point, because I love to
believe and to teach that in these respects true taste
and true economy are accordant, and that the graces
of life, as well as the profits, may be kept in view by
every ruralist, whether farmer or amateur. There
have been certain fermes ornées both in England and
France (may be in this country too), which I do not
172 RURAL STUDIES.
at all reckon in my estimate of the relations of good
farming to the positive laws of taste. They are play-
farms, upon which it is thought necessary, (however
flat the surface,) to give to the fields all manner of
irregular and curvilinear shapes. Such an arrange-
ment is to every judicious farmer an affront. If a
field takes irregular shape for sufficient reason—in its
surface, or encroachment of cliff, border territory, or
water,—well and good; the farmer can account for
it, and accommodate his labors to it. But if it bea
fantasy merely, which requires him to back his team
and give inequality to his “lands,” his common-sense
revolts at it; he sees an empty device that interrupts
his labor and provokes his contempt. The contempt,
I think, any man of true taste will share with him.
There is nothing horrible in a straight line (what-
ever some gardeners may think) upon flat surfaces.
I am inclined, indeed, to favor strongly the old Dutch
instinct for long clipped avenues, and for the straight
belts of trees along their water-courses, in Holland.
Why should they puzzle themselves with curves,
where no curves were needed? Or over the great
sheep plains of Central France, what mockery it
would have been to conduct a highway (or any other
way for convenience) by the meanderings which
belong so naturally to a highway of Devonshire!
Of course, I speak of landscape here in a large
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 173
way. A man may very properly have his door-yard
and garden curvatures upon a plane surface, if they
be accounted for by judicious planting. I have even
seen little hillocks thrown up upon a two-acre patch
of adroitly arranged pleasure-ground which suggested
agreeably larger and more graceful hillocks near by
that were not attainable. But a man who should
undertake the building of a considerable hill in. a
level country to relieve the monotony, would very
likely have his labor for his pains. Even the great
tumulus upon the field of Waterloo, upon which the
Belgian lion snuffs the air, had to me always a most
absurd look of impropriety. A group of white head-
stones or a column of marble would have told more
gracefully the story of the Belgian dead. The stu-
pendous rock-work at Chatsworth, again, always ap-
peared to me a most monstrous waste of good honest
material and honest labor. It is very costly and
expensive ; but one of the least of God’s cliffs would
overshadow it utterly. Its artificiality cannot cheat
one who knows what rocks are in the fissures of the
hills; and he looks upon it, at best, with the same
sort of foolish wonderment with which he looks upon
the wooden puppets in the Dutch gardens of Broek.
Thus much I have written to show, so far as I
might, that the small landholder can avail himself
of the laws of the best landscape art, and in virtue
174 RURAL STUDIES.
of them can confirm and establish the neatness and
order of his fields. There is, indeed, an artificiality
about his straight lines of crops, and bis rectangular
enclosures which does not tempt the painter; but it
is an artificiality that excuses itself. There 1s a fitness
and propriety in it, which, when contrasted, as it
may be, with the farmer’s clumps of pasture shade,
his wayside trees, and his leafy screen of the farm
buildings, is not without a certain charm.
Lands not Farmed.
HERE is, however, a higher grade of landscape
beauty than can belong to lands tilled for their
economic returns, just as there is a higher grade of
man than the agricultural laborer. I propose to
indicate some of the methods by which this higher
beauty may be made to declare itself. First of all, in
the immediate neighborhood of every country home-
stead, (the site and architecture being already deter-
mined on, and not, therefore, subject to present dis-
cussion,) there must be neatness and order; no
tangled weedy growth, no paths half matted over:
there must be abundant evidence of that presiding ©
and watchful care without which every homestead,
whether within or without, lacks its most considera-
ble charm. If the beauty of the remoter landscape
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 175
lie in its wild and unkempt condition, the contrast of
extreme care at the house-side with such savagery,
will be all the more engaging. And if the beauty of
the outer landscapes lie merely in graceful and undu-
lating forms, care around the doorstep will be requi-
site to mark definitely the outflow of the domestic
wants and influences. The path I tread ten times a
day should be smooth; the patch of croquet ground
should be reduced to absolute level, and any intrud-
ing tussock be shorn away from reach of the tender-
footed gamesters; but the walk along the further
hill-side, where I go only after a long reach of days,
may be only a tramped foot-path on the sward ; and
the stretch of turf-land where the Alderneys are feed-
ing may have its eyelets of dandelion and golden
buttercups. But the care and order of which I speak
should not be a finical nicety. Martinetism is odious
everywhere. It must be acare that shall conceal
itself—that shall be marked by the lack of every-
thing disagreeable, and not be cognizable by traces
of a recent broom or roller. The scar of a spade-cut
is an unpleasant reminder of the art which is best
when all traces of its mechanical devices are out of
sight. Of course, there must be clippings and _ roll-
ings, but they should be so deftly done, and with such
watchfulness, as regards season, as to make the
observer forget they had ever been used.
176 RURAL STUDIES.
Again, it comes within the domain of landscape
art to secure an agreeable lookout from the door and
the cherished windows of the country homestead,
whatever may be its situation. Accident or choice
of site may, indeed, secure this beyond question ;
but, site being established, where views are limited
or obnoxious objects fret the eye, it is surprising
what may be done by judicious planting, and the
re-adjustment of walls or fencing or hedging, to offer
the pleasant lookout we demand, though it be bound-
ed by a gunshot. With a reach of twenty rods
before one’s eye and in one’s keeping, there is no
possible excuse for not giving it charming objects to
rest upon—objects that will not pall, but grow upon
the affections of every true lover of the country.
Your neighbor’s slatternly barn troubles you—
plant it out; the toss of the tops of hemlocks will
not be odious. A wavy bald wall irritates you; if
needed as a barrier, cover it with wild vines, or flank
it with hedging, or so plant your coppices on either
side, in and out, that its line shall be indistinguish-
able. Is there a low bit of sedgy ground that can be
made nothing of, for the reason that the adjoining
proprietor (who holds the lower lands) will enter
into none of your schemes of drainage? Plant it
with rhododendrons and the red-berried alder ; or if
it be a mere morass, tumble into it a few of the
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. ker
mossy stones from the higher slopes, and equip it
with the wood-ferns or clematis. There is no spot,
indeed, so ungainly that it cannot be cheated of its
roughness by such appliances of bush and vine and
plant as our own woods will furnish; no stretch of
lawn so meagre that you may not throw across it
morning and afternoon, such splintered bars of light
and shadow from its encompassing trees as will
charm the looker-on. In all places of limited range,
and which, from the necessities of position, are with-
out wide-reaching views, it is doubtful if the eye
should be allowed to rest upon any very determinate
and defined barrier, as marking the extreme limit of
the grounds. An irregular belt of wood or lesser
growth of shrubbery will offer pleasant concealment
and take away the sharpness of limitation, while some
picturesque feature in a neighbor’s grounds beyond,
though it be only a dove-cot or the ventilator upon
the barn-roof, or a gardener’s cottage, may, by the
vagueness and indeterminate character of the inter-
vening barrier, become more surely yours by the pos-
session of the eye. It is specially the province of the
art we are considering, to avail itself of all within
reach of the view, whatever may lie between, and
make it contribute to the oneness of the home pic-
ture. True art does not inquire who made the pig-
ments, or whose name they bear, but only, will they
8*
178 RURAL STUDIES.
add to the effect of the work in hand? If, by cut-
ting a few trees from the copse upon the hillside, I
can bring my neighbor’s broad-armed windmill into
view, I am taking a very legitimate means of availing
myself of his expenditure; and if the usual anchor-
age-ground for my neighbor’s yacht is shut off only
by a tuft of shrubbery upon my lawn, I will cut it
away and enjoy his yacht (at anchorage) as much as
he.
There are many country places which from their
position, possess an outlook so broad and grand as
to demand no consideration of special views, and
where landscape art will find range not only in the
ordering of lesser details, but in partial concealment
of the beauties that confront the eye. The situations
to which I allude are upon such range of highland as
to offer—very likely from the adjoining public road—a
similar width of view; but the bouse-view must have
some special consecration of its own—some veil of
intervening foliage may be, through which the ravish-
ing distance shall come by glimpses; some embower-
ment of trees, under which, as in a rural framing, the
great picture of the rivers and the mountains shall
take new sightliness ; some tortuous walk through im-
penetrable shrubberies, from the midst of whose dim-
ness you shall suddenly burst out upon the glory of
the far landscape. Such devices are needful not only
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 179
to qualify the monotony of one unvarying scene, be-
wildering from its very extent—not only to distinguish
the home view from that of every plodder along the
highway, but furthermore, and chiefly, to show such
traces of art management as shall quicken the zest
with which the natural beauties, as successively un-
folded, are enjoyed. A great scene of mountains, or
river, or sea, or plain, is indeed always a great scene ;
but in the presence of it a country home is not neces-
sarily a beautiful home. To this end, the art that
deals with landscape effect must wed the home to the
view ; must drape the bride, and teach us the piquant
value of a “ coy, reluctant, amorous delay.”
Again, it should be a cardinal rule in landscape
art (as in all other art, I think) not to multiply means
for producing a given effect. Where one stroke of
the brush is enough, two evidence weakness, and
three incompetency. If you can secure a graceful
sweep to your approach-road by one curve, two are
an impertmence. If a clump of half a dozen trees
will effect the needed diversion of the eye and pro-
duce the desired shade, any additions are worse than
needless. If some old lichened rock upon your lawn
is grateful to the view, do not weaken the effect by
multiplying rocks. Simple effects are the purest and
best effects as well in landscape art as in moral
teaching.
180 RURAL STUDIES,
A single outlying boulder will often illustrate by
contrast the smoothness of a lawn better than the
marks of a ponderous roller. One or two clumps of
alders along the side of a brooklet will designate its
course more effectively and pleasantly than if you
were to plant either bank with willows. A single
spiral tree in a coppice will be enough to bring out
all the beauty of a hundred round-topped ones. Be-
cause some simple rustic gate has a charming effect
at one point of your grounds, do not for that reason
repeat it in another. Because the Virginia creeper
makes a beautiful autumn show, clambering into the
tops of one of your tall cedars with its fivelobed
crimson leaflets, do not therefore plant it at the foot
ot all your cedars. Because at some special point the
red rooflet of a gateway lights up charmingly the
green of your lawn, and fastens the eye of visitors,
do not for that reason make all your gateways with
red rooflets. If some far-away spire of a country
church comes through some forest vista to your eye,
do not perplex yourself by cutting forest pathways to
other spires.
Again, (and I think I have trenched upon this topic
previously in the course of these pages,) every pos-
sessor and improver of a country estate, however
small or however large, should work upon clearly
defined plans, decided upon from the beginning. I
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 181
do not mean to say that diagrams and surveyor’s
maps may be positively necessary, provided the
director of the improvements has a clear wnderstand-
ing of the boundaries and surface, and a clear under-
standing of the effects he wishes to accomplish. I
only insist that promiscuous planting, and the laying
down of paths, little by little, or year by year, with-
out reference, clear and constant, to the final results,
and to a plan that shall embrace the whole property,
will involve great waste of labor, and the inevitable
undoing in the future of what may be done to-day.
Of course, where such work is intrusted to a corps
of gardeners and laborers, complete diagrams will be
necessary ; and it is only where the constant personal
supervision of the director, whether proprietor or
other, can be counted on, that such detailed exhibit
of the work in hand can be dispensed with. No
general plan, such as I refer to, can be safely matured
without, first, full and intimate knowledge of the
ground and its environs, and, second, a clear under-
standing of the intentions and tastes of the proprietor
under whose occupancy the plan is to reach fulfil-
ment.
I do not at all mean to say that the laws of taste
in respect to landscape art are to meet revision
at the will of any chance proprietor, or that the art
itself has not its elemental principles which no occu-
182 RURAL STUDIES.
pant of a country estate can safely disturb. But one
landholder has a penchant for agriculture, and wishes
to make all the available acres contribute to his taste
for cattle or crops; another has a horticultural mania,
- and wishes the outlay to take such a shape as shall
most contribute to his special pursuit ; still another
foresees a demand for his acres as villa sites, and
desires such arrangement as shall best contribute to
their conversion into some half-dozen or more of
attractive homesteads ; and yet another wishes such
improvement as shall best develop the natural features
of the place, and insure the most economic treatment
of the same, without any view to future sale, or to”
whims, whether horticultural or agricultural.
Now it is strictly within the province of land-
scape art to meet either or all of these views without
violation of its elemental principles. I have already
intimated how far the offices of husbandman and his
methods of culture may be subordinated to good
landscape effect: of horticulture this is even more
true. In laying out with a view to ultimate division
of country property for villa sites, there are certain
difficulties in the way. In a general sense, it is true
that the more you make beautiful a country property,
the more you make it inviting for country residences.
But landscape design with a view to a single owner-
ship and a single home establishment must needs be
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 183
different from one which looks to the dispersion of
the property into a dozen lesser homes. Absolute unity
of plan will, in such a case, be naturally out of the ques-
tion. There must be some measure of sacrifice to the
contingencies reckoned upon ; no sacrifice of charm,
indeed, when the purpose is understood: six adjoin-
ing sites, well ordered, and planted with a view to
future occupancy, may embrace a thousand beauties,
but will not, of course, preserve that unity of effect
which would belong to a single permanent property.
need to compare notes with the pro-
a property ; Ry he suoul! be put in
he + a reservation for eae purposes, for
vineyard, for orcharding, more than will be essential
to his household supply ? Does he count upon subse-
quent division of the property for building purposes ?
These questions should meet full discussion and
the outlay be adjusted thereby. But it is unfortu-
nately true that half the owners of country estates
entertain no considerations of this kind, and, entering
upon their improvements with a vague improvidence,
find after a lapse of years, the bulk of them useless
and inconvertible. City improvements may be under-
taken without long look into the future ; errors may
be amended as fast as brick and mortar can be piled
184 RURAL STUDIES.
together ; but great trees do not grow in a night, or
ina year. In America, we must count upon divisions
and subdivisions of property. Great ancestral estates
will nowhere be long ancestral. Our republican mill
grinds them sharply. Hence we lack, and must
always lack that artistic dealing with country estates
which can count upon oneness of proprietorship for an
indefinite period of years. Better to admit this in
the beginning, and let our landscape art take its form
accordingly, than to weary itself with imitation of
what is feudally and mercilessly old. Nothing can
cheat us, indeed, of the beauty of God’s trees and
flowers and wood-paths. Nature is as much to the
occupant of a fifty-acre holding, as to the Duke of
Devonshire, or the Marquis of Buccleugh. But half
a thousand acres of sylvan glade and of velvety turf
cannot be maintained with us from generation to
generation as the feeding ground for fallow deer ; it
may, however, have such keeping and embellishment
as shall fit it for a score of fair homes. Better the
homes with cheerfulness in them than the deer-park
with want shivering beyond the walls.
City and Town Parks.
NHE office of a park is wholly different from that
of a village green; the same demands do not
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 185
suggest the two. The city square or plaza is the city
representative of the village common: this latter
being only a rural plaza whereon the green-sward is
a more economic and appropriate pavement than
stones ; the incessant traffic and wear of a metropolis
do not blot the grass.
The park represents not only a demand for space
and trees, but a revival and reassertion of country
instincts which city associations are only too apt to
infold and entomb; but, however drearily infolded,
there comes some day to all denizens of cities a resur-
rection of those earlier rural instincts which crave
an outburst, through all the stony
growth and food
interstices of pavement, of the love of trees and
green things. Not until a city has become so large
as to deny to very many living in its interior intimate
association and familiarity with the encompassing -
belt of country will this new need declare itself
strongly. Nay, in a city, whose elevated situation,
gives outlook from its open spaces upon great fields
of greenness around it, such need of park land will
not for a long period of years be felt.
Eventually, not only will the instinctive rural
longings of the masses stimulate to this struggle to
recover the lost birthright of trees and turf, but the
very vanities of city growth will demand a larger
airing than populous streets can supply; and the man
186 RURAL STUDIES.
who loves a sleek team, and indulges in its display,
will vie with the workman (who wants romping
place for his children) in clamor for a public park.
If our vanities and our healthful tastes were always
as closely yoked, we should have a better erowth
from the yoking. However, it may come about—
whether from the natural impulses of a crowded
population to ally themselves once again with the
bounteous amplitude of the fields, or whether from
the artificial desire to give room and exhibition to
equipages—it is undeniable that all towns of ambi-
tious pretensions and of assured and rapid growth do,
after a certain period of street packing, bestir them-
selves in a feverish way to secure some easy lounging-
place under the trees. Unfortunately the stir is, for
the most part, at so late a day, that all available or
- desirable localities have been secured for other pur-
poses. But, whatever the alternative of cost, I can-
not learn that such an enterprise, when thoroughly
matured and in complete operation, has ever proved a
disappointment. I have never heard of a disposition
on the part of voters to rescind any appropriation for
such a purpose, and to convert a public garden or
park to economic uses. I never heard of an instance
where pride did not speedily attach to the public
grounds, if accessivle and well cared for, and where
the people of such a town did not make a boast and
a glory of the endowment.
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 187
Even in countries where such far-sighted improve-
ments are effected by the force majeure of an Imperial
edict, popular resentments or revolutions never find
their leverage in such tokens of extravagance. There
are not a thousand men in Paris, rich or poor, who
would make quarrel with Louis Napoleon for the
millions lavished upon the Bois de Boulogne, or the
appointments of the Park Monceau. But there were
tens of thousands of malcontents, in Louis Philippe’s
time, with the fortification bill, and the inclosure for
private uses, of a terrace of the garden of the Tuil-
leries. The people may not, indeed, have a very clear
sense of their wants in the matter of a public park,
but once supply them attractively and accessibly, and
they feel the appositeness of the supply, and cling to
it with as much obstinacy as pride.
We Americans have a way of shrinking from pro-
spective taxation, whatever the purpose of it may be ;
but when once fairly saddled with it, whether for the
benefit of corporations or monopolies or public im-
provements, we bear it with a most admirable un-
flinchingness. The costs of public gardens or parks,
if well ordered, and not made the vehicle of private
peculation, are not such as. would create a remon-
strance from the people of any American city; and
the difficulty in the way of establishment would
lie not so much in a general spirit of hostility to
188 RURAL STUDIES.
increased taxation, (though that spirit, as I have
hinted, has a wonderful eatlike watchfulness,) as in
the private jealousies that must be harmonized before
any large real estate improvement is practicable. I
defy any benevolent gentleman, in a town of thirty
thousand active, and newspaper-reading inhabitants,
to propose a scheme for a public garden or park, upon
a designated spot of ground, without starting an
angry buzz of opposition from other equally benevo-
lent gentlemen, who see in it only a device to bring
about the rapid appreciation of property which is not
their own. The quick-sightedness with which the
philanthropists of one side of a smallish city will detect
flaws in the philanthropy of men living on the other
side of a smallish city, is indeed something marvellous.
Thus it happens that some brave and honest project
for park or water supply, or sewerage, will welter for
years in some slough of opposing doubts, all whose
obstructing slime is made up of such miserable, local
jealousies as I have hinted at. The same traces of
satanic influence belong, I think, to the philosophers
who make up our national Congress, so that our
best bits of legislation seem to come upon us by ac-
cident, when our wisest legislators are asleep, or tired,
or—worse,
In the days of our present civilization and educa-
tion, it is hardly to be doubted that the majority of
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 189
intelligent voters in any considerable town would
declare for the utility of a public park or garden ;
but whether their wishes can be made effective for
the establishment of such a result is another ques-
tion, and one which must drift into the arena of town
politics—where I leave it; proposing only to discuss
here some of the aims of such an endowment, some
of the possibilities in that direction, the conditions
of its success, and permanent usefulness to the
masses.
Place for Parks.
IRST of all, a public park should be as near as
possible to the town ; best of all, perhaps, if in
the very centre of the town, or, as in the case of some
of the old walled towns of Europe, girting it with a
circle of green. I hardly think any public gardens
of the world contribute more to the health and enjoy-
ment of the adjacent population than those of Frank-
fort-on-the-Main, which lie all about their homes, and
which are planted upon the line of the old fortifica-
tions. Even the ill-kept walks upon the ancient walls
of Chester and York (in England), by their nearness
to the homes of the people, and by the delightful out-
look they offer, are among the most cherished prome-
nades I know. But with us, who have no girting
190 RURAL STUDIES.
walls, and rarely vacant spaces about our commercial
centres, these pleasant breathing-places must be
pushed into the outskirts of our towns. I say—rarely
vacant spaces; but while I write, there occur to me
instances of beautiful opportunities neglected, one of
which, at least, I will record. The thriving little city
of Norwich, in eastern Connecticut, is situated at the
confluence of two rivers, which form the Thames.
Along either shore of the Yantic and the Shetucket,
the houses of the town are picturesquely strewed in
patches of white and gray; but between the rivers
and the lines of houses, the land rises into a great
promontory of hill—toward the east, forming a Sal-
vator-Rosa cliff, shaggy with brush-wood and cedars—
toward the south and west, a steep declivity on which
the swiftly slanting sward-land is spotted with out-
cropping ledges; to the north a gradual slope falls
easily away to the great plains, where lie the bulk of
the suburban residences. Within twenty or thirty
years the whole upper surface of this central hillock
might have been secured for the merest bagatelle, and
would have made one of the proudest public prome-
nades imaginable, accessible to all walkers from the
south and east, and to all equipages from the north,
and offering level plateau for drives that would have
commanded the most enchanting of views; but the
occasion has gone by; inferior houses hold their
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 191
uneasy footing on the hillside, and a gaunt-jail,
which is the very apotheosis of ugliness, crowns this
picturesque height.
Another little city, that of Hartford, in the neigh-
bor State of Connecticut, has made the most of its
opportunities by converting into a charming public
garden a weary waste of ground that lay between its
railway station and the heart of the city. The op-
portunity was not large, to be sure, but it was one
that needed a keen eye for its development, and the
result has shown that commercial thrift may not
unfrequently take its lesson with profit from the sug-
gestions of a cultivated taste. There is many a
growing town having somewhere within its borders
such unsuspected aptitude and capability, that only
needs an eye to discern it, and the requisite enterprise
to develop in the very heart of the population a
garden and a public promenade that would become a
joy forever. It must be remembered, furthermore,
that it is quite impossible to make such transmutation
of waste and unsightly places into an attractive area
of garden-land, without increasing enormously the
taxable value of all surrounding property. I recall
now, in one of our most thriving seaside cities, a
great slough of oozy tide-mud of many acres in
extent, shut off from the harbor front by a low rail-
way embankment, showing here and there a riotous
192 RURAL STUDIES.
overgrowth of wild sedges, foul with heaps of
garbage, uninviting in every possible way, and yet
lying within stone’s throw of the centre of the city.
Sandy highlands, almost totally unimproved, flank it
immediately upon the west—disposed there, as it
would seem, for the very purpose of furnishing easy
material for the fillmg in of the flat below. A few
thousands would accomplish this, and judicious plant-
ing and outlay would in three years’ time establish a
charming promenade or garden in the centre of the
sea-front of the town, and there is not one of the
adjoining pieces of property but would be doubled in
value by the operation. The neglect of such oppor-
tunities, whether due to miserable local jealousies, or,
as often happens, to the short-sightedness and indif-
ference of municipal authorities, is surely not compli-
mentary to our civilization.
The term “ near to town,” in these times of horse
railways, has rather a relative than positive signifi-
cance. Three miles, by a fair, broad avenue, upon
which well-equipped cars are making their rounds
every half hour of the day, is not half so large a
distance for either the laboring or the business man
to compute, as a mile and a half of ill-kept, old-
fashioned turnpike road.
The truth is, that citizens of sleepy towns in the
interior are losing their reckoning about distances ;
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 193
they have not been educated to metropolitan esti-
mates. The Wall Street man sneers at two miles of
walk before business ; your small broker of a country
city, on the other hand, advertises for a tenement
“within half a mile of the post-office.” I never see
such an advertisement but I think some Rip Van
Winkle has just waked, and that his friends should
give him a combing and nursing.
Ready accessibility is the true measure of distance
in our day, and a town park must be easily accessible
to all classes. It must be a matter in which the
humblest citizens can take pride and comfort. Those
cities which have considerable open spaces in the
shape of “common,” “ green,” or “squares,” scattered
here and there, are the last to wake to any need of a
park which shall give drives, and such sources of
diversion as belong legitimately to a public park.
The central commons and greens may do very well
in the early stages of a city’s growth, but there comes
a time when the municipal edicts forbid ball-playing
and cricket, at which date there is reason to plan
some larger forage ground for our youthfal sports.
And it is precisely this forage ground for the
developing muscle of Young America that the town
park should furnish. Cricket ground, base-ball
ground, and parade ground for the ambitious troops
of the municipality should be as sedulously cared for
9
194 RURAL STUDIES.
as a good roadway for carriages. A skating pond
would belong fitly to the requirements, and, if no
river or harbor offered better space, an opportunity
for boating would be wisely included. It is not
supposed that a feasible spot of ground in the neigh-
borhood of most cities can command and make good
these requirements. But much more can be done
than is imagined if the best available talent is secured
for the work in hand. Even in our fast days, it is
quite wonderful to find what a multitude of people
go to sleep upon advantages which, judiciously
ordered, would make them rich. There is many a
river valley, in the close neighborhood of cities,
covered now with rank and unprofitable grasses, over
which, at small cost, might be given flow to a lake
that would wash on either shore the banks of high-
lands, admirably fitted for drives, and already clothed
with the forest growth of half a century.
Equipment of Public Gardens.
S I have already said, it is requisite that a town
park should offer a charming drive; so far
charming that every townsman will feel it incum-
bent on him to give each stranger guest a full view
of its attractions. These latter must lie, either in
commanding views of the town itself and its environs,
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 195
or in landscape effects which have been wrought out
by skill and attention in the park itself. Neither
Hyde Park nor the Bois de Boulogne offer any com-
manding range of view; the delights all lie in the
neatly kept roadway, the flanking lakes and parterres,
the bright, green slopes of shaven turf; at Richmond
Hill or on the Pincian at Rome, on the other hand,
you forget the roadway, you forget the bits of pretty
turflet, you ignore the copses, you are careless of the
odor of flowers, for your eye, carrying all your per-
ceptive faculties in its reach, leaps to the fair vision
of flood and field and trees, which sweep away, in
sun and in shadow, to the horizon.
Undoubtedly if the surface of adjoining country
will permit, it will be far less expensive to establish
a park whose charm shall lie in exterior views than
one whose attractions shall consist in what the pro-
fessional men call (by use of an abominable word) its
gardenesque features. Yet, with such economic pur-
pose, it will never do to go too far in the country.
It must never be forgotten with us that the men of
equipages are by no means the only class who are to
participate in our eesthetical progress ; the town park,
to have its best uses, must not only be within easy
reach by walk or by the street tramway, but it must
have, too, its spaces of level ground to allure the
cricket or the base-ball players. Areas should be
196 RURAL STUDIES.
ample enough to prevent the possible interference of
these sports, (which every sensible township would
do well to encourage,) with the enjoyment of a quiet
drive.
While there is no need for making the wood of a
public park a complete arboretum, I think that
special care should be taken to give specimens of all
the best known timber and shade trees, and that
these should be definitely marked with their botanical
as well as popular names, so that strollers might come
to a pleasant lesson in their seasons of idleness. The
particular habits of individual specimens and of forest
growths might, I think, be safely and profitably
noted as lending additional interest to them, and
creating a sort of fellowship with the trees. Every
forester knows that oaks and maples of the same
species have yet idiosyncrasies of their own—one
blooming a full fortnight before its neighbor, and
another taking a tawny hue, while its companion is
still in full array of green. In the garden of the
Tuilleries there is a chestnut which enjoys the tradi-
tional repute of showing leaflets upon the twentieth of
March (hence called Vingt de Mars), and the vener-
able,old tree, well known to every frequenter of the
garden, has come to have a character of sanctity by
reason of this early welcome of the spring. In a field
within sight of my own door, there is a sugar-maple
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 197
which, by some fault in the planting, or some inherent
defect in the tree, has made little or no growth these
last six years, and which every August—a full month
before the earliest of its companions—takes on a
hectic flush of color, which it carries, with the buoy-
ancy of a consumptive, all through the autumn. This
accident of coloring gives an individuality and in-
terest to the tree which distinguishes it from all its
stalwart and thrifty fellows.
I do not think a town park can ever safely be
mated with a trotting course; either the trotting or
the park will go under. It is not intended to speak
against trotting-courses, or greased pigs, or the climb-
ing of greased poles; but the arena for these sports
is not usually such a one as to entice a quiet family
man toa park drive. Quiet family men are not, to
be sure, very plentiful, and are not much considered
nowadays; they still subsist, however, in sufficient
numbers to give astale flavor of respectability to many
of our growing provincial towns, and to shape, to a
certain degree, the municipal improvments. The love
for fast trotters and for trotting matches is so decided
an American taste that a good trotting-course will
become a cherished institution in every town of a
dozen or fifteen thousand inhabitants. Indeed, I
think its establishment may be regarded as a kind of
necessary safety-valve, through which unusual speed
198 RURAL STUDIES.
and the accompanying howls may be worked off
safely without frightening staid old gentlemen who
keep to the quiet high-roads. A good flat, a good
bottom, and a good amphitheatre of seats, are about
all the requisites of an approved trotting-course, and
anything picturesque in the way of trees or decora-
tive features is an impertinence. There is no fear,
therefore, that the trotting taste will ever have large
interference with the demand for public parks.
It is a common mistake, I think, to imagine that
anything like a finical nicety in the arrangement of
turf or walks or parterres is essential to the perma-
nent and larger utilities of a town park. This, in-
deed, involves great cost, and diverts from larger and
more important ends.
280 RURAL STUDIES.
The enclosure A, having a ledge and an old group
of forest trees in its northwestern angle (offering
admirable shelter), may have its picturesquely dis-
posed orcharding, or may be planted with ornamental
trees, as the proprietor may fancy. In either case,
with a few protective hurdles, it may be cropped by
a score of Southdowns ; but it must be fairly under-
stood that no orcharding will do its best or even its
second best, except it be kept under thorough culti-
vation, and no grass permitted within reach of its
most divergent rootlets.
The walks and entrance drive explain themselves.
The dotted line H J, indicates a view of a distant
village spire, which upon the first diagram, as will be
seen, was entirely cut off by two or three intruding
trees ; and even when these were removed, the view
was sadly interfered with by the mossy wall already
spoken of. To obviate this difficulty I suggested a
gap in the wall thereabout, and the establishment
of a broad rustic gate under whose rude arch the
distant spire would come into sight as through a
frame-work.
“7 E will suppose that Mr. Urban is thoroughly
satisfied with his garden and grounds—that
he finds his newly planted trees growing apace—that
his Southdowns are all that an accomplished grazier
could desire; but the old house becomes at last a
weariness. Not because it is old; nor yet because it
is comparatively small—so small that he has to billet,
from time to time, a bachelor visitor in a little loft
of his tool-house ; but it has no wide and open front-
age to the sun. He insists that the new one, of
which he projects the building out of the rough
material from his cliff, shall have at least a glimpse
of southern sunshine in every habitable room below.
MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 287
“T am tired of the gloom of north exposures,” he
writes ; “ wood-fires are very well, but the blaze of
them is not equal to the blaze of sunshine. Do what
you will with the north side, but the parlor must look
to the south, and the library (of course) and the din-
ing-room, and—without going up-stairs—there must,
if possible, be a billiard-room and a bed-room, looking
the same sunny way. In brief, my notion is, to have
a house with plenty of room, and no north side to it.
Can the problem be solved ?
‘“‘T don’t care for shape, if it be only picturesque,
and meet the wants I have named above.
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i
conduct of Landscape Gardening, and its connected
branches of business — including Rural Architecture
and Engineering, with the Agricultural, Horticultural,
and Sanitary treatment of public and private grounds.
They will furnish designs for the laying out of Parks, Ceme-
teries, Farms, Country Seats, and Village Homesteads. They will
also plan modifications of country houses and of old-established
gardens or farms, and devise whatever, in their view, may be
needful—by plantations, thinning of wood, re-adjustment of build-
ings or enclosures, drainage, and establishment of walks or drives
—for the full development of country property, whether the pro-
prietor aims at economic management or picturesque effects,
Simple suggestions, surveys, drawings, and specifications, for
the above objects, with estimates of cost, will each or all be given,
as correspondents may wish.
They further propose to give attention to the Selection of
Sites, whether for Summer Houses, permanent Rural Residences,
or Farms. In this connection, they propose to inaugurate a gen-
eral bureau of information in regard to country homes—to advise
respecting the desirableness of particular localities—whether on
sanitary or economic grounds—and to negotiate transfers of coun-
try property. Correspondence is invited from those having such
property for disposal ; none, however, will be offered by them, un-
less previously visited and examined by a member of the firm, in
order that an intelligent opinion can be given of its adaptation to
the special wants of a client.
Mr. RIcHARD M. Hunr has kindly permitted the association
of his name with the firm as advising Architect.
DONALD G. MITCHELL, (of New Haven.)
WILLIAM H. GRANT,
Late Superintending Engineer of Central Park.
CITY OFFICE, STUDIO BUILDING, 51 West Tenth St., N. Y.,
where a member of the firm can be consulted on Saturdays, Mon-
days, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays ; or Mr. MITCHELL may be
addressed by mail at New Haven, Ct.; Mr. GRANT at Sing Sing,
New York.
MY FARM OF EDGEWOOD.
By DONALD G. MITCHELL.
2 vol. 12mo., on Laid Tinted Paper. Price, $1 75.
A new issue now coming from the press for the Spring Trade.
‘The cultivation of the scholarly gentleman shows itself in every page,
and asunny geniality of soul throws a softening tint over the ordinarily
unpoetical and angular characteristics of agriculture.’—Evening Post.
‘‘The instruction which it embodies will be none the less valued because
of the desultory method which the author has followed, or the many di-
gressions into which he has been beguiled. By the great mass of readers,
these very features will be considered asan additional charm. The light
and easy movement of the author's style, the graceful and delicate transi-
tions which he makes, the quiet humor in which he so naturally indulges,
the sly but good-natured satire which seems to drop so natuyally from his
pen, and the unaffected yet chastened pathos into which he rises for a mo-
ment, are all exquisitely wrought into a varied and beautiful tissue, which
is fitted to give perpetual delight to the cultivated reader, and to be itself
an instrument of culture to the unrefined.”—New-Englander.
“Tt is a book whose merit can hardly be over-praised. It should be in
every farmer’s library, as a volume full of practical advice to aid his daily
work, and full of ennobling suggestions to lift his calling into a kind of
epic dignity.’—Atlantic Monthly.
“Mr, Mitchell has unusual skill in putting his experience, his culture,
his taste, his delicate perceptions, into such literary forms as to make them
of use to others. This work has the vitality which springs from a love of
and acquaintance with nature, and will long be read as oneof the best and
pleasantest pictures of a New-England farm, and of the charms and
drawbacks of our New-England country life.’—North American Review.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD,
WITH OLD FARMERS, OLD GARDENERS, AND OLD PASTORALS.
lvol. 12mo. Price, $1 75.
We have no more graceful writer of the English language living than
the author of ‘My Farm” and “* Wet Days at Edgewood,” nor has the
grace of his pen been more apparent in any of his works than in these two
bucolics. In the last we have the fruits of his readings and musings
among the authors who have written upon rural life and its occupations,
philosophers and poets, from Hesiod and Homer down through the ages,
to Charles Lamb, and Loudon, the encyclopedist. A great amount of
quaint and pleasing reading is gathered from the thoughts of a hundred
writers, and, by the skilful hand of our author, their seeds are cultivated
into attractive plants which will beguile many an hour in town or country.
The book is divided into nine ‘‘ wet days,’ each one of which has its own
attractions. The multitude of Ik Marvel’s readers will join us iu the
wish that he may long live to write such pleasant béoks,
Copies sert by mail, postpaid, on receipt of price, by CS. & Co,
DOCTOR JOHNS:
BesnG A NARRATIVE OF CERTAIN EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF A CONGREGA-
TIONAL MINISTER OF ConNECTICUT. By DonaLp G. MITCHELL, author
of ‘‘ Reveries of a Bachelor,” “ My Farm of Edgewood,” &c., &c.
2vols.12mo. Price, $3 50,
“The work affords a rare picture of New England life and manners.
It is every way a charming sketch, and must improve the mind and heart
of every one who reads it.” —Episcopalian.
“The book shows the blended powers of the student, the thinker, the
poet, and the humorist, and is read as we read Addison or Goldsmith,
with tranquil delight.’— Boston Transcript,
** As a piece of rhetoric, it is charming, of course; for no American
writer, since the days of Washington Irving, uses the English language as
the ‘Ik Marvel’ of a few years since, and the ‘Farmer of Edgewood’
of to-day.”.—Round Table.
‘Ttis quite evident that, personally, the author has no sympathy with
the theological system which ‘ Dr, Johns’ is made to represent, and which
is drawn in its hardest and extremest form ; but still his sturdy sense of
justice makes him to describe him asa really noble character, of which
no school of orthodoxy and no church has need to be ashamed, and one
which commanded the profoundest respect and lifelong confidence of the
worldly Maverick.”’—Hours at Home. cd
‘* No book of the author seems to us 80 good. The great charm of it
lies in the truthfulness of its picture of New England life.’—New Haven
Palladium.
“Tn one respect Dr. Johus can be spoken of with unalloyed approval ;
it is a picture of life and manners that were of a social state that is fast
passing away, the mere shadows of which are on the land.”—Boston
Traveller.
“The doctor is a kind, unworldly man, and the most interesting person
in the book ; his life has been shadowed and softened by sorrow, and he
learns to love the little Adéle, though she is a Roman Catholic, and by his
love converts her to Protestantism. With his rebellions and warm-heart-
ed son he has a sadder experience ; the boy, driven from home by his
father’s apparent, and his hard old aunt’s real, harshness, drifts about the
world, doing nothing bad, but tossed and worn by religious doubts and
love for Adéle, till at last he finds rest in perfect reconciliation with his
father, the knowledge of Adéle’s love for him and death.”— Daily Spy.
“ He has evidently seen, face to face, much of what he describes. His
characters stand out clear, distinct, and life-like, with their several fea-
tures of worldly wisdom, shrewd common sense, kindly feeling, exuber-
ance of spirits, precise manners, and unfeigned piety. In dealing with
these the author is quite at home, and his delineations are at once graceful
and truthful”"—N Y. Evanczelist.
Copies sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of price, by C. S. & Co.
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