The livable house, its garden (1917) (14773633051)

Identifier: livablehouseitsg01dean (find matches)
Title: The livable house, its garden
Year: 1917 (1910s)
Authors: Dean, Ruth. (from old catalog)
Subjects: Landscape gardening
Publisher: New York, Moffat, Yard and company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation



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pleasing iron rail. Good use is made of retaining walls in connection with thehouses designed by Mr. Grosvenor Atterbury at Forest Hills,Long Island. Here each house has but a small door-yard, threeor four feet above the level of the sidewalk. Instead of terracingthis down to the sidewalk—the usual treatment for such yards—awall built back, a foot or two from the edge of the walk in orderto leave space for planting at its base, takes care of the differencein levels, increases by a few feet the size of the front yard, andadds immeasurablv to its attractiveness both inside and outside thewall. A choice of materials for the retaining wall would inevitablybe influenced by the two factors: appropriateness, both to the styleof house and the kind of garden, and availability, which is boundup with the circumstances of cost. It goes without saying thata wall of fine cut ashlar work would be out of place in a small,unpretentious garden, and that, on the other hand, rough field (40) G a d n
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~r^ >-. OS oO o (41) The Livable House stone would be poorly suited to a formal garden of the size andcharacter of Weld. The garden is tied to the house and madea part of it, or alienated from it as much by the materials used inconstruction work as by any other one factor, and those of thehouse should at least be recalled in some way in the garden.The retaining wall of the terrace at the Knickerbocker CountryClub is a continuation of the foundation wall of the house con-,structed of native sandstone, whitewashed; and the marble treadsand brick risers of the steps are similar to those of the porch. In-cidently, this offers an example of a happy combination of severalmaterials. In a country like the blue stone regions of Pennsylvania or thegranite hills of New England, stone suggests itself as the naturalmaterial for walls, although even where it is so plentiful it is un-happily not always the cheapest material. A stretch of Long Is-land coast land, on the other hand, with sand or gr