When viewed by the passer-by in the street the planting around the
house should be so arranged that it makes a natural frame for it and
creates a composition for a picture. Regarded from this angle there
should be background trees, trees and shrubbery flanking the sides
along the edge of the plot, a green open lawn stretching forward to
the street, some columnar-shaped trees or lacelike trees wisely placed
to suggest the middle ground, and then a wall or low hedge with low
plantings to make a foreground.
The background trees should be tall and mixed in character, so that
their skyline is not stiff and wall-like. The trees which run along
the edge of the lot ought also to be varied in type. Low shrubs should
fill in the spaces between their trunks, but as they come forward on
the property they should be more scattered, lower and thinner, so that
the neighboring property can be seen, and finally they should end,
allowing a blended connection between the lawns on either side. There
are some who advocate that the site should be completely walled in with
shrubs or fences and separated entirely from the neighboring plots, but
this is not quite in harmony with our traditions, and ought not to be
carried to this individual exclusiveness, although the rear of the lot
may be so screened in.
The green lawn should not be broken with flower-beds, for, taken at its
largest, it is bound to be little, and nothing should be introduced to
break it up. The windings of the front path may be such that clumps
of low shrubbery and a few columnar trees, like cedars or Lombardy
poplars, can be placed along its edge and produce a motif for the
middle ground, like a moving silhouette against the elevation of the
house as one passes by.
The building up of the foreground should be with some low planting
over which one can look. The use of fence or wall is legitimate if it
does not cut off the view. Gates are a little out of harmony with our
American traditions, for they mean that they should be attended by a
gatekeeper, a human tool that is quite extinct in the average home, and
especially in the small one.