s of my own acre. When the
house was built its lot and others backed up to a hard, straight rear
line where the old field had halted at its fence and where the woods
began on ground that fell to the river at an angle of from forty to
fifty degrees. Here my gifted friend and adviser gave me a precept got
from his earlier gifted friend and adviser, Frederick Law Olmsted: that
passing from any part of a pleasure-ground to any part next it should be
entirely safe and easy or else impossible. By the application of this
maxim I brought my lawn and grove together in one of the happiest of
marriages. For I proceeded, by filling with earth (and furnace ashes),
to carry the lawn in, practically level, beyond the old fence line and
under the chestnuts and pines sometimes six feet, sometimes twelve,
until the difficult and unsafe forty or fifty degrees of abrupt fall
were changed to an impassable sixty and seventy degrees, and every
one's instinctive choice of way was the contour paths.

At the same time this has preserved, and even enhanced, the place's
wildness, especially the wild flowers and the low-nesting birds.
Sometimes a few yards of retaining-wall, never cemented, always laid up
dry and with a strong inward batter, had to be put in to avoid
smothering the roots of some great tree; for, as everybody knows and
nearly everybody forgets, roots, like fishes, must have air. In one
place, across the filled head of a ravine, the wall, though but a scant
yard high, is fifty feet long, and there is another place where there
should be one like it. In this work no tree was sacrificed save one
noble oak done to death by a youth who knew but forgot that roots must
have air.

Not to make the work expensive it was pursued slowly, through many
successive seasons; yet before even its easy, first half was done the
lawn was in under the grove on an apparently natural, irregular crest
line. Moreover the grove was out on the lawn with an even more natural
haphazard bordering line; for another operation had been carried on
meantime. Trees, souvenir trees, had from time to time been planted on
the lawn by visiting friends. Most of them are set close enough to the
grove to become a part of it, standing in a careful irregularity which
has already obliterated, without molesting, the tree line of the ancient
fence.

[Illustration: "The bringing of the grove out on the lawn and the
pushing of the lawn in under the grove was one of the early tasks