for itself. Especially is it right
that we should like our gardens to look as large as we can make them
appear. Our countless lawns, naked clear up into their rigid corners
and to their dividing lines, are naked in revolt against the earlier
fashion of spotting them over with shrubs, the easiest as well as the
worst way of making a place look small. But a naked lawn does not make
the premises look as large, nor does it look as large itself, as it will
if planted in the manner we venture to commend to our Northampton
prize-seekers. Between any two points a line of shrubbery swinging in
and out in strong, graceful undulations appears much longer than a
straight one, because it is longer. But, over and above this, it makes
the distance between the two points seem greater. Everybody knows the
old boast of the landscape-architects--that they can make one piece of
ground look twice as large as another of the same measure, however
small, by merely grading and planting the two on contrary schemes. The
present writer knows one small street in his town, a street of fair
dwellings, on which every lawn is diminished to the eye by faulty
grading.

[Illustration: Shrubs are better than annuals for masking right angles.
South Hall, Williston Seminary. (See "Where to Plant What.")]

[Illustration: " ... a line of shrubbery swinging in and out in strong,
graceful undulations."

The straight planting on this picture's left masks the back yards of
three neighbors, and gives them a privacy as well as My Own Acre. The
curved planting shows but one of three bends. It was here that I first
made the mistake of planting a sinuous alley. (See "My Own Acre," p.
34.)]

For this he has no occasion to make himself responsible but there are
certain empty lots not far from him for whose aspect he is
answerable, having graded them himself (before he knew how). He has
repeatedly heard their depth estimated at ninety feet, never at more. In
fact it is one hundred and thirty-nine. However, he has somewhat to do
also with a garden whose grading was quite as bad--identical,
indeed--whose fault has been covered up and its depth made to seem
actually greater than it is, entirely by a corrective planting of its
shrubbery.

One of the happiest things about gardening is that when it is bad you
can always--you and time--you and year after next--make it good. It is
very easy to think of the plants, beds and paths of a garden as things
which, being once pla