The average practitioner of Olmsted's art today is perforce more tradesman than maestro. He is reduced to carving walnut shells instead of panoramas. He is scarcely needed by the home owner whose problems this book approaches. Too much good money changes hands in return for piddling professional preciosities, when anyone with half an eye for form and perspective can lay out his own modest green spot unaided. Within the limits here contemplated—an acre, more or less—the essence of good taste will be good sense. And in the smallest frame, there is always room for that personal touch which, however invisible it may be to others, will spell out self-expression. The Japanese in their huddled culture found this out and perfected it some centuries ago.

Full as the phone books are of landscapists, the house-and-grounds periodicals are even fuller of planting suggestions for new home owners. Many of these run to fancified effects, but invariably they show pictures of how different species look when grown in various combinations. If there is in your family no talent for sketching, amuse and instruct yourselves by playing with cutouts from magazines and catalogs superimposed on blown-up photographs of your house and lot.

As a matter of duty, not presumption, some basic suggestions are offered herewith. What you are likely to be after will come under four headings: warmth, shade, beauty, and privacy.

By warmth is meant a visual, not a physical, effect— a sense of the house and any outbuildings having come to dwell in, not just on, the site. Planting around the foundations is the answer to this need, but the commonest mistake that warmth seekers make is to overdo such planting, to swaddle the architecture so thickly with growths that in a few short years it is stifled. Most new houses nowadays are low in profile, and so should be their foundation planting. Evergreens give a warm look all year round, but beware of species that will spindle up, like spruce, cedar, arborvitae and cryptomeria. Low-growing by habit or easily kept so by trimming are mugho pine, pfitzer juniper, most forms of Taxus (yew), and such other stand-bys as box and prostrate Euonymus.