; the shrubs orphaned, the lawn destroyed.
If the enclosure was a hedge it had to be a tight one or else it did not
enclose. Now wire netting charms away these embarrassments. Your hedge
can be as loose as you care to have it, while your enclosure may be
rigidly effective yet be hidden from the eye by undulating fence-rows;
and as we now have definite bounds and corners to plant out, we do not
so often as formerly need to be reminded of Frederick Law Olmsted's
favorite maxim, "Take care of the corners, and the centres will take
care of themselves."
[Illustration: Fences masked by shrubbery.
One straight line of Williston Seminary campus, the effect of whose iron
fence before it was planted out with barberry may be seen in the two
panels of it still bare on the extreme right.]
Here there is a word to be added in the interest of home-lovers, whose
tastes we properly expect to find more highly trained than those of the
average tenant cottager. Our American love of spaciousness leads us to
fancy that--not to-day or to-morrow, but somewhere in a near future--we
are going to unite our unfenced lawns in a concerted park treatment: a
sort of wee horticultural United States comprised within a few city
squares; but ever our American individualism stands broadly in the way,
and our gardens almost never relate themselves to one another with that
intimacy which their absence of boundaries demands in order to take on
any special beauty, nobility, delightsomeness, of gardening.
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