No amount of good grass seed, or expensive planting, or well-cared-for flowers and lawns will ever make the average suburban lot anything but a "lot," and most of them might as well, or _better_, be rough, uncultivated fields for all the relation they bear to the houses upon them or the use they were intended for. It is to be supposed that when a man gives up the comforts of town apartments and hies him to the country, it is the garden, the outdoors, which lures him. Why is it, then, that he seems to take particular pains to arrange his garden so that it is about as much his own as Central Park is? It might give the average man a great deal of pleasure to be able to say to all the passersby on the Mall, "This little bit of the Park belongs to me! I cut that grass, I weed those flower beds in the evening when I come home from the office; and every Saturday afternoon I take the hose and thoroughly soak that bit of lawn there, you may see me at it any week in the summer." But then, we are not dealing with the fictitious average man, and we firmly believe that many "commuters" wonder deep down in their hearts why it is they get from their gardens so little of the pleasure they anticipated when they came to live out of the city. Any one who has traveled abroad, has admired and perhaps coveted the gardens of England, France, and Italy. Their charm is undeniable, and thought to be too elusive for reproduction on American soil without the aid of landscape gardeners and a fair-sized fortune. Just why we, as a nation, are beset by the idea of reproducing instead of originating beautiful gardens is a question apart from this discussion. But as soon as we try to develop, to their fullest extent, the advantages of our climate, and soil, in combination with our daily life as a people, we shall produce gardens which will equal, without necessarily resembling, those of other countries. In every case we must, however, follow the same procedure which every successful garden is built upon, whether it be in Mesopotamia or in Long Island City. That is, we must study the place, the people, and the circumstances. The most general fault in American gardens is their lack of privacy. No one claims that the high walls of Italy and France or the impenetrable hedges of England would invariably suit the climate here. But there are many ways to obtain seclusion without in any way depriving us of much-needed air in summer and sun in winter. One way is by placing the house rationally upon its lot. Our custom has been to invariably build so that we had a "front yard," "back yard," and two side yards, all equally important, equally uninteresting, unbeautiful and useless.