The House in Good Taste

The terrace is built of tiles on a cement foundation. Vines are trained over square column-like frames of wire, erected at regular intervals. Between the edge of the terrace and the smooth green lawn there is a mass of blue flowers. We have a number of willow chairs and old stone tables here, and you can appreciate the joy of having breakfast and tea on the terrace with the birds singing in the boughs of the trees. I have written at length in the other chapters of my ideas of house-furnishing, and in this one I want to give you my ideas of garden guilding. True, we had the old garden plan to work from, and trees two hundred years old, and old vine-covered walls. Who couldn't accomplish a perfect garden with such essentials, people said! Well, it wasn't so easy as it seems. You can select furnishings for a room with fair success, because you can see and feel textures, and colors, and the lines of the furniture and curtains. But gardens are different--you cannot make grass and flowers grow just so on short notice! You plant and dig and plant again, before things grow as you have visualized them. There was a double ring of trees in one corner of our domain, enclosing the salle de verdure, or outdoor drawing-room. In the center of this enchanted circle there was a statue by Clodion, a joyous nymph, holding a baby faun in her arms. There were several old stone benches under the trees that must have known the secrets of the famous ladies of the Eighteenth Century courts. The salle de verdure looked just as it did when the little daughters of Louis XV came here to have their afternoon cakes and tea, so we did not try to change this bit of our garden.