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Introduction - The desire for healthful, relaxed and informal living is resulting in a growing awareness of the importance of landscaping to a home. Your plans for home modernizing therefore, should not be confined within the walls of your home, but should extend to include lawns, gardens and out­door living areas.

Landscaping, if properly planned, properly executed and properly financed will add to the comfort, improve the appearance and increase the value of your home.

1. Your Grounds - When you buy a new house or decide to improve your old one, you are, of course, concerned with every foot of ground that goes with it, for modern living and modern garden­ing can make every inch of your property usable and desirable. New methods of soil improvement, grad­ing, fencing and terracing make even sloping, hilly lots, hitherto un­desirable, now attractive and choice

2. Designing and Planning - For the most attractive and bene­ficial use of your grounds, you will want to include in your plans most of the features outlined in this chap­ter. Such essentials as a good lawn, thriving shade trees and paths and walks are usually taken for granted, yet often they are the most difficult to acquire, and may absorb a major part of your initial effort and budget.

3. Designing and Planning #2 - Today, when building costs make large houses prohibitive, one way to extend your house is to use your outdoor space to full advantage. And many contemporary houses make many a room look larger by visually extending it into the lawn or garden. Tricks such as glass walls, using the same wall material inside as for a continuing wall on the terrace and using the same material for the ceiling inside as on the extended terrace eaves, help to do this. Your living room or dining room and even your bed­room or your children's bedrooms can flow right outdoors on to "float­ing" decks of wood, bricked ter­races or sodded, lattice-roofed log­gia

4. Gardener Equipment - Whether your grounds are large or small, the right tools and equipment can speed routine tasks and help you to successful garden­ing. Taking good care of your tools and keeping them in one place will pay dividends in time and effort. If you do not have a tool house or room where you can keep all your tools, and the insecticides, fertiliz­ers, stakes, wire, paint and other equipment a well-prepared garden­er should have, arrange to make space in your garage, or build a locker in a corner of your carport or breezeway. A tool shed that is like a giant kitchen cabinet can be added lean-to fashion to your ga­rage

5. Construction Problems - Not every house is blessed by ideal surroundings, with promise of easy creation of outdoor recreation and entertainment areas, a good lawn and a good garden. Often it is necessary to undertake a certain amount of construction to insure the quality and life of tree gardens you wish to plant and the terraces you wish to build.

6. Construction Problems #2 - Both the strength and beauty of a dry wall may be enhanced by using it as a wall garden. It may acquire a mossy and aged appear­ance simply by green-planting in the soil in the crevices. A greater degree of color can be obtained, however, by planting any of several flowering plants, whose strong roots will serve the additional function of holding the wall together.

7. Soils and Lawns - The most important tool with which the gardener works is the soil on his land. The qualities of soil vary greatly from area to area, and all the information outlined in this chapter must be applied to local conditions. In general, however, soils can be divided into three cate­gories ; claylike, sandy or silt. The ideal soil consists of a good mix­ture of sand, silt and clay, and is classified as good garden loam. Clay soils have the greatest water-holding capacity, sandy soils the least.

8. Soils and Lawns #2 - Every authority states unequi-vocably that fall is the best time to seed, preferably in September after the months of hottest weather and when there is a good moisture con­dition. If you seed in the fall the grass will thrive, but, nevertheless, the heaviest sales of seed are in the spring. If you do seed in spring, start as early as the weather per­mits so that there will be good root growth started before hot weather sets in.

9. Trees - Trees can be broken down into three main parts: the roots, the leaves and the woody structure be­tween them. The roots' function is to bring raw materials—water and mineral salt dissolved in water—to the tree. The leaves absorb carbon dioxide from the air and use the sun's light energy to combine this gas with the moisture from the roots, thus making the simple sugars which are the basic nutrients of the tree. The trunk, limbs, branches and twigs hold the leaves in position to receive the life-giving sunlight and air; they also act as transportation, carrying raw materials between roots and leaves.

10. Trees #2 - Certain trees will not live long if a fill of soil is laid over their roots, or if a terrace of blacktop, stone, brick or concrete paving blocks is laid over their feeding roots. Large, valuable trees should be protected with drain tile so that they will get water and air. The bark should be protected from dirt from a fill directly against it.

11. Shrubs and Hedges - In general, trees and shrubs are planted and cared for in the same way, the difference between them being chiefly one of height. One definition of the difference, how­ever, is that while a tree has only one trunk, a shrub has several stems or trunks.

Not so long ago the number of reliable shrubs was quite limited, but today the many new hybrids have lengthened the list and the gardener's choice is almost endless. No matter the region, it is now pos­sible to plant shrubs that will sat­isfy color needs, bloom at various seasons, cover bare spots where grass won't grow, or grow in such profusion and depth that screening purposes are served.

12. Shrubs and Hedges #2 - Hedge shrubs must be planted marcate various areas, and help to screen service areas and vegetable gardens.

The plant materials generally used for hedges are mentioned else­where in this book. They include the tall background hedges of hol­ly, thorn or wattle; the informal flowering hedges of rose, bridal wreath spirea or barberry; Such evergreens as mugho pine, globe arbor vitae, box or eunonymus (most of which are used as low in the same manner as any other shrub, with soil preparation all-important to the continued life of the plant.

13. Flowers - The loveliness of flowering plants needs little embellishment by de­scription. Certainly every gardener seeks the beauty and color that can be brought to his grounds by a variety of flowers. The proper ar­rangement of flower beds in your garden and attentive care to them can insure you a continuing bloom of lovely flowers year after year. For with planning, it is possible to maintain flowers in your garden during the entire length of the growing season.

14. Flowers #2 - Each spring, flowering bulbs should be well-fertilized. (Use ma­nure and chemical fertilizer.) Care must be taken to keep fresh manure away from the roots or the bulb or tuber itself. The fertilizer should be worked well into the soil. The soil itself should be cultivated to a depth of 3 to 4 inches each week. During the blooming season, it is a good idea to cut off most of the buds to get bigger and showier flowers.

15. Home Financing - The "Assured Home Owner­ship" Plan, which The Equitable Society has provided to over 280 thousand home owners, is a practi­cal and economical method of home financing, designed to enable you to acquire your home and retain it de­spite many of the common exigen­cies of life. This modernized Plan provides benefits and safeguards not otherwise available to you in a conventional mortgage plan.

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