LANDSCAPE GARDENING OF CONCRETE

THE

HE home builders of California are making use of concrete on an extensive scale for landscape gardening, some of the most elaborate formal gardens in the country being constructed of this material. It is especially well adapted to the architectural style most popular in the Southwest, the Italian Renaissance and modifications of the Spanish and Mission style. Plain surfaces, unbroken lines, either straight or with broad sweeping curves, are the distinguishing features of this architecture and the effect is exceedingly beautiful, simple and dignified.

One of the finest specimens of this sort is the winter residence of a street railway magnate, who has built a "show place" in the foothills of Hollywood, near Los Angeles. About a quarter of a million dollars has been spent in laying out this rolling

land in a series of five terraces, joined by paved walks with concrete steps, and leading to an elaborate semi-circular promenade with ornamental balustrades. This is flanked on either side by pergolas, with concrete columns supporting rustic beams.

A fountain, also of concrete, and ornamental arches of the

same material, and graceful concrete urns with shrubs are features of the estate all tending to show the great variety of uses to which cement can be put.

The house itself is a twenty-room structure built about the inner court

in the Spanish style and characterized by the almost unbroken wall surfaces and generous arches of the portals. The walls are white and the contrasting tones of the red-tiled roof, the rough-hewn beams that support it, and the green

lawns and shrubbery are exceedingly artistic. American

land

scape gardening is rapidly relieving itself of the charge, made by foreigners of taste and discrimination, that it is crude and inartistic. The excellent results that are being obtained not only in California but in all parts of this country are ample proof of the truth of this state

ment.

TRACTOR

FOR the use of orchardists a unique

gasoline farm locomotive has been constructed at Rochester, New York. It will pull three 14-inch bottom plows eight inches deep in hard plowing. This tractor is a one-man machine that brings about a tremendous saving in cost. To do the same amount of work there would be required ten horses at $3 per week and five men at $10 per week or a total of $80. The fuel cost of operating the tractor for one week of six days, ten

MOST USEFUL OF ORCHARD TRACTORS

hours each day, is only $25.70, and one man at $12 per week would give a total of $37.70, which is a saving of over half, while the horses cost $30 per week, after the work is done, for so long as they are idle.

Though this tractor will not pull as many plows as some larger, heavier machines, its power is sufficient for all purposes to which it may be put.

CUTTING THE PORT HOLES OF WORLD'S BIGGEST STEAMSHIP Imperator, WITH ACETYLENK TORCH

The steel wall of this ship is three inches. thick. To insure safety the steel plates are riveted together before the port holes are cut. The steel is then pierced by means of an acetylene torch, such as the workman is shown using.

The hull is said to be the heaviest and strongest of any steamship afloat. As an additional safeguard it is doubled throughout the entire length, to a point sixteen feet above the water line, there being three and one-half feet between the inner and outer plating. This forms at "ship within a ship", and in case of accident to the outer plating, the vessel would be in no danger. The Imperator measures 919 feet in length, 98 feet in beam, and is of 50,000 tons. She is rapidly nearing completion, and will sail for New York early in May.

The Germans, while they have no such naval record as the English, have reason to be proud of their recent successes in ship construction. Their war-vessels compel the awe of the Powers; their liners, the admiration of the world.

HOUSE BEING MOVED BY HORSES. MULES AND AUTO The animals are hitched to the auto, to which is attached the guy ropes, in turn hooked to the building. The contractor was given 24 hours-a Sunday-in which to move the building eight blocks. He did the job in eight hours. This was in Galveston. Texas.

WAKE at last to the fact that submarine navigation is an extremely perilous business, the British Admiralty Office is vainly scheming to lessen the risks run by the brave blue jackets who go down to the sea in the "subs". I say vainly, because at the present writing, with all the life-preserving facilities that have come to hand or that have been proposed, it would seem that absolutely nothing can be done to obviate the greatest of all dangers to this latest type of fighting craft-collision with other vessels and the striking of rocks and shoals.

Fish can see under water, but men cannot, that is, save for very short distances. The keenest-eyed lookout, aided by the strongest searchlight that ever shot its rays under the sea, is not able to spy a ship from a completely submerged torpedo boat far enough ahead to get out of its way in time to prevent a fatal stab somewhere in the vessel's anatomy. That stab generally means death to every man aboard the poor, helpless little "sub".

A big liner might strike and sink any one of the A or B type of the British submarines and her passengers might continue their games of ring quoits, their dances, their promenades, or their lovemakings, without the slightest idea that anything had happened, while a score of men might be drowning under her keel or below her foaming wake.

Yes, "helpless" is the word. There is no other that fits so well. To think that what for ten years has been considered the most formidable of all warships-the steel-built, death-dealing submarine,should be so easily vulnerable, so completely at the mercy of every peaceful old tub of a merchant ship afloat, seems strange; but this has been so positively and perfectly proved in scores of cases that not the most optimistic dreamer of a naval designer or contractor can offer a word by way of successful contravention.

When the periscope was invented it was promised that there would be no more collisions, but their number increased. The periscope, stuck upon a mast above