Acre

“ Twelve years ago we saw about our dwelling an acre and a quarter of grass, in unsightly condition, grazed by a sickly cow; a few beds of flowers and a few more of vegetables — the former not well kept, and the latter far from productive — and, for the rest, a drive and little plantations, and slopes rarely neat, and always craving more care than we could give. ”

“ Besides, you would have uneconomical furrows; the oxen would be stopped before they had traversed what was regarded as the natural distance for beasts to go. Divide your acre into two long strips, then your folk and beasts can plough in the good old way. Hence it follows that when men think of dividing an acre they speak only of its breadth. Hence it follows that the quarter of an acre is a ‘rood’ or ‘yard [1299] ’ or virga or virgata of land. Its width is a rod or land-yard, and its length—but there is no need to speak of its length [1300] . ”

“ And doubling their boldness I doubled their beauty. "Don't" ever let your acre's, or half or quarter acre's, ground lines relax into feebleness or shrink into pettiness. "Don't" [Pg 37] ever plan a layout for whose free swing your limits are cramped.
"The lane is open to view from end to end. It has two deep bays on the side nearest the lawn." The straight line of high growth conceals in the midst of its foliage a wire division fence, and makes a perfect background for blooming herbaceous perennials. ”

“ If I had a wooded acre I should study the trees most carefully before coming to any decision as to the situation of the dwelling and out-buildings. Having removed those obviously unworthy to remain, I should put in the axe very thoughtfully among the finer specimens, remembering that I should be under the soil before Nature could build others like them.
In the fitting up of this planet as the home of mankind it would appear that the Creator regarded the coniferae, or evergreen family, as well worthy of attention ”

“ I think every acre of land suitable for garden or field cultivation is taken. I doubt if there is much of the orchard land higher up remaining and what there is would command a rather stiff price; but if you would be content with some small plateau at the base of a mountain where you could set any sort of a house and have—say two or three acres, mostly of sage and boulders and greasewood and yucca around it——”
“Why in this world are you talking about stones and sage and greasewood?” cried Linda. ”

“ A quarter of an acre can be made equal to half an acre. You can about double the garden, without adding to it an inch of surface, by increasing the depth of good soil. For instance, ground has been cultivated to the depth of six or seven inches. Try the experiment of stirring the soil and enriching it one foot downward, or eighteen inches, or even two feet, and see what vast differences will result. With every inch you go down, making all friable and fertile, you add just so much more to root pasturage. When you wish to raise a great deal, increase your leverage. Roots are your levers ”

“ In England the work of "groving," or thinning out trees, is carried to the perfection of a fine art. One shudders at the havoc which might be made by a stolid laborer. Indeed, to nearly all who could be employed in preparing a wooded acre for habitation, a tree would be looked upon as little more than so much cord-wood or lumber. ”

“ From the fifth to the tenth year is assumption, except that I know one garden which, to my certain knowledge, has given more then ten maunds an acre, and this in spite of about 15 per cent. vacancies. The garden is an old one, planted about 18 years ago. It is also a very small one. The soil is very poor, but the plants are of the highest class. ”

“ My garden is situated on the Brighton Race Hill ridge, and twelve years ago it was but four inches of soil on chalk, but I now have a foot of soil on the whole of the half acre, and year by year my profits increase. ”

“ If the acre has been enriched and plowed twice deeply, as I have already suggested, little more is necessary in planting than to excavate a hole large enough to receive the roots spread out in their natural positions. Should no such thorough and general preparation have been made, or if the ground is hard, poor, and stony, the owner will find it to his advantage to dig a good-sized hole three or four feet across and two deep, filling in and around the tree with fine rich surface soil. ”

“ Anyhow the whole enclosure, which is about an acre in extent and is surrounded by an ancient wall, is thickly planted with bo-trees, some of really fine dimensions, so that the pious pilgrim need have no difficulty in securing a leaf, without committing the sacrilege of robbing the venerable plant. ”

“ The great amount of family supplies which may be obtained from a half-acre garden, provided the best soil is prepared for their growth, renders it a matter of equal importance and economy to give the soil the very best preparation. ”

“ When men have confined themselves to ten acres of land, having plowed it well the season before, all the foul weeds killed out and the soil left clean, the seed sown at an early day in the Spring, and put in in good order, I have known such fields to produce from forty to sixty bushels of good plump wheat to the acre. ”

“ Really the acre is the best agricultural unit. We buy and sell the land itself by the acre; we report crop yields at so many bushels or tons per acre; we apply manure at so many loads or tons per acre; we apply so many hundred pounds of fertilizer per acre; sow our wheat and oats at so many pecks or bushels per acre; and we ought to know the invoice of plant food in the plowed soil of an acre and the amounts carried off in the crops removed from an acre.
"Now, referring again to these figures from the forty acres of clover at two tons per acre. ”

“ One cannot expect much diversity of surface on a single acre. A large lawn will give the effect of greater flatness. If you find the hired gardener, bred in some noted school in Europe, setting out trees in straight lines, exhort him to penitence at once. If he remain obdurate, cut the trees down with your little hatchet and pitch them over the fence, but keep your temper as sweet as a June morning. ”

“ In places where the whole extent of garden-ground does not perhaps exceed an acre, every one must have felt the relief afforded to the eye by a broad strip of lawn, bordered by trees and shrubs, not in a formal line on each side, but running into numerous projections [Pg 302] and recesses, and resting their lower branches, frequently covered with flowers, on a rich smooth velvet-looking carpet of grass. ”

“ Also each new path has made it easier to bring up, for the lawn garden, sand, clay, or leaf-mould, or for hearth consumption all the wood which the grove's natural mortality each year requires to be disposed of. There is a superior spiritual quality in the warmth of a fire of h-oak, h-ash, and even h-ellum gathered from your own acre, especially if the acre is very small and has contour paths. ”

“ This use of the word acre as long measure arises from the fact that the French acre or arpent, the arpent of Paris, makes a square of ten perches, of eighteen feet each on a side, a Paris foot being equal to 1.06575 English feet. He said that the wood was cut off about one mile from the river. The rest was "bush," and beyond that the " Queen's bush." Old as the country is, each landholder bounds on the primitive forest, and fuel bears no price. ”

“ The real acres in the fields.
At length we reach the fields, and at once we learn that there is something unreal in all our talk of acre and half-acre strips. In passing we may observe that some of our English meadows which show by their ‘beds’ that they were not always meadows, seem to show also that the boundaries of the strips were not drawn by straight rods, but were drawn by the plough. The beds are not straight, but slightly sinuous, and such, it is said, is the natural course of the old plough ”

“ But sometimes the hedging and ditching takes place independently of the other two processes, and strips of an acre, two or more acres, and even half-an-acre are enclosed in the middle of the common-fields, and, what is more remarkable, the little enclosed strips are sometimes the property of several individuals. ”

“ We have about an acre of clear ground behind our house, then the woods begin. It's really an abandoned apple orchard, with the apple trees grown tall and neglected and other trees grown to a respectable height between them. ”

“ The background to our portrait is a forest, lofty, shaggy, and dense, and the home of a thousand wild things, which, being invisible at this moment, could not, with due regard to fidelity, be introduced into our picture. The foreground is a cultivated clearing of about one hundred acres, with woody walls, unbroken in their leafy density, hemming it in on every side. Directly in front is a field of corn, the dark and thrifty green of which may well bespeak the deep, rich soil of the Paradise. ”

“ Until a man might travel twelve stout miles,
Or reap an acre of his neighbour's corn. ”

“ Half an acre, or an acre of ground, is appropriated as a grave-yard, on one side of which the proprietors of the estate, from age to age, are buried; whilst the other parts of the ground are open to strangers, poor people of their vicinity, and, in general, to all who choose to inter their dead within its boundaries. ”

“ Fancy the prairie commencing at the water's edge—a natural meadow covered with grass and flowers, rising, with a gentle slope, for miles, so that in the vast panorama thousands of acres are exposed to the eye. The prospect is bounded by a range of low hills, which sometimes approach the river, and again recede, and whose summits, which are seen gently waving along the horizon, form the level of the adjacent country.... The timber is scattered in groves and strips, the whole country being one vast illimitable prairie, ornamented by small collections of trees.... ”

“ Each of these consisted of a rectangular area of a eighth or a quarter of an acre, enclosed by a high wall. The side next the sea is formed by the park-keeper’s house, and on the other three sides of the great open yard are rows of store-houses, and the houses of the natives who work on that plantation. Near the place where we landed was a small area where all the mace is white when the fruit is ripe and not red. ”

“ We passed through acres of sweet bay and spear grass, sometimes skirting thickets of twisted cedars, sometimes walking in the full glare of the morning sun, sinking into shifting sand where sun-scorched shells crackled under our feet, and sun-browned seaweed glistened, bronzed and iridescent. ”

“ The soil you kick up when you walk over your acres is different soil from that which you kick up on your neighbor's land—different because it is yours. Another man's tree, another man's rock heap, is a simple tree or a mere rock heap, as the case may be ”

“ We rush for a few minutes through these highly cultivated lands, and suddenly find ourselves out on a wide, open plain, comprising about eighty thousand acres, without a house to be seen anywhere, with no orchards, no vineyards, no signs of civilized life. And still the soil is the richest, the native vegetation of grasses the most luxuriant. ”

“ Thousands of acres, capable of bounteous fruitfulness, still lay in the perpetual shadow of the woods, untouched by spade or plough; and the forest growth of centuries was itself a harvest worth the gathering, while wild cataracts still invited masterful hands to tame them to utility. ”

“ There have been notable kingdoms of the past of fewer and less productive acres. Yet even in the great avenues of palms that flick the light a thousand ways from their wind-stirred, serrate edges, is a reminder of the host of bristling, spiny growth the land once entertained. ”

“ Eleven thousand acres of fertile hill and dale, sinking and swelling gently, so as to attract all the benignity of sun or breeze—not more densely wooded than is common on our own western shores, and watered to an ornamental perfection—truly on any civilized land, such is a goodly heritage. ”

“ They ascended the rising ground, passing along the edge of the orchard, till, upon gaining the height of land, they entered upon a broad, level field of twenty-five acres, smooth as a lawn, green in all the verdure of spring, and giving promise of an abundant yield of grass. ”

“ In his 300 acres you have the finest lawns, a serpentine river playing in the sweetest valley, hills finely planted, which command charming prospects, winding walks made gay with flowers and flowering Shrubs, part of a rude forest, sombre woods, a river deep and still, gliding round the woods and shaded by trees that hang over the bank, while the serpentine river open and exposed to the sun, adorn’d with little Islands and enlivened by waterfowls, gladdens the vallies. ”

“ Woods, lakes, pools, fountains, clumps of trees, single trees, masses of shrubs, all have to be duly arranged for, and, as it were, made to fall into their respective positions in the landscape; and no slight experience or imperfect knowledge of the harmonies of colours could lay out an upland undulating lawn of fifty or a hundred acres, so that the wood and water should be made to assume their most picturesque forms, and a million bright blossoms of every hue be gathered into their proper places. ”

“ The buildings, including a residence, cottages, and gardens, occupy about four acres, and the farm consists of 350 acres of strong clay land, which has been thoroughly drained and profusely manured, with the object of getting from it the largest possible crops. Fifty tons of turnips have been obtained from an acre. ”

“ The trees are fine, the undergrowth not uncomfortably tangled, the sward is velvety, the acres of drying cones a novel item in commerce, and away from the marshy spots all combines to form an agreeable and sweet-scented retreat. ”

“ Nature was certainly in no passive mood when last it flung its constituents together; for, with the exception of a few circling acres forming a rim around the harbor, high, broken, and frowning battlements of rock, ungainly and sterile, look down upon you [Pg 314] as far as the eye can reach. No sprig, or tree, or blade of grass takes root in its parched soil or stony bed, or survives the blasting heat. Scattered and dotted on crag, hilltop or slope, in glaring white, are the many offices and residence buildings of the camp. ”