118 TKANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



LANDSCAPE GARDENING ON THE PRAIRIES. 



BY E. K. BROWN, ELMWOOD. 



Ladies and Gentlemen : 



I do not come here as a school-master, to teach you anything 

 about " Landscape Gardening on the Prairies." If what I do not 

 know in that line is ever published, the world will not contain the 

 books to be printed on that subject. I come, rather, as an " awful 

 example " and warning. And yet, 1 am not altogether like that 

 Weramick in Dickens' " Great Expectations," who wore his hat on 

 the back of his head and looked straight before him, as if nothing 

 was worth looking at. On the contrary. A sincere love of Nature 

 has led me to look about a little, to repent of many mistakes in re- 

 gard to her, and to appreciate in some small degree the splendid pos- 

 sibilities of this prairie region, beyond the mere production of swine 

 and corn. I would add my earnest word to the line upon line, and 

 hint upon hint by which the villager and farmer may yet come to 

 see that use and beauty should go hand in hand, on these grand 

 plains of ours as well as elsewhere. 



In a prairie country, no doubt, the amateur landscape gardener 

 lies under some disabilities. Variety and picturesqueness are not so 

 easily found or produced as in those regions where the face of na- 

 ture is diversified by hill, dale and mountain. With the exception 

 of Indian history and tradition, which have hardly left a mark on 

 the landscape, we are too new. The open, unbroken prairie, stretch- 

 ing silently away to a distant horizon, has, indeed, something of 

 solemnity and grandeur, and touches the imaginative soul with sug- 

 gestions of unwritten history and untold cycles of time. But the 

 moment the wide plain is broken up into farms and village sites, this 

 sentimental element of the picture disappears. There is no sky-line 

 of rock-ribbed and eternal hills to speak forever of the past. Old 

 architecture, old monuments, and venerable trees, with all their rich 

 suggestiveness, are wanting. The subtle charm of association with 

 distant ages and departed glories lends no ideal enchantment here to 

 scenes which we would fain endow with the harmonious union of 

 use and beauty. Napoleon, though he had little enough of the 

 poetic in his composition, recognized the power of these backward- 

 reaching associations. Standing by the mighty memorials of the 

 Pharaohs of Egypt, he addressed to his soldiers that grandest utter- 

 ance of his life, "From the summit of yonder pyramids forty cen- 

 turies look down upon you." 



But our prairies have something the grassless plains of monu- 

 mental Egypt do not possess; something that California and Florida 

 strive for in vain — a rich green turf, the first and most essential 

 condition of all landscape beauty. So we have little reason to covet 

 the sepulchral glooms of the old Nile, the sunny sands of alligator 

 land, or the granite glories of the Sierra Nevada. 



