304 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



mental principles of simple arithmetic. You can enumerate them 

 upon three fingers, or label them A. B, C, if you choose, but before 

 I give them, perhaps it will be well if we understand clearly what 

 landscape gardening means. Most people have associated the term 

 with the expensive and oftentimes hideous grounds of millionaires, 

 have conjured up in their minds an exaggerated meaning which 

 they imagine it takes a bit of dictionary to define. It does not, 

 however, for the art is simply the planning and laying out of 

 grounds, large or small, with a view to the most beautiful effects. 



Now, if you will read between the lines, you will see that nothing 

 is said about costly stone walks, rustic summer houses, wooden 

 trellises or wire fences. People associate landscape gardening with 

 masons and brickla3'ers, and cari>enters and blacksmiths, but it is 

 all wrong. How does nature do? You go into northwestern Penn- 

 sylvania, where the maple is abundant, and look at a natural land- 

 scape late in October, and you see all the colors of the rainbow in 

 vast gorgeous masses which you do not tire of admiring; yet you 

 see no summer houses, no clematis scantily covering a gingerbread 

 trellis; no iron gate posts or carved stone lions. Nature does her 

 landscape work with trees and grass and shrubs, and her nearest 

 approach to anything artificial is the occasional dead stump of a 

 lightning riven oak standing sentinel-like out of an ocean of green. 

 Analine dyes and mineral paints are desperately cheap in these days, 

 but nature discounts the prices of the druggist a thousandfold. Give 

 her but a rod wide of ground and she will paint your pig-stye and barn- 

 yard, and your neighbor's tumble down sheds in twenty shades of 

 green, ranging from the blue of the Colorado spruce at one extreme 

 and the silver gray of the Nordmann fir at the other. To use a 

 slang expression, she can paint "clear out of sight." 



She will not do her painting on bits of cardboard and hang them 

 in a row like samples in a paint store, but she will drape them in 

 pendant festoons from the far reaching arms of the Norway spruce, 

 or hang them in graceful beauty on the sprays of hemlock and cy,- 

 press, to gleam in the bright sunshine, and bow and tremble in the 

 tiniest breeze like the nodding plumes on a maiden's hat. If you 

 live in a mountain region, and sombre evergreens are in such abun- 

 dance that you are already sated with their beauty, then nature will 

 give you a score of naked forms of equal beauty for your winter pic- 

 tures, and you need not go out of Pennsylvania w oods to get them. 

 The red-twigged dogwood, the green-twigged wahoo, the white- 

 limbed sycamore and birch, the tortuous-branched coffee tree, the 

 grey-barked beech, the red-berried alder, the witch hazel, the pussy 

 willow are samples along this line. 



In summer, the material Nature offers you is multiplied tenfold, 

 and much of it grows right on your own hills and in your own valleys. 



