600 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



extensive views, the lots should be made much larger than in other places. 

 Such an arrangement will add to the artistic effect of the whole cemetery and 

 increase the value of even the most humble lot. 



The planting should be done in accordance with the principles of landscape 

 gardening, which should be carefully studied before the work is commenced. 

 Do not plant rows of trees along each side of the avenue nor arrange them 

 like an orchard. Although the boundaries of lots should never be indicated 

 by the planting, it is advisable to separate the monuments more or less by 

 trees and shrubs. In some cemeteries the planting of shrubs is prohibited on 

 account of their occupyiug so much ground space. Such a rule greatly dimin- 

 ishes the attractiveness of cemetery grounds, where we should have every 

 variety of beautiful form and color which the vegetable world produces. It is 

 not an uncommon thing for a man to buy a lot and erect thereon a monu- 

 ment costing ten times as much as the lot itself. If he had reduced the cost 

 of the monument one-tenth and doubled the size of his lot the effect would 

 have been much better aud there would have been plenty of room for shrubs. 

 Furthermore, the larger the area and the greater the amount of foliage in 

 proportion to the number of the graves, the less injurious will burial grounds 

 be to the healthfulness of the neighborhood. If properly treated they may 

 indeed become beneficial. 



The Best Monument. — Dr. T. H. Hoskins, the able horticulturist writer of 

 Vermont, is responsible for the following sensible thought: The danger now 

 seems to be in vast and unwise expenditure for the adornment of cemetery lots 

 and the erection of costly monuments. Alongside of a poor and meanly 

 equipped school-house in my neighborhood is a cemetery with not less than a 

 dozen lots, where from $500 to 12,000 have been expended in this way. Yet, 

 would not the memory of the loved and lost " smell sweet and flourish in the 

 dust " far longer if a large part of this money had been bestowed for the en- 

 dowment of some permanently beneficent institution? If my heirs want to 

 spend $1,000 in a memorial I hope they will give it to a free school or a free 

 library and let the sweet grass over my grave grow, unvexed by costly marble 

 or granite. 



WALKS AND DRIVES. 



The Line of Bea.uty. — " Shelah" in New York Tribune says: There is a 

 practical convenience and economy in the laying out and building of streets, 

 roads, houses, etc., on straight lines and with rectangular cross lines which has 

 even too firm a hold upon our people. We impose enormous labor, cost and in- 

 convenience upon owners of property through laying out streets iu this strict 

 and uncompromising fashion, where a little curve round an interfering hill 

 would prove far better in every respect. The resolute old Romans were given 

 to this working in direct lines only, and now we wonder as we see the remains 

 of their roads, never deviating from the perfectly straight line for any hill or 

 vale. So they carried their water, too, to supply cities, at enormous cost, in 

 aqueducts of strict level and alignment no matter what came in the way. In 

 modern Europe it is different, "the road the human being travels winds round 



