346 



THE GARDENER'S MONTHLY 



\November, 



caterpillars under these trees made the filthiness 

 of the place hardly less disgusting than the to- 

 bacco stained flag stones on the side walks 

 around the park. These flag stones were neat, 

 being very smooth and all of one size ; and the 

 man who laid them had evidently prided him- 

 self on having all laid in exact line. It must 

 have been a costly and nice job, but tobacco 

 juice had caught the dust. In some places 

 there were masses of dirt three inches thick 

 in the places near the side wall where feet 

 could not tread, and weeds were already getting 

 a hold and covering up the pretty workmanship. 

 I passed from here to I^ew York. It was 

 raining heavily, so I could only take a rapid 

 ride through its famous Central Park. As the 

 first to give a taste for public works of this 

 character, and in some degree the result of 

 life-long eff'ort on the part of our great land- 

 scape gardening apostle Downing, I was partic- 

 ularly anxious to see how it looked after these 

 many yeai's of vast expenditures; but I could 

 scarcely feel that it was very encouraging for 

 other cities to go and do likewise. It is well 

 known to those experienced in landscape 

 gardening that the skilled artist is required 

 much more seriously after a place ha« 

 grown up somewhat than when it is first 

 planted. If a designer were to arrange things 

 only as they are to look in some twenty- 

 five or fifty years time, no one would employ 

 him. He has to make a picture that will look 

 well at once, and yet must so arrange that as 

 some are every year taken away as the mass 

 grow, the balance remaining shall look only the 

 more beautiful. To employ an expensive land- 

 scape gardener, and to spend largely on orna- 

 mentation, only to leave the whole in a few 

 years to a set of ignoramuses, is money thrown 

 • away. Far better would it be to take a piece of 

 ground, throw stones freely over it, then plant a 

 tree or bush where the stones fell, and in some 

 half a dozen years employ a skilled landscape 

 gardener to thin out and make something of the 

 whole as the trees grow on the ground, than 

 take the New York plan as it appeared to 

 me now. Trees and masses of vegetation that 

 were evidently intended to be but of temporary 

 use, are now crowding out the rarer and more 

 valuable material. Spots which were once beau- 

 tiful have grown into deformities, and this will 

 go on until the whole becomes a very common- 

 place affair. And yet this will not be perhaps 

 strictly the fate of the Central Park. One may 



meet sometimes among the lowest of human 

 kind, some few whose continuous dissipations dur- 

 ing many years have still left some marks of 

 beauty. The original design was too lovely for 

 even the most destructive power wholly to efface. 

 Central Park even in its old days will still be a 

 handsome wreck, and I fancy will always have 

 something left of its original glory for any one 

 to admire. Even now it is an excellent school 

 for the would-be landscape gardener. Some one 

 of its former managers has had a good eye for 

 variety, and there is an immense amount of ma- 

 terial here both in individual trees and shrubs 

 and in their composite character, which can not 

 be so well studied elsewhere. These points of 

 beauty abound ; and for those students who 

 would perfect themselves in the details of land- 

 scape gardening, and who would like to knovv 

 what beauty trees and shrubs are capable of 

 aff"ording in almost endless variety, could not do 

 better than spend a whole month at least in an 

 analysis of what is to be found in Central Park. 

 I have now taken the reader with me through 

 a small park belonging to a city which has 

 great pretension to art and tast, and through a 

 pretentious park of another great city. As I 

 return I will take them for an October walk 

 through another " square " or small park of the 

 first proud city. As we enter the gate we come 

 right on several cart loads of filth, apparently of 

 several weeks collection, and around which we 

 have to course before we can enter. It would ap- 

 pear from the contents of the heap, that for a 

 while the falling leaves were gathered, but no sign 

 of any sweepei's are about now. Indeed the little 

 boys are gathering the bits of paper that lie about 

 loose, and are lighting them,making little bonfires 

 on the paths right before you. The paths them- 

 selves are only discernable from the places 

 where the grass should be, by the grinding the 

 leaves have received from the feet of passengers. 

 Therein, in this trail, variegated by peach atones, 

 apple cores, bananna skins, and the omnipresent 

 remains of peanuts, the traveler may find his 

 way out, if he keeps to the beaten path. Now, 

 when it is remembered that one expert broomist 

 with a long slender switch-like birch broom 

 could go over every walk in one of these city 

 squares once a day in ordinary times, needing 

 only an assistant at the fall of the leaf, the inno- 

 cent searcher after the truths of social science 

 wonders why it is not done. But it is the same 

 story all over. The same in the great Central 

 Park or the little Philadelphia square. It is that 



