404 THE GAKDEN AND ITS DEVELOPMENT. 



This is so much the more striking because for a long time the botan- 

 ical garden has been considered as evidence that botany is properly 

 pursued in a university. The public in general esteems a science 

 according to its practical value, and to this botany is no exception. 

 Certainly no branch is more frequently asserted to be an object of 

 great public interest. The botanist hears such assertions with some 

 skepticism, for he knows that the interest of the public consists almost 

 wholly in the pleasure felt at the sight of beautiful flowers and their 

 use in the home and garden. Interest in botanical problems and the 

 complicated biological phenomena with which the science busies itself 

 is usually summed up by the public in the question, " Why do not my 

 plants do well V This is not astonishing, for in fact a comprehension 

 of botany now demands more chemical and physical knowledge and 

 insight than has hitherto been regarded as sufficient for general educa- 

 tion. For this reason I shall, with your permission, not attempt in the 

 short time now and here at my disposal a theme by which I might lay 

 before 3'ou the fundamental principles of this science were I to occupy 

 the greater portion of the day. To-day 1 would rather discourse to 

 you of the generally understood, practical side of my department and 

 relate in brief the development of the garden with reference to style 

 and architecture. This subject is, indeed, of special interest in the 

 history of culture, inasmuch as the ideal of the garden has varied 

 much in different times and countries according to the artistic require- 

 ments of mankind. For the sake of convenience I here ignore the 

 kitchen garden, on which necessity has in every age impressed the 

 same utilitarian character. 



Like all art, the horticultural art is the product of advanced culture. 

 Even among the Greeks the appreciation of the ornamental garden 

 was a late attainment, onlj^ reached in the time of Alexander the Great 

 through contact with the East. Whenever Homer describes gardens, 

 as at the court of the Pha^acian king Alcinous, he praises only their 

 f ruitf ulness. His age knew only the useful garden. What Sophocles 

 later praises in the grove of Colonos is rather its romantic wildness 

 than its artistic qualities. It is, however, especially misleading to base 

 statements concerning the condition of gardening in early times upon 

 the descriptions of the poets, as one can never know where truth stops 

 and where the imagination of the poet may lead. 



We reach the solid ground of direct observation at quite an early 

 period, as the Egyptians have left us in their wall decorations many 

 pictures of gardens. It is, however, at the beginning of our era and 

 upon Italian ground that we first find an uninterrupted, connected 

 development of the garden. The Romans, practical, but wanting in 

 creative power, simultaneously imported from Greece both garden 

 flowers and garden art, and from the time of the end of the Republic 

 they followed the example of Lucullus and bedecked the hills on both 



