6 Hints on Landscape Gardening 



property embellished by the cabbage garden, 

 usually close to the house, with at the most a few 

 carnations and single lavender plants surrounding 

 his onions and beet roots; alleys of crooked fruit 

 trees sadly hemmed in by cabbages and turnips ! 

 Should a few old oaks or limes from his fore- 

 fathers' day have withstood the tooth of time, 

 then the good husbandman seldom fails to rob 

 them of their foliage for his sheep, so that they 

 stand there like naked victims, stretching out 

 their branches to heaven, as if for vengeance. 



Yet more painful is it when the owner, bitten 

 by the fashion, has conceived the notion of 

 laying out his gardens in so-called English style. 

 The straight roads are then turned into cork- 

 screw forms which are just as mechanical, ser- 

 pentining in the most tedious manner through 

 young birches, poplars, and larches, and gener- 

 ally either impassable after every shower from 

 mud, or in dry weather making the visitor wade 

 perspiring through loose sand. A few exotic 

 shrubs, which grow badly and are much less 

 beautiful than native ones, are planted, mixed 

 with young firs on the borders. After a few years 

 they encumber the ground, have to be lopped, 

 later on lose their lower branches, and thus pre- 

 sent to our view only bare stems with the naked 

 earth between, while on the spaces left open the 

 badly nourished grass and stumpy exotics give a 

 picture neither of a free natural, nor ot an arti- 

 ficial, garden. 



If the plan is more seriously carried out and 



