The Neglected American Plants 237 



but considered them "wild plants," and therefore too little 

 deserving of attention lo be worth the trouble of collecting 

 even for curious foreigners. "And so," he continued, "in a 

 country of azaleas, kalmias, rhododendrons, cypripediums, 

 magnolias and nyssas, - - the loveliest flowers, shrubs, and 

 trees of temperate climates, - - you never put them in your 

 gardens, but send over the water every year for thousands 

 of dollars worth of English larches and Dutch hyacinths. 

 Voila le gout Republicain!" 



In truth, we felt that we quite deserved the sweeping sar- 

 casm of our Belgian friend. We had always, indeed, excused 

 ourselves for the well known neglect of the riches of our 

 native ilora by saying that what we can see any day in the 

 woods is not the thing by which to make a garden distin- 

 guished, and that since all mankind have a passion for 

 novelty, where, as in a fine foreign tree or shrub, both 

 beauty and novelty are combined, so much the greater is 

 the pleasure experienced. But, indeed, one has only to go 

 to England, where "American plants" are the fashion (not 

 undeservedly, too), to learn that he knows very little about 

 the beauty of American plants. The difference between a 

 grand oak or magnolia, or tulip-tree, grown with all its 

 graceful and majestic development of head, in a park where 

 it has nothing to interfere with its expansion but sky and 

 air, and the same tree shut up in a forest, a quarter of a 

 mile high, with only a tall gigantic mast of a stem, and a 

 tuft of foliage at the top, is the difference between the best 

 bred and highly cultivated man of the day, and the best 

 buffalo hunter of the Rocky Mountains, with his sinewy 

 body tattooed and tanned till you scarcely know what is 

 the natural color of the skin. A person accustomed to the 

 wild Indian only, might think he knew perfectly well what 

 a man is, and so indeed he does, if you mean a red man. 

 But the "civilizee" is not more different from the aboriginal 

 man of the forest than the cultivated and perfect garden 

 tree or shrub (granting always that it takes to civilization, 

 which some trees, like Indians, do not), than a tree of the 

 pleasure grounds differs from a tree of the woods. 



