18 DECORATIVE PLAXTINO. 



pics, in miniature, of what we call landscapes. Decorative Plaining 

 should have for its highest aim the beautifying of Home. In com- 

 bination with domestic architecture, it should make every man's 

 home a beautiful picture. As skillful stonecutting, or bricklaying, 

 or working in wood, does not make of the artisan an architect, or 

 his work a fine art, so the love of trees, shrubs, and flowers, and 

 their skillful cultivation, is but handling the tools of the landscape 

 gardener — it is not gardening, in its most beautiful meaning. The 

 garden of the slothful, overgrown with weeds and brambles, could 

 not have been much more ugly to look upon than many flower- 

 gardens, in which the whole area is a wilderness of annuals and 

 perennials, of all sorts and sizes and conditions of life, full of beau- 

 tiful bloom if we examine them in detail, and yet, as a whole, re- 

 pulsive to refined eyes as a cob-webbed old furniture museum, 

 crammed with heterogeneous beauties and utilities. Such gardens 

 cannot be called decorative planting. They are merely bouquet 

 nurseries of the lowest class, or botanical museums. Neither the 

 loveliness of flowers, nor the beauties of trees and shrubs, alone, 

 will make a truly beautiful place, unless arranged so that the spe- 

 cial beauty of trees, plants, and flowers is subordinated to the gen- 

 eral effect. An attempt to make good pictures by hap-hazard 

 applications to the canvas of the finest paint colors, is not much 

 more sure to result in failure than the usual mode of filling yards 

 with choice trees, shrubs, and flowers. It is as easy to spoil a 

 place with too many flowers as to mar good food with a superfluity 

 of condiments. The same may be said of a medley plantation of 

 the finest trees or shrubs. Numbers will not make great beauty 

 or variety; on the contrary, they will often destroy both. That is 

 the best art which produces the most pleasing pictures with the 

 fewest materials. Milton, in two short lines, thus paints a home: 



" Hard by a cottage chimney smokes, 

 From between two aged oaks." 



Here is a picture ; two trees, a cottage, and green sward — these 

 are all the materials. Unfortunately the " two aged oaks," or their 

 equivalents, are not at hand for all our homes. 



Has the reader ever noticed some remarkably pleasant old 



