SUBURBAN NEIGHBORHOODS. ^7 



Attempts to make and keep great private parks are generally con- 

 spicuous failures. Some of the old family parks on the Hudson 

 River, and a few in other parts of the country, may be thought of 

 as exceptions, but they are exceptions which rather prove the rule ; 

 for most of them are on portions of manorial grants, held under 

 almost feudal titles, which have remained in the same families 

 through several generations, .simply because they are held under 

 laws which present a jarring contrast with the general laws of prop- 

 erty which now govern in most of the States. Great fortunes can- 

 not be lavished perennially for half a century to keep them up, 

 where fortunes are so seldom made or kept in families of high cul- 

 tivation — the only ones which are likely to be led by their tastes, 

 or qualified by their education, to direct such improvements suc- 

 cessfully. It is from this lack of cultivation, and from sheer ignor- 

 ance of the fine arts, the great expenditures and the generations of 

 patient waiting for results, which are all necessary to produce such 

 works, that so many wealthy men stumble and break their fortunes 

 in ridiculous attempts to improvise parks. It would be well for 

 our progress in Landscape Gardening that this word park, as 

 applied to private grounds, should be struck out of use, and that 

 those parts of our grounds which are devoted to what feeds the eye 

 and the heart, rather than the stomach, should be called simply 

 Home-grounds ; and that the ambition of private wealth in our 

 republic should be to make gems of home beauty on a small scale, 

 rather than fine examples of failures on a large scale. A township 

 of land, with streets, and roads, and streams, dotted with a thou- 

 sand suburban homes peeping from their groves ; with school-house 

 towers and gleaming spires among them ; with farm fields, pastures, 

 woodlands, and bounding hills or boundless prairies stretched 

 around ; — these, altogether, form our suburban parks, which all of 

 us may ride in, and walk in, and enjoy ; and the most lavish expen- 

 ditures of private wealth on private grounds can never equal their 

 extent, beauty, or variety. 



A serious inconvenience of extensive private grounds, or parks, 

 is the isolation and loneliness of the habitual inmates of the house — 

 the ladies. Few, even of those who have a native love for rural 

 life, can long live contented without pleasant near neighbors. A 



