RAILROAD-GARDENING 



RAILROAD-GARDENING 2901 



stations is really merely decorative. Carpet-beds are 

 relatively costly as compared with hardy shrubbery. 

 They last but a few months and then leave bareness, 

 while the best hardy trees and shrubs skilfully arranged 

 are interesting all the year round. (Figs. 3335, 3336.) 

 This making of nature-like pictures with relatively 

 simple, inexpensive, and permanent materials is a 

 much higher art than that involved in creating and 

 maintaining flower-beds and a few summer-blooming 

 plants. However, both have their places. Many a tired 

 traveler is cheered by the bright colors of a neatly 

 kept railroad station. Such displays are suitable at the 

 stations if anywhere along the line. They are always 

 preferable to dirt, ugliness, and a general air of indiffer- 

 ence. But railroad-gardening never becomes worthy 

 our best attention until it rises to the plane and impor- 

 tance of planning. (Fig. 3337.) 



Some of the underlying considerations in the land- 

 scape improvement were stated in an editorial in 



3336. A better method of treating the area. 



"Garden and Forest," 1889, by the late W. A. Stiles, 

 from which we quote: "Up to the present time, with 

 few exceptions, railroad-gardening has failed to accom- 

 plish what the public has a right to expect of it from an 

 artistic point of view. Instead of using their opportuni- 

 ties for increasing the taste and knowledge of the com- 

 munities they serve, railroad managers have generally 

 been satisfied to reproduce all that was glaringly bad in 

 the prevailing horticultural fashion of the time. Per- 

 haps this is inevitable, and it will continue so as long 

 as they feel that they need not call for the advice of an 

 expert of a higher class than the ordinary jobbing gar- 

 dener. It is the old story a man employs an architect 

 to build his house, but thinks he needs no advice in lay- 

 ing out the park that surrounds it. 



"The principles that underlie good railroad-gardening 

 are simple. They relate, so far as such gardening has 

 been attempted, to the immediate surroundings of 

 country stations and to the shaping and turfing of the 

 slopes rising and falling from the permanent way. 



"The essential features are: convenient and abun- 

 dant approaches, and some treatment of the ground not 

 needed for approaches. This treatment should be at 

 once economical and permanent, and of a character 

 simple enough to be successfully maintained by the 

 station-master and his assistants, under the inspection 

 and with the occasional advice of a higher official 

 charged with the management of the horticultural 

 affair.s of the corporation. 



"The selection of a system of general treatment is the 

 only difficult thing, and it is here that railroad managers 

 have usually failed. Most railroad-gardens, and this is 

 as true of Europe as of America, consist of a badly 

 laid out and constructed approach, bordered with turf 

 in which are cut as many large and often grotesquely 

 shaped beds as can be crowded in and filled during four 

 months of the year with the most showy and ill-assorted 

 plants, and quite bare of all covering during the remain- 

 ing eight months; of a few shrubs, mutilated almost 

 past recognition by bad pruning, and by a clump of 



pampas grass to complete the decoration; also often the 

 name of the station in stones (mere 'toys'). As Bacon 

 wrote three centuries ago, 'You may see as good sights 

 many times in tarts.' Such grounds are not artistic, 

 and are therefore bad from the point of view of the 

 public. They are enormously expensive and difficult to 

 maintain, therefore bad from the point of view of the 

 railroad. 



"If railroad-gardening is ever to become a potent and 

 permanent means of public education, it must be organ- 

 ized upon a more economical basis, and with more 

 regard to the laws of good taste and good business. This 

 subject has already occupied the attention of a few 

 thoughtful men, and we are confident that some progress 

 has at last been made." Mr. Stiles commends the plans 

 of the then new station grounds of the Boston & Albany 

 Railway for "convenience, neatness, and simplicity. 

 No beds, no brilliant flowers, no startling effects. They 

 rely for attractiveness on convenient, well-kept roads, 

 neat turf, a few good trees, and masses of well-selected 

 and well-planted shrubs, among which herbaceous and 

 bulbous plants are allowed to grow. The plan is simple, 

 and when thoroughly carried out in the beginning it is 

 easy to maintain." 



On the treatment of the right-of-way between sta- 

 tions, Mr. Stiles says: "What is needed is a ground- 

 covering that will be more permanent than turf and 

 will not need its constant cutting and attention, and 

 which can be secured without the enormous first 

 expenditure for accurate grading and the deep soil that 

 makes a grass slope presentable," and adds: "Such low 

 plants as wild roses, dwarf willows and sumacs, sweet 

 fern, bayberry, etc., when once established will prevent 

 surface soil from washing, will not grow tall enough to 

 interfere with operating the road, and if destroyed by 

 fire would soon grow again from the root and re-cover 

 the ground." 



The proof of these deductions is seen yearly on many 

 roads, where thousands of miles of railroad rights-of- 

 way which, in the spring and early summer, are like 

 ribbons of flowered brocade linking the towns together 

 but later in the season become blackened wastes from 

 accidental or intentional fires. Year by year this 

 mournful program is repeated. 



Railway officials offer no practical objections to the 

 use of small trees and of shrubs between stations which 

 apply when the work is done with discretion; viz., on the 

 outer boundaries of rights of way that are 100 or more 

 feet wide, on straight stretches, or on long tangents, and 

 not on short curves or near grade crossings. The tracks 

 should never be menaced by the danger of trees falling 

 across them in wind-storms, nor should the telegraph 

 wires and poles be interfered with, nor the view of the 

 line obstructed. The danger to planting from fire can 

 never be entirely eliminated until some non-spark-pro- 

 ducing fuel is substituted for coal. 



Planting for protection, as practised so far, includes: 

 (1) covering banks with vegetation to prevent erosion, 

 and (2) planting for protection from wind and snow, and 

 from landslides. All this has been successfully done in 

 various parts of the world. Snow-hedges are compara- 

 tively common at home and abroad. A notable exam- 

 ple of confidence in the advantage of belts of trees for 

 this purpose is seen in the groves planted some years 

 ago by the Northern Pacific Railway Company. About 

 600,000 trees were set out in 1900, and the chief engineer 

 of the road says: "This experiment has been under- 

 taken to determine the possibility of substituting 

 groves for snow-fences. It is necessary to protect all 

 railway cuts in these prairie regions in some manner, as 

 the strong winds across the treeless prairies cause the 

 snow to drift badly. A strip 100 feet wide is cultivated 

 to keep down weeds and overcome danger from fire, 

 and through the middle of it runs a grove 60 feet wide, 

 the inner edge being 125 feet from the center line and 

 parallel with the tracks through cuts. The trees are 



