DEVELOPIXG PUBLIC PARKS. 23 



place, but this fad for the stiff and formal will have a short season. 

 We will soon tire of the terrace when placed on the flat, and the poplar 

 when seen starving on the hill, and eventually we will return to the 

 natural style. 



The terraces will be sent to the hillside, where the ground is too 

 steep for climbing, without having recourse to steps; our native trees, 

 *uch as the live oak, the madrone, the pine, and the silver fir, will again 

 come to be recognized, and have a place in landscape, aided, of course, 

 by the introductions from foreign climes. 



Nature has given us some of the most charming landscape effects 

 here in California in her grouping of indigenous trees. The live oak, 

 the white oak, and the bay on our plains and valleys, the black and tan 

 oak, madrone, and buckeye of our rolling hills, and what in nature can 

 surpass the great massive groves and groups of our coast redwoods, as 

 they cluster about the meadows? 



Xo end of grand combinations of native trees, shrubs, and flowering 

 plants might be formed in our wonderful state if a little good judgment 

 and taste were introduced in the work. The trouble is that too much 

 is left to the management of those who have had no special training in 

 landscape work, men who do not even know the names of the plants 

 which they are planning to set out, and have not the faintest idea what 

 the effect will be in five years or in one year, whether the habits of growth 

 are bushy or pyramidal. I have known some instances of advisers being 

 followed when they have advocated the cutting out of grand old ever- 

 green oak in order to make room for a clump of formal-shaped poplars 

 which only carry their leaves four or five months of the twelve. These 

 same advisers who are cutting out our native oak and laurel are also 

 advocating the changing of our beautiful natural undulating slopes 

 into stiff, artificial terraces, where every foot must be on the same grade. 

 They set the plants exactly the same distance apart, all of the same kind 

 and size; and, not content with shaping the ground into stiff, formal 

 lines, they must get out their shears and clip and cut their trees into 

 the shape of peacocks, umbrellas, globes, and pyramids. I do not 

 know whether I am singular in my opinion, but for my own part I 

 would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriance and diffusion of 

 boughs and branches than when it is cut and trimmed into mathe- 

 matical figures, and I can not but fancy that a group of free, naturally- 

 shaped trees or shrubs is much more to be admired than the most 

 curiously-shaped and tortured specimens to be found in either Japan or 

 on the continent. 



Another innovation that we hear a great deal of in late years is the 

 advisability of reducing the size of the space allowed for grass and also 

 dotting it over with so-called specimens of rare trees. I also am an 



