7 3 PACIFIC STATES FLORAL CONGRESS. 



a form to the garden beds, yet doing my best to keep out, as much as 

 possible, all impression of stiffness, all tiresome regularity. But 

 believe it is impossible to obliterate the artificial in a garden bounded 

 on three sides by unyielding straight lines and on the fourth sides by 

 a just as unyielding railway track, and only forty feet to give per- 

 spective to. In laying out these gardens I have shunned, as far as 

 possible, the English idea of a stiff, closely-cropped lawn, upon which 

 a lonely palm or two has been stuck out, or a shrub or two, to shiver 

 in awkward bashfulness at their own conspicuousness. Instead, I have 

 tried to bring color, lots of color, into these little gardens, such as our 

 cloudless summer will develop, at the same time being forced to use 

 such plants as would thrive under the main care of unskilled hands. I 

 have planted hundreds of palms in these gardens, hundreds of olean- 

 ders. In my selection of trees and plants I have tried, as far as means 

 permitted, to imitate the gardens of bella Italia, so that, as they grow 

 older, they may own their southland charms of form, color, and 

 fragrance, in preference to the cold, passionless stiffness of the modern 

 imitation of the English garden. 



I have said that a tasteful depot garden is one of the best kinds of 

 advertisements of our state. These gardens, then, should be given the 

 true character thereof; they should be a concentrated southland. In- 

 stead of the northern pine and maple should grow the airy, graceful 

 Casuarinas, the feathery cypresses, the heat-loving fig, the trees of 

 warmer Japan, the olive, the myrtle, the acacias, and the trees from 

 warm Australia and Africa, and the araucarias, giving sympathetic 

 earnestness to all this semitropical voluptuousness. Instead of the 

 snowberry, let us plant the oleander and crape-myrtle in profusion, with 

 their brilliant abundance of southland bloom and coloring; instead of 

 the syringa, let us plant the real orange, and have no mockery about it. 

 Let us use the banana freely, and the charming bamboos, with their 

 rustle and glistening cleanliness in the eternal sunshine, the whispering 

 music every passing breeze plays on the Jew's-harps of their myriad of 

 leaves and slender twigs. But, above all, let us have the palms in great 

 abundance; not one lonely specimen on a level, unmitigating lawn, but 

 groups of them, and, if space permits, groves of them, raising, in time r 

 their crowned heads above thickets of oleanders shaded by feathery 

 acacias. And right here I would like to say a word for a tree of great 

 impressiveness, the Italian cypress, misused, abused, clipped, and 

 amputated into ugly malformations, their picturesque, slender ragged- 

 ness shorn off them. What charms do not these trees, in their natural- 

 ness, lend to the landscapes of bella Italia, planted in small groups in 

 some old villa garden, rising in slender, wind-bowing solemnity, dark 

 and classic ; or on a hillside, their dark raggedncss outlined against dis- 



