CHAPTER XIV 



DISPOSITION OF FLOWERS IN PARKS 



THE French landscape gardeners adorn their lawns with flowers 

 in the form of scrolls, the Germans in bands and straight lines, 

 the Italians in all sorts of curious shaped beds, the English plant in 

 masses and natural growing borders, but the Americans still cling to 

 that first of all conceived form, the circle! Professor John George 

 Jack, of the Arnold Arboretum, once said to a class of students, pos- 

 sibly in a spirit of jest, that he could identify most twigs with his eyes 

 shut, from the sound of their swish through the air. Anyone can 

 identify an American park with his eyes shut at the first stumble into 

 a round flower-bed. Not that occasional round flower-beds may not 

 be found in European parks, but nowhere has the plague taken hold 

 in such virulent form as in American parks. 



Why is a round flower-bed anathematised by the landscape de- 

 signer and enthused over by the lay observer? Because the one sees it 

 violating lines of design, the other rioting in colour. Just as the 

 savage admires a bright stone or a shining bit of metal or the gleam- 

 ing teeth of the wild beast, and adorns himself with them for their 

 glitter and sparkle, so our people of advanced civilisation, by a strange 

 reversion to primitive taste, adorn parks with the flower-bed for its 

 gaudy brightness. Moreover, as the savage will discard his primitive 

 jewelry for a flaming bit of calico, so will modern man discard the 

 heliotrope and ageratum for the flamboyancy of the scarlet salvia. 



EMPHATIC NEED OF DESIGN 



The trained eye sees a circular flower-bed as a spot of design which 

 in line and mass should relate to all other lines and masses in its sur- 

 roundings. It is similar to a button on a jacket. A button is a circular 

 spot of design, which relates at least to the buttonhole, or vice versa; 



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