26 OLan&scape Hrcbttecture 



the primitive forest, which should not be altogether 

 the model as will be shown hereafter. Many of the 

 French and Italian designs even at the present time 

 strike a formal, artificial note in their most natural- 

 looking conceptions. They make their curves so true 

 and neat; there is too much artifice, and not enough 

 suggestion or mystery, and mystery should form a part 

 of nearly all landscape gardening in order to secure the 

 highest kind of pleasure. The Germans and English 

 and some other nations do excellent landscape garden- 

 ing, but it is doubtful whether the present age is quite 

 keeping up to the old standard of the art. Love of 

 perfection in detail of tree and shrub and flowers has 

 led many to forget or overlook fundamental principles 

 as practised by the great masters of the profession. 

 Certainly there is no landscape gardening of the present 

 day that surpasses in fundamentals, if it equals, that 

 done by Prince Ludwig Heinrich Herman Piickler on his 

 estate of Muskau in southern Germany nearly a hundred 

 years ago. In support of this statement I am sure I may 

 be allowed to quote the authority of a landscape archi- 

 tect, the late Chas. Eliot, than whom there has been in 

 modern times no better writer anywhere on the principles 

 of landscape gardening if we perhaps except A. J. Down- 

 ing and the distinguished artists Frederick Law Olmsted 

 and Calvert Vaux, creators of Central Park, New York. 

 Mr. Eliot writes that Prince Puckler undertook: 



"Nothing less than the transformation of the al- 

 most ugly valley of the Niesse into a vale of beauty 



