LANDSCAPE GARDENING 7 



of flowers instead of bare earth or unsightly manure. These 

 ideas are illustrated by the picture of bunchberry on plate 5 and 

 by Chapter XXII. 



I will give you two examples of luxuriance and finish already 

 attained in America in five years or less chiefly by transplanting 

 large trees. First the Long Island home pictured on plate 3. 

 A man who drove by this house when the place looked just as it 

 did in the picture asked how long the house had been there. 

 When told that the whole place was four years old, he replied, 

 "You must be mistaken. It's forty if it's a day." I do not 

 assert that this is a perfect place, but I do claim that it has at 

 least 90 per cent, of the English luxuriance, while most Americans 

 who have been to England believe we cannot get even 50 per 

 cent. And as to finish, I have yet to see in England any greater 

 perfection of detail than you can find in the formal garden of 

 Mr. Larz Anderson at Brookline, Mass., which was fully de- 

 scribed and pictured in Country Life in America for March, 1905, 

 and again in March, 1906. 



If, as individuals, we can get so much of the English luxuri- 

 ance and finish in only five years, why worry about the other 10 

 per cent.? Those last ten degrees before perfection are very 

 precious, but there is such a thing as paying too high a price for 

 beauty. I saw an Englishwoman putting the finishing touches 

 on a perfect garden for thirty-six cents a day. Would you have 

 American labour paid like British labour? Would you be will- 

 ing to entail the land in order to have perfect estates? Would 

 you exchange a social democracy for a social aristocracy that the 

 loveliest gardens might be preserved forever? 



The only way in which we can surpass England is by loving 

 our own trees, as they do theirs, and by planting more American 



