NATIONAL COUNCIL OF HORTICULTURE 



89 



pie that all visible works of man should be expressive and beautiful 

 in their general form and main features before they are ornamented 

 with mere decorative detail. 



Esthetic ideas are difficult to explain without illustrations. 



Among large constructions, we find a general regard for good 

 appearance has always controlled ship builders. They made many mis- 

 takes, from a scientific point of view; they did not always make fast 

 ships; they compelled sailors and passengers to submit to unnecessary 

 inconveniences; but they strove always for such beauty of form and 

 outline of hull and fittings, rake of masts, taper of spars, cut of sails 

 that sailing vessels have always been the delight of artists. And how 

 conspicuously absent is all surface decoration and applied ornament! 



It is shocking to imagine the hideous job the engineer of an ele- 

 vated railroad would make of an order to build and rig a steel sail- 

 ing ship, if he should entirely ignore the traditions of ship building 

 and use stock dimension rolled steel beams, bars, angle irons, tubes, 

 rods, and so forth, as he uses them in his elevated railroad trusses 

 and columns and brackets ! How much simpler and cheaper it would 

 be for the deck of a ship to be straight from bow to stern and to pitch 

 straight from center to sides like a flat tin roof! Yet all the demands 

 of the shrewd owners for economy, and all the power of competition 

 were unable to make shipwrights for countless generations build a 

 ship that way. They knew it would be ugly and they wouldn't do it. 



The beauty of the typical sailing vessel is a good illustration of 

 the superiority of beauty of form and proportion, of graceful adapta- 

 tion to useful purposes over a purely scientific and economical but 

 ugly general form superficially decorated. Let us hope that investors 

 and public opinion will more and more encourage civil engineers to 

 take to heart this great esthetic principle that visible structures should 

 be beautiful in form whether there is superficial decoration or not. 



If a knowledge of horticulture and its allied crafts and sciences is 

 to be regarded as less essential to the landscape gardener than a train- 

 ing in general architectural designing and in certain selected branches 

 of civil engineering, it is not intended thereby to belittle the import- 

 ance of a practical knowledge of hardy trees and other plants used in 

 landscape gardening works and of their cultivation, cost and esthetic 

 qualities. Such knowledge is absolutely essential. 



The point sought to be enforced is that the landscape gardener 

 should be educated to design first the general plan for a given work, 

 then its constituent parts and details in such a way that they will 

 produce a consistent, well balanced, harmonious whole and to always 

 keep in mind that the inherent, essential beauty of the whole, and its 

 obvious and graceful adaptation to its main purposes are far more 

 important than its superficial ornamentation. 



Horticulture is the art of the cultivation of garden plants as dis- 

 tinguished from farm cfops. Those horticulturists who raise or sell 

 plants for their beauty are florists. Most florists advise as to or direct 

 the use of ornamental plants. Many florists also branch out into the 

 practice of landscape gardening because their technical knowledge 



