LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 203 



From the fact last named the giving over of 

 individual lots to private caprices of planting or 

 arrangement, no consummate or finished gardening 

 can, of course, ever be looked for in our cemeteries. 

 The general effect will be at best spotty, and lack 

 coherence. The trail of the principal drives or walks, 

 the establishment of the capital masses of foliage, the 

 ordering and adaptation of the encircling belt, the 

 finish and appointments of the entrance-way these 

 are the objects which will demand taste and skill for 

 their happy execution. To twirl a great labyrinth 

 of serpentine paths through a forest, shaven clean of 

 its under-brush to throw rustic bridges over a flow 

 of sluggish ditch-water, and to construct grottoes 

 where they sit like mountebanks in the hollows of 

 the hills, is not good gardening for cemeteries if it 

 be good anywhere. If there be great reach of irreg- 

 ular surface, there should be sunny glades to contrast 

 with masses of solemn shade. Rustic or other little- 

 nesses should not pique and arrest attention. The 

 story of the place should be told in the largest letters 

 of the gardener's vocabulary and the interpretation 

 easy quiet seclusion REST. 



Something might be said of the character of the 

 trees which should be planted in these fields of the 

 dead. The willow is the traditional weeper, and in 

 place ; but such product of the gardener's art as a 



