July 15. 1S96.] 



Garden and Forest. 



281 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office : Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POST-OFFICE AT NEW YORK, N. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 1896. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Editorial Article :— English Gardens Unsuitable for America 



Plant Names of Indian Origin. — III IV. R. Gerard. 



Foreign Correspondence : — London Letter IV. Watson. 



New or Little-known Plants: — Deutzia Lemoinei. (With figure.) 



Plant Notes 



Cultural Department: — The Vegetable Garden W. N. Craig. 



Greenhouse Plants Burned by the Sun IV. E. Britton. 



Carnation Notes IV. N. Craig. 



The Hardy Plant Border Edward J. Canning. 



The Flower Garden IV. E. Endieott. 



Notes from the Botanic G. rden, Washington G. IV. Oliver. 



Calamus ciliaris N. y R. 



Correspondence : — Jackson Park in June Rev. E. J. Hill. 



Some American Fruit Associations Charles H. Shinn. 



Recent Publications 



Notes.. 



Illustration : — Deutzia Lemoinei, Fig. 39 



AGE. 



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 284 

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287 

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290 

 285 



English Gardens Unsuitable for America. 



WE spoke last week of the energetic plea made by- 

 Mr. R. Clipston Sturgis in The Cosmopolitan for a 

 change in our current methods of planning and planting 

 the grounds of suburban houses. We plan them rather for 

 display than for use, and we secure neither beauty nor 

 convenience. We leave them unshielded by walls or 

 hedges ; we provide them with no sheltered umbrageous 

 spots for repose and domestic or friendly intercourse out of 

 sight of the passers on the road ; we furnish them with no 

 vegetation whose care and enjoyment may foster a love 

 for nature. Our suburban places are, therefore, monoto- 

 nously alike and generally ugly. They lack individuality, 

 they have no homelike atmosphere, and they lose their 

 rightful effect in forming home-loving habits. We practi- 

 cally make them a part of the public street, and therefore 

 those who own them live indoors or seek their pleasures 

 away from home. 



There is need, indeed, for a radical change in our ideals 

 of what a small suburban place should be, but the right 

 ideal for American adoption is not suburban gardens like 

 those of England. Mr. Sturgis illustrates his article with a 

 plan and some pictures of an actual English suburban 

 place of four acres. It stretches away from the high road 

 in a long and relatively narrow rectangle. The house 

 stands close to the right-hand boundary line, separated 

 from the road in front by narrow, but dense, plantations 

 and a curving entrance-drive. To the left of it lies a formal 

 garden. Back of it is a large lawn for tennis and croquet, 

 and back of the formal garden is another lawn surrounded 

 by flower-beds. Beyond these are two smaller lawns, one 

 of them encircled by flower-beds again, and all these 

 lawns are defined by hedges. Then across the whole 

 width of the place stretches a plantation of large trees, 

 irregularly disposed and broken by little open glades, and 

 hidden by these, at the rear end of the place, are the stables 

 and a kitchen garden. All the paths are straight except 

 where they wind through the plantation of large trees. 

 The approach to the stable runs close to the boundary 

 line, passing the kitchen entrance of the house under a 

 range of great Elms, while the opposite border of the place 



is likewise protected by trees overshadowing a straight 

 foot-path. 



This is an excellent design of its kind. Perhaps, in a 

 four-acre place, the average American would prefer less 

 formality and more naturalness of effect. But this is a 

 matter of taste, to be largely determined by the character 

 of the surroundings of the place, the modeling of its sur- 

 face and the vegetation it bears. And certainly Mr. Sturgis 

 is right when he praises an arrangement which, putting the 

 house in one corner of the grounds and the stable in 

 another, and cutting them with no obtrusive lines of 

 gravel, leaves all their planted portions an unbroken whole, 

 to produce the full effect possible with such dimensions. 

 Our usual American plan of setting the house exactly or 

 nearly in the middle of its grounds is the worst that could 

 be imagined, destroying all possibility of either unity or 

 breadth of effect in their disposition. Two and two are not 

 equal to four in gardening art. If this English house had 

 been placed in the middle of its four acres neither half of 

 the grounds would have looked one-third as large as the 

 whole place must appear to-day. 



But in considering places like this as models we should 

 note the fact that American are unlike English conditions, 

 and especially so in two important ways — namely, the 

 price of labor and the character of the climate. A suburban 

 place covering much less ground than four acres may, 

 indeed, be made charming and private and homelike by 

 an intelligent arrangement of trees and shrubs, fruit-trees 

 and kitchen gardens, lawns and hedges and flower-beds. 

 But such a place needs a large amount of persistent and 

 skillful care. Even the clipping of the grass, when it is cut 

 up into many narrow borders, is time-consuming labor. 

 And flower-beds in a climate like ours, very hot and often 

 very dry, must be sedulously tended, or they quickly be- 

 come distressing instead of pleasing to the eye. In Eng- 

 land labor is cheap ; in America it is very dear. The 

 majority of our suburban householders cannot afford to 

 keep a skilled gardener. At the most, they keep only an 

 " all-round man," who divides his time between the horse 

 and the household chores and the garden. Very often they 

 depend upon a peripatetic gardener for such occasional 

 days or hours of attention as their gardens imperatively 

 require. And many of our readers must have sad memo- 

 ries of the difficulty of obtaining the aid of this person in 

 suburban districts or rural villages. 



But, it may be said, the members of the family should 

 care for their gardens themselves. English people do this 

 to a very great extent. English women especially seem 

 born with a love for gardens, a passion for flowers, and 

 count no time or trouble too great to bestow upon them. 

 Such work is physically wholesome and mentally whole- 

 some, too. If our gardens were planted in the English 

 way, so that privacy would be secured to those who labor 

 in them, our women and girls would be better employed in 

 caring for them, during a part of the day at least, than in 

 swinging in hammocks or promenading the streets, or even 

 in driving ponies or riding the seductive bicycle, if only 

 the American climate were like the English. English 

 women live in a temperate clime. We live in a land 

 which is almost arctic in winter and almost tropical in 

 summer. When the sun shines in England, even in July 

 or August, it gives out a moderate, supportable heat. 

 Upon us it shines with scorching force even in those early 

 weeks of spring when the hardest part of gardening work 

 must be accomplished ; and any one who has attempted 

 gardening work knows that to stand and stoop and potter 

 about in the hot sunshine is even more exhausting than to 

 walk or to ride a bicycle, or to play tennis beneath it. 



Then the moisture of England facilitates Nature's gar- 

 dening processes to a degree of which the untraveled 

 American can hardly conceive. And the long northern 

 twilights give a chance for leisurely, comfortable garden- 

 ing wholly denied us by our swift-coming darkness. 

 This latter fact is of much significance in one direction. 

 It especially affects the outdoor possibilities of the men of 



