February 15, 1893.] 



Garden and Forest. 



73 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Officb : Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by 



Professor C. S. Sargent. 



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



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1893. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles: — Garden-art and Architecture 73 



Restoring the Primeval Names of Lakes and Peaks 74 



A Cold W inter in North Carolina Professor W. F. Massey. 74 



Notes on the Forest Flora of Japan. — V. (With figure.) C. S. S. 75 



Entomological : — A Destructive Elm-tree Bark-borer Dr. y. A. Lintner. 76 



Foreign Correspondence : — London Letter W, Watson. 76 



Cultural Department : — Fatal Club-root of Turnips. (With figure.) 



Professor Byron D. Halsted. 78 



Water-lilies from Seed Win. Tricker. 79 



Decorative Species of Asparagus , W. H . Taplitt. 79 



Winter-flowering Plants Robert Cameron. 80 



Manettia bicolor George C. Buiz. 80 



Correspondence: — The Treeless Plains E. f. Walker &= Co. 81 



The Sierra Club of California Charles Howard Shinn. 81 



Valves in Heating Apparatus W. S. 81 



Flowers in Winter Professor W. A. Buckhoat. 81 



Sali.x balsamifera F. H. Horsford. 82 



Second Crop of Potatoes Professor W. F. Massey. 82 



How to Get a Blue Grass Sod Waldo F. Brown. 82 



Recent Pubuc.a.tions 82 



Exhibitions : — Flower Pictures at the Academy of Design, 



Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer. S3 



Notes 83 



Illustrations : — Michelia compressa, Fig. 13 77 



Club-root Fungus (Plasmodiophora Brassicse) , Fig. 14 79 



Garden-art and Architecture. 



IF the art of gardening in America is to develop in a vig- 

 orous and versatile way, it should have the intelligent 

 support of the architectural profession. French architects 

 recognize its importance to some extent ; they feel that it 

 is a needful adjunct to architectural art, and the problerns 

 given out in the Parisian schools require that the surround- 

 ings of the proposed building shall be developed as well 

 as the building itself; but the full value, the wide range, 

 and often independent character of gardening-art, are not 

 thoroughly understood, even in France. This is proved 

 by the phrasing of a precept which one constantly hears in 

 Parisian studios : " The art of gardening must be studied, 

 for it is the sauce of architecture." 



The art of gardening, in the broad sense, is much more 

 than this. It is the art of design applied to the creation of 

 beautiful pictures on the surface of the ground. Sometimes, 

 in truth, it must merely supplement the art of architecture ; 

 but sometimes, on the other hand, architecture must 

 become its handmaid and helper; and, as a whole, it is a 

 vital, independent, individual art, the sister, not the servant, 

 of architecture. This fact should be recognized in America, 

 for it is the home of the greatest of all the masters of this art, 

 or the greatest, at least, of those who have followed its natu- 

 ralistic branch ; and where have been created, if not the 

 finest private estates in the world, yet the finest of those 

 great public parks which are among the landscape-gar- 

 dener's most difficult tasks, and which, more than any 

 other products of his hand, show how truly independent 

 his art may be. 



All lovers of this art must therefore regret that some 

 architects do not appreciate its dignity, or even recog- 

 nize its existence. Too often they ignore it in their prac- 

 tice, even when the designing of a building ought not to be 

 their controlling artistic purpose, but rather the designing 

 together of a building and its surroundings with such unity 

 of purpose that the whole shall be a consistent creation. 



The architectural journals, too, do not always recognize 

 the value of garden-art, and even when they attempt to 

 give instruction in this field their teachings may be incor- 

 rect and misleading. For example, the pages of an architec- 

 tural quarterly of good repute lately contained an article 

 entitled "A Hint for Preparing a Country-house," with an 

 accompanying plan, which included grounds as well as 

 house. The author speaks to those who want "inex- 

 pensive country-places, with the grounds laid out in 

 a sensible manner, or as the occupant wishes, and the 

 house modern and exactly what the occupant likes"; and, 

 he asks, "In what way are such places to be obtained.?" 

 The first part of. his answer is wise enough : "Each man 

 must prepare his own country-place" if it is to suit him 

 precisely. But the next phrase, "This is not a difficult 

 thing to do," is misleading, if doing is understood in the 

 sense of doing well. Then he supposes that a site of some 

 three acres, with a frontage of about 2CO feet on a high-road, 

 has been securedjin convenient nearness to a small settlement 

 on a line of railway ; and finally he passes to specific sug- 

 gestions for its treatment. The ornamental grounds are to 

 occupy about one-third of the whole area, having, there- 

 fore, a depth of some 250 feet and lying next the high-road. 



The first thing to do for their improvement, says the au- 

 thor, "is to remove every tree on the front lot and have 

 their stumps extracted. Then the lot should be plowed, 

 graded and rolled and seeded. In the fall or spring the 

 trees are to be planted. . . . The line for the front 

 of the house should be placed back from the new front 

 fence-line, say seventy-five feet. Referring to the illustra- 

 tion, it will be seen that along the front fence, ten shade- 

 trees have been located. Down each side fence are eight 

 Cherry-trees, these combining fruit and shade. Surround- 

 ing the location for the house are eight Maple-trees, and on 

 one side of each of the two front carriage-roads are two 

 shade-trees. Along the back roads are placed Pear-trees, 

 eighteen in all, and intervening, in three rows of three 

 trees each, are nine Apple-trees. Additional Apple and 

 other fruit-trees may be placed in the rear lot to any de- 

 sired number." 



This certainly is far from an ideal scheine for a small 

 place, but the full measure of its folly cannot be ex- 

 plained without reproducing the plan. Sufhce it to say 

 that, in a place of only 200 feet frontage there are 

 two carriage-drives of equal im])ortance leading to the 

 house, and two similar ones leading away from it, one of 

 the latter to a stable, but the other to — wdiat.'' It is hard to 

 divine the nature of the little building indicated at its ter- 

 mination unless we assume it to be the coachman's cot- 

 tage ; and it is hard to assume a coachman who requires a 

 carriage-approach to his door. Furthermore, these roads, 

 converging at the house, encircle it on all four sides with 

 broad stretches of gravel, thus giving it an isolated station, 

 as of a boat on a beach, when it ought to have at least 

 three of its fronts based on the grass and united to the soil 

 by green and sheltering plantations. 



We do not think that in all cases the scheme for small 

 grounds ought to be a true landscape-scheme, or even a 

 definitely informal scheme. Regularity — even geometrical 

 regularity — can be made very beautiful on certain sites, 

 amid certain surroundings, and with a house of a certain 

 character. But when a man is so enamored of regularity 

 that he advises, as the necessary first step, that all the trees 

 which may exist on a place shall be destroyed, and that its 

 surface shall be "graded" (by which he evidently means 

 made quite flat), then he ought surely to devise some artis- 

 tic scheme of formality. But in this case the roads are 

 neither simply straight nor pleasingly curved. They con- 

 verge at the house in awkward sweeps, so as to emphasize 

 the mistake of their needless repetition. Again, planta- 

 tions of trees must make something — if not naturalistic 

 groups and pictures, then shady lanes and bowsers. But in 

 this case the Maples and fruit-trees simply run along the 

 fences and along one side of the roads, producing a stiff, 

 yet not a rightly formal, systematic effect. In short, an 



