March 15, 1893. 



Garden and Forest. 



119 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST RUBLISHING 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, MARCH 15, 1893. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles :— Formal Gardening: Does it Conflict with' the Natural 



Style? 119 



Establishment of Forest-reserwitions in the West 120 



Making Maple-sugar : The Old Way and the New. — I.. Timothy Wheeler. 120 



Phosphale for Fruit Dr. G. C. Caldwell. 121 



Notes on the Forest Flora of Japan.— VIII C. S. S. 121 



Foreign Correspondence: — London Letter W. Watson. 122 



Pads Letter ff- "24 



Cultural Department:— Winter-flowering Begonias. (With figure.) 



y. N. Gerard. 125 



The Persian Cyclamen. — I M. Barker. 125 



Spring Cultivation of Chrysanthemums T. D. H. 126 



Correspondence : — Hvbrid Genera Dr. Maxwell T. Masters. 126 



Relation of Yield of Potatoes to Weight of Tuber Planted, 



Professor C. S. PUuiib. 126 



Recent Publications 127 



Exhibitions : — Mr. Parsons' Pictures of Japan. . . .Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer. 127 

 Notes -28 



Illustration : — Begonia Souvenir de Franfois Gauliu, Fig. 20 123 



Formal Gardening: Does it Conflict with the Natural 



Style. 



IT is not credible that the art which brings men into 

 closest contact with Nature's kindness and serenity 

 can tend to make them narrow and unjust; and there- 

 fore it is strange that so much narrowness and in- 

 justice should be revealed in treatises on gardening. In 

 elder days very few writers who advocated either the 

 formal or the naturalistic style of gardening could see any 

 merit in the opposite style ; and the same temper is often 

 manifested in our days. Too many recent books, which 

 otherwise would be useful, are rendered dangerous by the 

 bitterness with which the words and works, the ideals and 

 processes of the opposite camp are attacked. This is unfor- 

 tunate, for the judgment and taste of a novice may easily 

 be warped forever by the first books he may chance to take in 

 hand ; and one must read a good many books on gardening- 

 art, and check off their contradictory statements one against 

 the other, using, meanwhile, one's own eyes out-of-doors, 

 to arrive at the right understanding of what they teach. 

 This understanding shows us that each system of design is 

 right in its own place, and that the advocates of each have 

 not always dealt fairly with the advocates of the other, or, 

 at least, with the system which did not chance to be their 

 own. Occasionally we do find a wise and temperate 

 writer who puts the fact of the essential value of both 

 styles of gardening into brief, plain words. Mr. Walter 

 How^e, for example, in the charming introduction to his 

 little book called " The Garden in Polite Literature," tells 

 us that "the mistake should not be made by the adherents 

 of one school of art, of utterly condemning the other. There 

 are elements of truth in the ideas of both schools which 

 intelligent amateurs and professional men should cherish 

 and utilize whenever and wherever circumstances will 

 permit." And Monsieur Edouard Andre, the foremost pro- 

 fessor of landscape-art in France, goes still further in his 

 Art des Jardins, and very instructively says, "Three 

 styles may be recognized : The geometrical style, the 



landscape style, and the composite style. . . . The mixed 

 or composite style results from a judicious mingling of the 

 other two, under favorable conditions ; and, to my mind, 

 it is to this style that the future of gardening-art belongs." 



In truth, if we use our own minds and eyes, there is no 

 reason to think that formal gardening and landscape-gar- 

 dening are deadly rivals, each of which must put the knife 

 to the other's throat if it wishes itself to survive. There 

 is no real opposition between the two systems, although 

 they seem very far apart when their most extreme results 

 are compared. 



" Natural gardening " is a term which is often used, but 

 it is so inexact that it may well move to contumely any 

 advocate of the formal styles. No gardening result is 

 natural. .At the most it is only naturalistic. " True, be- 

 hind all the contents of the place sits primal Nature, but 

 Nature 'to advantage dressed,' Nature in a rich dis- 

 guise. Nature delicately humored, stamped with new quali- 

 ties, furnished with a new momentum, led to new 

 conclusions by man's skill in selection and artistic concen- 

 tration. . . . Man has taken the several things and trans- 

 formed them ; and in the process they passed, as it were, 

 through the crucible of his mind to reappear in daintier 

 guise ; in the process, the face of Nature became, so to 

 speak, humanized ; man's artistry conveyed an added 

 charm. ... A garden is man's transcript of the wood- 

 land world ; it is common vegetation ennobled ; outdoor 

 scenery neatly writ in man's small-hand. It is a sort of 

 twin-picture, conceived of man in the studio of his brain, 

 painted upon Nature's canvas with the aid other materials. 

 It is Nature's rustic language made fluent and 

 intelligible. Nature's garrulous prose tersely recast — 

 changed into imaginative shapes, touched to finer issues." 



These are the late James Bedding's w^ords, written by an 

 architect and printed in a book the purpose of which is to 

 exalt formal gardening-art and to decry the "so-called 

 landscape-gardener" as a person who is not an artist at 

 all but a helpless meddler with Nature, professing to 

 do work exactly like Nature's, and, of course, always 

 failing in the attempt. But this book is one of those 

 which most grievously misrepresent the true ideals, 

 methods and results of landscape-gardening, however 

 faithful may be its pictures of what the actual professors 

 of the art to-day achieve in England. And we are glad to 

 emphasize the fact by quoting this one passage and saying 

 that it is an admirable description of genuine landscape 

 arrangements, and essentially inappropriate to definitely 

 formal arrangements. 



In a true formal garden the canvas is not Nature's and 

 does not profess to be, while in the naturalistic garden it 

 may be Nature's, and, if not, must look as though it might 

 have been. In a formal garden the language is not a re- 

 finement of Nature's, but a translation of it into quite 

 another tongue. In a formal garden Nature is not deli- 

 cately humored, but is boldly compelled in a direction 

 opposite to any of those which she ever chooses for her- 

 self. A formal garden is not man's transcript of the wood- 

 land world, but a wholly new conception based on archi- 

 tectural knowledge and elaborated by architectural taste. 

 It is as artificial, almost, as a building ; for, although its 

 materials are Nature's, so are the stones of a cathedral ; 

 and Nature shows us nothing which at all resembles it, 

 either in fundamental idea or in finished effect 



On the other hand, Mr. Sedding has exactly and beauti- 

 fully painted such scenes as we may find, for instance, in 

 some parts of Central Park. They are not natural scenes, 

 but they are naturalistic, in effect as well as in idea. Sug- 

 gestions and hints for them may be found in wild Nature, 

 although no exact patterns or prototypes. They speak to 

 the mind in Nature's language, although more clearly and 

 exquisitely than she ever speaks herself. No study of 

 architecture could have taught a man how to conceive 

 them, and no degree of architectural taste could have 

 enabled him to perfect them. Nature was our great artist's 

 school-master, and not merely the store-keeper from whom 



