March 22, 1893. J 



Garden and Forest. 



129 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office : Tribune Bi/iujing, 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 22, 1893. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles :— Formal Gardening : Where it can be Used to Advantage. 129 



Cypress as a Building Material 130 



Notes on North American Trees. — XXX C. S. S. 130 



Are the Varieties of Orchard-fruits Running Out?— II. 



Professor L. H. Bailey. 131 



Palms at Federal Point, Florida H. Nehrling. 131 



A Study of Architecture in the Rural Districts of the West. (With figure.) 



Thojnas Hohnes. 132 



Foreign Correspondence :— London Letter W. Watson. 133 



Cultural Department :— A Serious Filbert Disease. (With figures.) 



Professor Byron D. Halsted. 134 



Hardy Deciduous Barberries J. G. Jack. 134 



Sowing Seeds of Annual Plants T. D. H. i^s 



The Hardy Plant Garden 7. N. G. 136 



Correspondence :— Forestry in the West Robert Douglas. 136 



Exhibitions :— Spring Show of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society 137 



Notes -38 



Illustrations : — A Farm-house in Northern California, Fig. 21 132 



Filbert Twig attacked by Blight, Fig. 22 134 



Sections of Blighted Branch ot Filbert, Fig. 23 135 



Formal Gardening: Where it can be Used to 

 Advantage. 



WE said last week that there is no real opposition be- 

 tween the formal and the naturalistic styles of 

 gardening, widely apart though their extreme results may 

 lie ; but that they are twin branches of that great art 

 which means the expression of man's sense for beauty on 

 the surface of the ground by the use of Nature's materials. 

 Formal gardening does not, as we are apt to think, cramp 

 the artist within very narrow limits. The hill-side garden 

 of Italy, with its terraces and balustrades, stairways, grot- 

 toes and statues, and its rich masses of free-growing 

 foliage contrasting harmoniously with these artificial fea- 

 tures, is formal in aim and aspect — that is, it does not aim 

 to suggest effects which Nature spontaneously produces, 

 or to clarify and deepen impressions which wild scenes can 

 make. Formal is the vast level park at Versailles, with its 

 magnificent straight alleys of trees, its big rectangular ba- 

 sins of water, its stately fountains and cascades and wide 

 graveled spaces — splendid outdoor drawing-room that it 

 was for a pompous king and his courtiers. But formal, 

 too, is the park at Dijon, which also Le Notre designed, 

 where a straight avenue runs through the centre, and nar- 

 rower ones radiate from it to the drive which encircles the 

 park, but where the whole of the remaining space is a free- 

 growing forest, traversed by winding foot-ways of turf. 

 The old Dutch garden was formal, with its trees and shrubs 

 clipped into fantastic shapes, and its puerile, toy-like orna- 

 mentation ; but so, too, was the great walled garden of old 

 English days, symmetrically arranged and partly planted 

 in stiff fashions, but partly given up to more naturalistic 

 " heaths " — the garden that Bacon described and that Evelyn 

 loved. An enclosed court-yard laid out with gravel and 

 pattern-beds of flowers, such as the one at Charlecote Hall, 

 in England, which was illustrated some years ago in these 

 pages, is formal, of course ; but so, likewise, are those 

 small Parisian pleasure-grounds which are formed by sim- 



ple lawns, encircled by borders of varied and naturally 

 growing flowers, and so, too, was your grandmother's gar- 

 den in New England, with its masses of luxuriant plants, 

 but its straight walks bordered by prim little edgings of 

 Box. Some of these types are more formal — more archi- 

 tectural than others ; but in none of them has Nature been 

 "delicately humored," as she is in the naturalistic park or 

 garden ; in all of them a non-naturalistic ideal has been ex- 

 pressed by non-naturalistic methods of arrangement. 



We can thus draw a line between one great gardening 

 style and the other. But it should be felt that this line is 

 not a rigid one. The borders of the two styles overlap, not 

 as regards fundamental conceptions, but as regards details 

 of execution. Nature must be allowed her freedom to 

 some extent, even where all the trees are clipped and all 

 the grass is shorn and all the flowers are set in pattern- 

 beds. Within the prescribed shapes and lines she must 

 grow her flowers and foliage as she will, and she must sup- 

 ply light and shadow and the atmospheric envelope. And, 

 on the other hand, artificial, formal elements must enter 

 into every landscape which man's foot is to tread and 

 man's eye is to enjoy as a work of art. We must always 

 have roads and paths and the non-natural curbs or edges 

 of grass that they imply. In private grounds we have a 

 house as the very centre and focus of the scene, as the very 

 reason for its artistic treatment ; and in public parks we 

 have minor buildings, bridges, steps and a dozen other ar- 

 tificial preparations for human comfort. No garden can be 

 altogether artificial, and none can be altogether natural ; 

 and this is enough to prove that the elements characteristic 

 of the one style may sometimes be very freely introduced 

 into a general scheme which we class as belonging to the 

 other style. 



The Thier-garten in Berlin is probably the finest public 

 pleasure-ground in all Europe. Some of its portions are 

 wilder-looking, more distinctly naturalistic, than any parts 

 of Central Park. But through its whole breadth runs a 

 wide formal space, with straight drives and walks, richly 

 adorned wuth works of sculpture and planted in appropriate 

 ways. In the park at Dresden, on the other hand — once a 

 royal, but now a public possession — the general scheme is 

 formal, with a beautiful seventeenth-century palace as its 

 central feature ; on one side of this a rectangular sheet of 

 water, and on the other a flower-beset lawn of similar size 

 and shape, and with straight avenues crossing the whole 

 tract in various directions. Once this park was much 

 smaller than it now is, and was formal throughout ; but 

 later additions and alterations have given its outlying por- 

 tions a thoroughly naturalistic look, here being little forests 

 tangled with freely growing shrubbery, and there broad 

 glades where huge Oaks and Elms stand in semi-rural 

 isolation. Yet, as the transitions have been artistically 

 managed, there is no want of harmony in the scenes 

 through which one passes ; the free park-like charm of 

 some of them merely seems refreshing in contrast to the 

 architectonic dignity of those we have just left ; or, if we 

 come first upon the naturalistic parts, they merely make 

 more impressive and appropriate the formality of those 

 which encircle or lead up to the palace. 



In our own Central Park we have a distinctly natural- 

 istic scheme, with no such dominating formal feature as 

 the many-pathed long avenue in Berlin. But here, too, 

 we, nevertheless, find a formal feature of great impor- 

 tance, in the wide straight walk which is called the INIall, 

 symmetrically planted with rows of Elm-trees, and ending 

 upon an architectural terrace with fiights of stairs descend- 

 ing to the plaza at the edge of the lake. Nothing in the 

 park is more beautiful than the harmonious contrast we 

 note when, standing on this terrace, we look in one direc- 

 tion down the formal Mall and in the other across the 

 water to the naturalistic opposite shore- of the lake. Each 

 of these prospects gains in charm by its artistic opposition 

 to the other — an opposition which is turned into union by 

 the presence of the intervening sheet of water. And even 

 when we are far away from the terrace, the IMall plays a 



