May 7, 1890.] 



Garden and Forest. 



223 



gained the level of the upland. The stables stand apart a little 

 to the north, and the greenhouses, with an enclosed garden 

 attached to them, lie in a similar position on the plateau to the 

 south. Both are entirely surrounded by the open groves of 

 the park. 



According to Mr. Downing, Andre" Parmentier, of Long 

 Island — the first landscape-architect who practiced in America 

 — arranged the roads, buildings and plantations of the estate, 

 under the patronage of Dr. Hosack, who succeeded Dr. Bard as 

 proprietor. No man ever undertook a more responsible service 

 in the realm of taste applied to landscape, nor one in which it 

 would have been easier to fail by spoiling what nature had so 

 magnificently provided. What a contrast is his work to the 

 usual practice of the modern amateur, who, being a cultivated 

 gentleman, considers himself quite able to layout his own place. 

 With the help of a jobbing gardener, he too often first despoils 

 the natural scene of much that makes its character and beauty, 

 for the sake of introducing supposedly decorative elements 

 such as strange trees and the short lived brilliancy of flower- 

 beds. Montgomery Place and Hyde Park should teach us 

 better. The soft and tranquil beauty of the gentle landscape 

 of the first named, and the broad stateliness of the upland 

 scenery of the second, must impress all sensitive minds as no 

 splendor of embellishment can. Decorative gardening, as it 

 is often introduced in modern country-seats — that is, in patches 

 scattered here and there — would at once kill the effectiveness 

 of these old seats. Their power over the mind and heart con- 

 sists chiefly in the unity of the impression which they make. 

 Their scenery is artificial in the sense that Nature, working 

 alone, would never have produced it; but the art which has 

 here "mended nature," to use Shakespeare's phrase, has 

 worked with Nature and not against her. It has, by judicious 

 thinning, helped Nature to grow great trees; it has spread 

 wide carpets of green where Nature hinted she was willing 

 grass should grow; it has in one place induced a screen of 

 foliage to grow thickly, and in another place it has disclosed a 

 hidden vision of blue distance; and so, while it has adapted 

 Nature's landscape to human use, it has also, as it were, con- 

 centrated and intensified the expression of each scene. "Al- 

 most all natural landscapes are redundant sources of more or 

 less confused beauty, out of which the human instinct of in- 

 vention can, by just choice, arrange, not a better treasure, but 

 one infinitely more fitted to human sight and emotion, infi- 

 nitely narrower, infinitely less lovely in detail, but having this 

 great virtue, that there shall be nothing which does not con- 

 tribute to the effect of the whole." Montgomery Place and 

 Hyde Park on the Hudson may serve as illustrations of these 

 good words of Mr. Ruskin's. 



Two other excellencies of these old seats remain to be 

 mentioned so that they may perhaps be imitated. Firstly, the 

 roads and paths, instead of displaying themselves and their 

 curves as if they were the chief elements of beauty in park- 

 scenery, are rightly made subordinate and inconspicuous, as 

 befits the mere instruments of convenience they really are. 

 When they run straight across level country they are shaded 

 by trees in rows; when they curve, as they do only for good 

 reason, formality of planting instantly stops. They lead to 

 their objective points with directness and without superfluous 

 flourish. Secondly, the makers of these old seats were wise 

 in their generation in that they chose sites for their houses 

 where ample space was obtainable and where fine trees 

 already existed. Prevailing custom places fine houses on lots 

 of land much too small for them, and many a mansion, archi- 

 tecturally excellent, is foredoomed to rise in some bare field 

 where it must stand naked during many years. And yet, New 

 England, not to speak of other parts of the country, abounds 

 in accessible park-sites, crying to be occupied, where, if there 

 is no such mighty river as the Hudson, there is great variety 

 of lake, hill and mountain scenery adorned by fine trees and 

 woods. 

 Boston. Charles Eliot. 



The Art of Gardening. — An Historical Sketch. 

 XX. — The Mahometans in Spain and India. 



PHE Generalif,* a sort of summer-palace attached to the 

 ■*• Alhambra, stands on another spur of the same moun- 

 tain. The walk from one to the other may be traversed in about 

 a quarter of an hour, and leads through a ravine luxuriantly 

 overgrown with Figs, Oaks, Laurels, Pistachios and Cystisus. 

 The place, as Gautier described it fifty years ago, -J- wore the 



aspect of a virgin forest ; but it was once a carefully tended 

 pleasure-ground, like the approach to the Alhambra on the 

 other side, where natural effects had been simulated with con- 

 summate art. Much of the architectural beauty of the Gen- 

 eralif has perished, yet its gardens and water-works still de- 

 light the eye. Gautier says: "A marble bordered canal runs 

 the whole length of the enclosure, rolling its rapid and abund- 

 ant waters under arcades of foliage formed by massive and 

 fantastically shaped evergreens. Orange-trees and Cypresses 

 are planted on either hand. . . . The perspective is terminated 

 by a gallery-portico with fountains and marble colonettes. . . . 

 The canal makes a sharp bend and you penetrate into other en- 

 closures ornamented with pieces of water and surrounded by 

 walls. ... In the middle of one of these basins opens, like an 

 immense bouquet, a gigantic Oleander of incomparable beauty 

 and vividness. When I saw it, it was an explosion of flowers, 

 a veritable bouquet of vegetable fireworks. . . . The waters 

 reach the garden by a sort of very steep inclined plane, edged 

 with little walls, supporting channels of great hollowed tiles, 

 through which the stream precipitates itself under the open 

 sky. At each break in the descent the water rises in abundant 

 jets from the middle of little basins, pushing its aigrettes of 

 crystal into the thick foliage of the Oleanders which lock their 

 branches above. The mountain ripples with water ; . . . 

 always one hears close by the murmur of some rivulet which 

 is being led to feed a fountain or to moisten the roots of a 

 tree." Some writers say that this charming aqueduct was 

 bujlt as late as the time of Charles V. ; but even if this is the 

 case it represents a characteristically Moorish conception. The 

 Oleander which so delighted Gautier is, according toothers, not 

 a single tree, but a massive group ; its beauty, however, is 

 always spoken of in terms as enthusiastic as Gautier's own. It 

 is, indeed, one of the "sights" of Granada ; and still more fa- 

 mous is another feature in the gardens of theGeneralif, a group 

 of very large and ancient Cypresses — " Los Cupressos de la 

 Reyna Sultana" — which have a traditional connection with one 

 of the most sanguinary scenes in Spanish history. Every one 

 has heard of the "massacre of the Abencerages," a royal 

 Moorish race ; and it was precipitated by the fact, we are told, 

 that in their trysting-place, beneath one of these huge Cy- 

 presses, a Christian king had surprised his wife with a Moorish 

 prince. J 



Looking down from the gardens of the Generalif on one 

 side " the hill disappears under an ocean of verdure," while 

 on the other there rises at a little distance a burnt, bare moun- 

 tain throwing the more fertile scenes into incomparable relief. 



In speaking of a convent not far away, Gautier says that 

 the ancient Moorish garden had fallen into decay and wildness, 

 but that he found an alley paved with white marble, flanked 

 on each side by a long marble bench with a curved back, 

 overarched with Oleanders of enormous size, and showing at 

 the end of its long vista a magnificent panorama of the 

 Sierra Nevada Mountains. This verdurous archway, with its 

 marble mastabali, vividly recalls a description in the " Ara- 

 bian Nights" of the approach to Haroun-al-Raschid's "Gar- 

 den of Delight " at Bagdad ; and the fact is of interest as 

 showing the essential identity of Saracenic ideas in all the 

 widely separated lands where they found expression. 



If the great palace at Zahra, near Cordova, built about the 

 year 1000, still existed "we could afford to despise the Al- 

 hambra," # which represents a later and less admirable phase 

 of Moorish art. The enclosing walls of this palace measured 

 about 4,000 feet in one direction and 2,200 in the other. Like 

 most Oriental buildings of the kind it consisted of a great 

 number of apartments scattered about in gardens ; and so 

 rich were these gardens in marble kiosks, fountains and or- 

 naments of every kind, as well as in plants and flowers, that 

 "they may well have surpassed in cost and even in beauty" 

 the buildings themselves, despite the 4,300 columns, the 

 gilded roofs of cedar, the inlaid marble floors and the bril- 

 liant friezes of which the old historians tell. 



Warlike tribes from central Asia early appeared in the west 

 Asiatic provinces ruled by the Mahometan khalifs, Tartars 

 coming first and Turks or Mongols later. They embraced the 

 religion of the land and served for a time in its armies, but 

 growing in numbers, they gradually gained one district after 

 another for themselves. Before the middle of the thirteenth 

 century pretty much all the ancient kingdom of Persia was in 

 the hands of Ghengis Khan. His empire fell apart after his 

 death, but a century later was consolidated by Tamerlane; and 



*The name is properly Ginut al arif—" garden of (lie artist." The place was 

 created by the architect of the Alhambra, who afterward sold it to the Icing. 

 t "Voyage en Espagne." 



+ 1 venture to use the present tense in speaking of these trees, although I can 

 find no recent account of their condition, and writers early in our century describe 

 them as extremely old. 



§Fergusson : " History of Architecture." 



