3 66 



Garden and Forest. 



[JULY 30, 1890. 



now exploring the 'land and preparing to pounce upon it 

 in the expectation that it is about to be opened for entry. 



It .seems that live years ago several townships in this 

 county were withdrawn from entry, on account of alleged 

 fraudulent practices, and it has been understood that they 

 would not be restored until after official examination into the 

 character of the surveys. It was believed, therefore, that 

 if the Department changed its decision ample public notice 

 would be given. It has turned out, however, that some of 

 the Sequoia lands have been suddenly restored, and were 

 at once secured by speculators and lumbermen, who 

 seemed to have been prepared for the occasion by some 

 private notification. The presence of locators in the tract 

 mentioned naturally arouses the suspicion that the last re- 

 maining grove is doomed to the fate of all the others. 



May we not hope that Secretary Noble will interpose to 

 prevent such a disaster? Surely the Government should 

 hesitate before surrendering to destruction this last cluster 

 of these world-famous trees. If it ever is a duty of civil- 

 ized society to preserve for posterity objects of natural 

 beauty or grandeur, nothing more worthy of such protec- 

 tion than these giant trees can be named. They ought to 

 remain the property of the nation forever. 



The Gardens of the Fountain at Nimes. "* 



T^EW gardens in Europe equal in beauty those at Nimes, which 

 -*- the people call simply La Fontaine, considering, it seems, 

 the rest of the enclosure a mere appanage of the fountain 

 itself. Few gardens, even in Italy, have greater historic inter- 

 est, and none in any land surpass them in individuality or in 

 the happy combination of formal and natural elements. Their 

 earliest features date from before the time of Christ; their 

 latest were created in our own century. Yet all now blend in 

 an enchanting harmony of happily managed contrasts. 



The so-called fountain is really a great spring filling a basin 

 seventy-five feet in diameter and twenty-five feet in depth, in 

 the natural rock on a steep hill-side, and fed from natural un- 

 derground reservoirs, some of which are so distant that the 

 waters will suddenly surge up in it at times when no rain has 

 fallen at Nimes. To its existence was due the existence of the 

 city. Around it in Celtic times grew up a small town called 

 Nemoz, whose inhabitants naturally held its plenteous waters 

 sacred. Under Roman rule and the Latinized name of 

 Nemausus this grew to a place of first importance. The 

 fountain was nearer the centre of the Roman than of the mod- 

 ern city, and was utilized in baths which necessitated a group 

 of beautiful buildings, some relics of which still survive. 



The baths proper and most of the accessory structures were 

 probably destroyed in the invasion of the Visigoths in the fifth 

 century; and they or the quick-succeeding Franks broke the 

 dikes which had regulated the flow of the waters and caused 

 them to seek a new channel down the hill-side. But the sacred 

 edifice (its ruins are now popularly called the Temple of Diana), 

 which stood against the hill-side, not far from the spring, was 

 saved and became the church of a house of nuns upon 

 which, in 991, the fountain and the adjacent lands had been 

 bestowed. It was called the Abbaye de St.-Saiivenr-de-la-Font, 

 and many were the disputes between its inmates and the 

 townsfolk, as the centuries rolled by, over the possession of 

 the spring and of the mills turned by its escaping waters, as well 

 as over the right to use certain meadows adjoining the canal 

 as a place of public promenade. 



A settlement was made in favor of the town in 1352, but 

 disputes still went on with regard to the rights of the nuns 

 over the fountain itself and the canal, until the monastery was 

 razed, in 1563, the nuns were dispersed, and, in the religious 

 conflicts of the following year, it was reduced to the ruinous, 

 but picturesque, state in which we now see it. 



For generations after, the spring was constantly discussed, 

 with a view to increasing and regulating its flow, and thus 

 preventing that almost total drying up which, in late summer, 

 brought the local industries to a stand-still. Trees were 

 planted, and there was much digging among the old baths, 

 but little was accomplished until 1744, when Jacques Philippe 

 Marechal, Director of Fortifications for the Province of Lan- 



*The historical facts in this sketch have been gathered from Monsieur L. Bou- 

 coiran's Monographic de la Fontaine de Nimes, published in 1S59. As the motto of 

 his little book he quotes these lines from Ausonius: 



Divona Celtarum lingua fons addite divis 

 Non Aponus potu, vitrea non luce Nemausus 

 Purior. 



gucdoc, presented a plan which was accepted, and associated 

 with himself in its execution an architect of Nimes named 

 Darclailhon, whose scheme had seemed to him the best of the 

 preceding ones. The work was at once begun, and was fin- 

 ished in nine years at a cost of about 1,000,000 francs. 



Let us sec now how the gardens look to-day. The main 

 approach is through a wide boulevard, planted with double 

 rows of trees on either side, which brings us to the great iron 

 gates seen in the distance in our'picture (see page 371). Hence 

 to right and left the eye follows broad tree-bordered canals, 

 widening into many-angled basins at the two corners of the 

 garden, and thence to the right, leading the waters of the dis- 

 tant spring down a wide shady street, which really deserves 

 the name of Quai de la Fontaine. Entering the gates we are 

 in a large rectangular space, through which run quadruple 

 lines of ancient trees, leading the eye to the bath as the cen- 

 tral feature of the garden. Other avenues surround the space; 

 beyond them runs the canal and still more avenues. The 

 canal is broken in its circuit of this space only by the entrance 

 path at the gateway, and opposite by two bridge-like paths 

 between which it is continued as a square basin. The 

 avenue-trees are chiefly Lindens and Horse-chestnuts. As 

 we follow the bridge-like paths, we see in front of us — in the 

 centre of a wide expanse of gravel still planted with shady 

 avenues — the modernized remains of the baths, which our 

 illustration shows from the opposite point of view. They 

 consist simply of a great square, sunken and flooded basin, 

 surrounded by a colonnade, behind which lie small rooms or 

 cells, and in the centre of which rises an island, where many 

 changes were made, notably those in the centre of the picture, 

 where the angle vases and centre group take the place of in- 

 teresting Roman relics. Of course, all the balustrades and 

 other vases, which add so much to the beauty of the arrange- 

 ment, are works of Marshal's time, indeed, the whole thing 

 is so distinctly Rococo in its general effect and in almost all its 

 details that it is hard to believe any part of it antedates the age of 

 Louis Quinze. The island is a mass of blossoming shrubs, 

 largely broad-leaved evergreens, amid which, in late July, great 

 sprays of Pink Oleander were blazing — all forming the most 

 effective of backgrounds for the graceful, if somewhat affected, 

 work of the Rococo sculptor. 



The art with which the vicinity of the basin is treated will be 

 clearly appreciated from the picture and the fine contrasts of 

 the snowy balustrades with the thick masses of foliage. The 

 canal in the foreground leads diagonally for a short distance 

 to the spring, whose great basin is bordered in a similar way 

 so that its natural character is scarcely apparent. But all this 

 is only a small part of the garden. To the left, if we stand as 

 in the picture, behind the trees in the middle distance, is a 

 broad triangular graveled space, thickly shaded by rows of 

 Lindens, Horse-chestnuts and Pianes, with Orange-trees be- 

 tween them in boxes gayly striped with yellow and green. 

 Closer at hand the hill-sides rise all around us; they are low on 

 our right, sheltering the Temple of Diana near the spring; on our 

 left, beyond a broad open space and a strip of lawn, they rise 

 almost perpendicularly as a wall of rock about fifty feet in 

 height; and behind us they are again as high, and are backed 

 in their turn by the steep and lofty hill called Mont Cavalier, 

 on whose summit stands the ancient Tour Magne. 



Here we begin to see how nature has been blended with art 

 in this garden. The hill near the temple is covered with a 

 seemingly natural growth of trees, chiefly Pines. Opposite, the 

 perpendicular rock is clothed with the richest masses of free- 

 growing vines and creepers. Great spiky Agaves and stiff 

 Palms grow from the crevices and ledges through the mats 

 of swaying foliage, making a delightful picture. Nothing 

 could be finer than this cliff as a back for the diagonal per- 

 spective of avenues and balustrades, if the little lawn at its foot 

 were not disfigured by an ugly statue of a local poet and by 

 formal flower-beds of garish hue, perhaps the only note of bad 

 taste to be found in the whole garden. 



It would not have been well, however, to continue the 

 naturalistic treatment adopted for the sides of this little amphi- 

 theatre across its back. Here something architectural was 

 needed to carry on the scheme adopted in the centre, and, 

 moreover, some dignified approach to the Mont Cavalier; so 

 here we have a stately terraced stairway of marble rising to a 

 broad balustraded upper terrace, from which we look over the 

 whole lower garden, and again admire the vine-wreathed cliff, 

 and see that its top (with which we are now on a level) is 

 planted with forest-trees and laid out with winding walks. 



So, too, is the whole steep, lofty side of the Mont Cavalier 

 behind us. At the beginning of our century it was a burnt 

 bare cone, its poor soil bearing only scattered tufts of grass 

 and stunted shrubs. About 1820, thanks to the energy of the 



