March 20, 1889.] 



Garden and Forest. 



135 



the barbarian or mere neglect had laid a hand upon them. 

 The origin of art has been found by some in that desire to 

 portray natural forms which led the cave-dweller to scratch 

 the outline of a reindeer or a mammoth on a piece of bone ; 

 by others in that appreciation of the beauty of abstract lines 

 and spots which the South Sea islander shows when he adorns 

 his paddles and hatchets with incised patterns; and by at least 

 one writer — Schiller — in the act of the savage woman who first 

 bound a handful of wild-flowers into a garland or nosegay. 

 But to find the origin of the art of gardening we cannot look 

 back to savage times. Nor can we wisely conceive of it as 

 practiced in the very earliest, most rudimentary periods of 

 civilization. It must have followed and at first strictly de- 

 pended upon the art of architecture. Not until men had built 

 themselves solid dwellings and places of worship of some 

 pretensions can gardens for the delighting of the eye have 

 been designed. The fact may seem a strange one at first 

 sight if we have been taught by the " romantic " school of 

 thinkers, with Rousseau at their head, to picture a primitive 

 civilization as one in which man lived "close to the bosom of 

 nature " and loved her beauties far more than those which 

 were due to his own efforts. Nevertheless, it is a fact in enfire 

 accord with all that we really know, and all that we can sensi- 

 bly imagine, of a primitive society. In such a society nature 

 must always have been regarded hot as the friend, comforter 

 and restorer of man, but as his enemy to be thwarted and 

 subdued; and a different conception could notarise until man 

 felt himself her master. What he first wanted was to get pro- 

 tection from the rigor of her elements, the attacks of her wild 

 beasts, and the menaces of other men ; and his first artistic 

 efforts must have been to adorn his walls and roofs and to 

 beautify his own person and the utensils .and weapons he 

 employed. The artistic impulse means the wish to make 

 something individual — to put a fragment of the artist's self 

 into the result; and it can have found an outlet in gardening 

 only after men had grown well accustomed to living in settled 

 habitations, and had lost their first intimate familiarity with 

 nature in her wild estate. 



Some authors have found the origin of gardens in the tree- 

 worship of primitive ages. When fetishes were the gods, 

 trees were even more universally adored than serpents, al- 

 though, indeed — as the story of Eden is enough to prove — the 

 two cults often went hand in hand; and when this stage had 

 passed and abstract deities were worshipped, the earlier phase 

 of development was perpetuated in the "sacred grove" which 

 surrounded every temple in every ancient land. Other writers 

 have imagined that the first gardens were merely homes 

 for useful plants — edible vegetables, niedicinal and incense- 

 producing herbs. These the Nomad tribes carried about with 

 them, and were forced to grow in protecting enclosures. Un- 

 doubtedly much in the development of gardening art was 

 due to both these sources. But it is only when a desire for 

 beauty of general effect makes itself clearly felt that art is born. 

 And gardening, we may feel sure, had not reached this point 

 until after architecture had made considerable strides. 



Of course many early poets, and among them the poets of 

 Judea, have described beautiful gardens as existing before 

 structures of any kind. But, however early they may have 

 lived, the mere fact that their words have come down to us 

 implies a long-developed civilization; and the conditions and 

 tastes they express are, I need hardly explain, those of their 

 own period, not of the mythical period they profess to portray. 

 When men were able to record themselves in perfected forms 

 of speech they had long left the bosom of wild nature, had 

 lost their first fear of natural forces and first familiarity with 

 natural beauties, and were therefore in a position to appreci- 

 ate the charms of the outer world and to long for spots in 

 which they could enjoy them. We cannot believe that the 

 "first man" lived in a garden, but it is entirely natural that 

 when poets began to record their conception of primeval hap- 

 piness they should have thus imagined. Bacon says that 

 " when ages grow to civility and elegance, men come to build 

 stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the 

 greater perfection." And I may add that when men first came 

 to work in art they must have begun to build before they began 

 to garden, because a more rudimentary need was thus gratified, 

 and a better outlet for the artistic impulse was thus afforded. 

 New York. • M. G. Van Rotsselaer. 



The middle-grounds and distances are the first subject of 

 study for the artist in landscape. The beauties and deformi- 

 ties, the pleasing and unpleasing objects, which the more dis- 

 tant parts of the site and the surrounding country exhibit, or 

 are capable of exhibiting, to the house or other principal place 

 of view — these are his unalterable data. 



Planting and Rtiral Ornament, I'jgd. 



Foreign Correspondence. 



London Letter. 



T HAVE lately been asked by a friend in America to inform 

 -■• him what species of Palms would probably thrive in the open 

 air in the Southern States; and as this is a subject likely to in- 

 terest many readers of Garden and Forest, I will reply 

 through the medium of its pages. 



At the outset I must state that, except at Kew, very few of 

 the hardier kinds of Palms are cultivated in England, although 

 recently some notice of the most ornamental of these has been 

 taken by our horticultural journals. So far as I can ascertain, 

 the same statement applies to such favored localities as the 

 south of France, Italy, etc., where the conditions which favor 

 the out-door cultivation of many extra-tropical, and even trop- 

 ical, species of Palms are almost perfect. There are a few 

 exceptions to this as in the garden of Mr. Hanbury, at Mentone, 

 and in that of the late M. Dognin, at the Villa- Valetta, Cannes. 

 We are too apt to consider that all plants which are found in 

 tropical countries must require stove-treatment. It took many 

 years in the earlier stages of Orchid culdvafion in England to 

 convince gardeners that Orchids might come from the tropics 

 of the old or new world and yet be what are termed "cool" 

 subjects. I remember in my apprenticeship days a fairly 

 large collection of these plants, which included Odontoglos- 

 sums, Cattleyas, Masdevallias and Dendrobiums, every one of 

 which were grown in a hot, moist stove ; and it is not very 

 many years since we were not allowed to carry an Orchid from 

 one house to another without first enfolding it in cotton-wool. 

 Ignorance of the condifions under which new introductions are 

 found wild often cause one to make gross blunders in their 

 cultivation. It is only three years since we received, for the 

 first time, at Kew some handsome stems of one of the noblest 

 of all tree Ferns, namely, Alsnphilacrinita of Ceylon — and not 

 knowing more than that this species is a native of that island, 

 we treated them as stove-plants. They grew rapidly, but the 

 fronds died almost before maturing. Dr. Trimen, the Director 

 of the Botanic Gardens at Ceylon, happened to visit Kew in 

 time to save these plants for us. They grow only in the moun- 

 tains, so that on removing the stems to our large temperate- 

 house they soon recovered. Now they are magnificent speci- 

 mens. Palms are not so delicate as tree Ferns, and many of 

 them thrive in temperatures of considerable range. Cliam- 

 CErops humilis and C. excelsa {Forti{}iei)a.xe examples of this, for 

 they are perfectly healthy in a stove, quite as healthy in a 

 green-house, and the latter species does very well out-of-doors 

 in the neighborhood of London. The varying power of plants 

 from warm climates to resist cold is often very remarkable. 

 The Kniphofias and Phygelius Capensis occur to me just now 

 as instances. Both are natives of the Cape, where they rarely, 

 if ever, are frozen, yet in England they bear 20° of frost with 

 impunity, whilst many plants which are their companions in a 

 wild state succumb to the first frost here. 



And now to the subject of Palms for temperate climates. In 

 the Kew collection the following are perfectly happy in a house 

 where the temperature is approximately the same as that in 

 the open air all through the year, except that in severe weather 

 it is never allowed to fall below 40° : 



Jubcea spectabilis, the Chilian Wine Palm, a noble plant, 

 with an enormous bottle-shaped stem and a massive head of 

 large, dark green, pinnate foliage ; Chamcerops humilis, C. 

 excelsa and C. Martiana, the two first well-known Fan Palms, 

 with constitutions like nails, the last similar in leaf to C. ex- 

 celsa; Livistona [Corypha) australis, a splendid Palm for a tem- 

 perate climate, and also a first-rate tropical plant ; L. Chinensis 

 {Latania Borbonica); Areca (^Kentia) Baiieri and A. sapida, the 

 former a truly noble Palm, with very strong, large, curved, 

 pinnate leaves ; A. monostachya, now called Bacularia, or the 

 walking-stick Palm, a small Australian species, with stems 

 one inch in diameter, five feet high, and a graceful head 

 of irregularly pinnate foliage, and here rarely out of flower ; 

 Washingtoniafilifera and W. robnsta, both natives of southern 

 California, and probably better known in America than here. 

 These last grow rapidly in our coolest houses, preferring the 

 border to pots, and their handsome leaves are greatly admired. 

 W. robnsta I have seen, in the famous collection formed by Herr 

 Wendland at Hanover, with leaves six feet across, as stout as 

 iron, with large brown teeth on the petiole, and the long, white 

 filaments hanging from the blade-like silken threads. There 

 is no Palm to sin^pass this for a temperate climate. In Eng- 

 land it is scarcely known. All the Braheas are best here when 

 grown in the cool-houses. 



Two other Palms, generally known as Braheas, namely, 

 Erythea armata and E. editlis, both natives of Mexico and both 



