242 



Garden and Forest. 



[May 22, 1889. 



virgin forest — tell of years or of centuries of struggle, in 

 which hundreds of weaker individuals may have perished 

 that one giant might survive. Eut man can intervene, and 

 by judicious and systematic thinning help the strong to 

 destroy the weak more quickly and with less expenditure 

 of vital force. Thick planting is but following the rule of 

 nature, and thinning is only helping nature do what she 

 does herself too slowly, and therefore too expensively. 

 This is why trees in a plantation intended for ornament, 

 like those in a park or pleasure-ground, should be planted 

 thickly at first, and why they should then be systematically 

 thinned from time to time ; and it is because this system- 

 atic thinning is altogether neglected, or put off until the 

 trees are ruined for any purpose of ornament, that it is so 

 rare to find a really fine tree in any public place or private 

 grounds. Of the implements required to produce a fine 

 tree the axe is certainly the first and most important. 



The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch. — V. 

 Judea and Phoenicia. 



ON the whole we may conclude that while gardens were 

 known and prized in Judea, they played no such conspic- 

 uous part in royal and priestly life as they did in most 

 Oriental countries, while the private citizen — usually devoted 

 to agriculture and devoid of wealth — rarely, if ever, created 

 them on an extensive scale. Moreover, we can divine that the 

 royal gardens themselves were primarily places for the propa- 

 gation of fruit-trees and other useful plants! Even the poetical 

 imagery of the Bible reveals this fact, speaking much more of 

 fruits, sweet smelling herbs and serviceable trees than of plants 

 prized for their beauty or for the luxury of the shade they gave. 

 Flowers were not required in religious ceremonials, but in- 

 cense was, and odoriferous herbs are constantly referred to in 

 the Scriptures, sometimes as very precious things. A "balsam 

 garden" at Jericho was important enough to be noticed by 

 Strabo, but in reading authors of his time we must not forget 

 the great influence which Greek and Roman conquest had 

 then had upon the world. Of course, flowers cannot have been 

 neglected in Judea — there is no civilized time or country when 

 this has been the case. But their role was private, not public ; 

 and plants are only mentioned in connection with the temple 

 in those simulated forms of Pomegranates, Palms and " flowers 

 of Lilies," which entered into its carven decoration. So learned 

 and enterprising a king as Solomon may well have filled his gar- 

 dens with exotics obtained from his constant helpers, the trav- 

 eling and trading Phoenicians, and the mention of planting 

 " strange slips," in Isaiah xvii. ri, seems to indicate that they 

 were especially valued. The Levitical law against the propa- 

 gation of mixed species must, however, have stood in the way 

 of such horticultural operations as have enriched the garden 

 flora of modern peoples. 



The Jews had a peculiarly keen sense for the beauty and 

 grandeur of natural scenery and of wild-growing forms of veg- 

 etation. Why, then, were their gardens less numerous and 

 important than those of other Oriental nations? Partly, as I 

 have said, because of their relative poverty and simple ways 

 of life, but partly because, while the Egypdans, for example, 

 were artists by nature, the Hebrews were not. The same 

 difference which shows in the history of gardening shows in 

 that of other forms of art. Art of every kind was vitally essen- 

 tial to the religious ceremonials of Egypt, but it played a minor 

 part in Judea, and in many of its developments was absolutely 

 outlawed. It was proscribed as a spring of spiritual danger. 

 But it would hardly have been proscribed for this or any 

 other reason among a people endowed by nature with a 

 strongly artistic temperament. The Jews were a highly imagi- 

 native race, but their imagination concerned itself most of all 

 with moral and spiritual things, least of all with the things of 

 art. 



The Phoenicians were likewise a Semitic people, and there- 

 fore devoid of that instinct for the arts of design which covered 

 Egypt, Assyria and Greece with splendid monuments. But, 

 unlike the Jews, they were rich, luxurious, and given to sump- 

 tuous and sensual religious rites. A nation of traders and 

 travelers by land and sea, wealth flowed freely into private 

 hands and was as freely spent for private pleasure, while the 

 native lack of artistic ideas was made good by perpetual bor- 

 rowings. This we know from the works in the minor arts 

 which have come down to us from the Phcenicians, and their 

 technical experience is proved by the familiar fact that Solo- 

 mon sent for Tyrian artificers to build his temple and his 



palace. The highest merit of the Phoenicians in their own day 

 must have seemed their manual skill ; to-day it seems the part 

 they played in carrying the works and the ideas of one country 

 to another and thus developing the rudimentary gifts of their 

 less advanced neighbors. They originated nothing, unless it 

 be certain forms of decoration which, many ages later, 

 bloomed into new and richer life under the hand of Byzantine 

 artists. But they were the world's carriers — the transmitters 

 and perpetuators of much that without their help would have 

 perished where it was born. 



Gardening was widely and successfully practiced in Phce- 

 nicia. The country was merely a narrow strip of land ; but its 

 soil was fertile, and the needs of a dense and wealthy popula- 

 tion incited to careful culture. Ezekiel implies as much when 

 he cries to the King of Tyre, "Thou hast been in Eden, the 

 garden of God," and we know that hydraulic engineering, 

 upon which agriculture and horticulture so largely depend in 

 southern coimtries, was elaborated on an extensive scale in all 

 parts of Phcenicia and its colonies. 



The chief towns of the mother-country were isolated, i^ocky 

 citadels, where the merchants plied their trade and gathered 

 for defense in times of war. Here the poorer citizens lived in 

 crowded, many-storied streets ; but the rich had their homes 

 in the suburbs, in countless villas surrounded by beautiful 

 grounds. It is easy to imagine what these villa-gardens were. 

 In this art, as in every other, the Phcenician must have bor- 

 rowed from the Egyptian and Assyrian, and laid out his gar- 

 dens in a formal way. So eminently practical a people were 

 doubtless enterprising and successful horticulturists; and 

 trading from far beyond the Pillars of Hercules to the shores 

 of the Indian Ocean, and eagerly laying hands on everything 

 new, beautiful or curious which came in their way, they must 

 have filled their pleasure-gardens with a multitude of exotic 

 plants. 



Carthage, the greatest of Phcenician colonies, surpassed in 

 wealth and splendor any city of the motherland; and we know 

 that, like these, it was encircled by villas with gardens, which ex- 

 tensive works of irrigation kept fresh and green. The Roman 

 conquerors were impressed with the beauty of tliese Cartha- 

 ginian gardens, and it is said that some of them were so long 

 preserved that they could be renewed and improved in very 

 niuch later times by the new race of conquerors from Arabia. 

 Of course the same taste that expressed itself in Carthage must 

 have been displayed in all the colonies of Phoenicia, and we 

 may picture the shores of the Mediterranean, even before the 

 extension of the Roman power, dotted with garden-encircled 

 villas, embowered in beautiful plants gathered from many 

 foreign lands. 



The sensual religion of Phoenicia — in which the gross wor- 

 ship of Astarte held a prominent place — demanded numerous 

 tenqjles ; wherever there was a temple in the ancient world 

 there was a " sacred grove," and we can hardly conceive such 

 a grove without some characteristics, in arrangement and ac- 

 cessories, which woidd entitle it to rank among gardens. The 

 Phrjcnician temple-garden, however, has perished from men's 

 knowledge as entirely as the building which it enshrined. 



All these gardens, at least in Phoenicia itself, must have been 

 comparatively small. There was no room in such crowded 

 suburbs for large demesnes, and palace-gardens cannot have 

 been very conspicuous in a country which consisted of a num- 

 ber of almost independent towns, held loosely together by com- 

 mercial interests, but ruled by no great potentate such as those 

 who sat at Babylon, Nineveh and Susa. Nor in a community 

 of busy traders, where even the king was a merchant like his 

 subjects, can there have been a demand — even had there been 

 a place — for those wide hunting-parks which the Persians so 

 dearly loved. In Carthage the royal gardens may have been 

 more extensive, but a people so inartistic as to have produced 

 neither great architects, great sculptors nor great writers has 

 naturally left few traces of itself on history's page. It is not 

 because Carthage was conquered and ruined by the Romans 

 that we know so little about her. Nineveh, too, was ruined, 

 and Jerusalein. But the buried lithic records of the one and the 

 magnificent literature of the other have preserved their mem- 

 ory green. 



" All passes — Art alone 

 Enduring stays to us ; 

 The bust outlasts the throne. 

 The coin, Tiberius." 



Perhaps when the nations of to-day have perished, some- 

 thing besides their art will remain — the prosaic printing-press 

 turns out its reports in quantities which Time itself may de- 

 spair of destroying ; but literally nothing remains of ancient 

 nations except their art. No ancient land in which art — in 



