422 



Garden and Forest. 



[September 4, 1889. 



denuded hills. Under such conditions the question of a 

 greater or less quantity of water dissipated by forest evap- 

 oration is not important. The forests are an indispensable 

 factor in a system of irrigation by mountain streams. 



Major Powell adds that in low mountain and hilly regions 

 of humid lands, forests about the sources of the streams 

 are of advantage, because they " serve to hold back the 

 water and thus equalize the flow through the year and 

 greatly mitigate the floods." That is a very good statement 

 of an important truth, and the forests will perform this 

 oflice just the same whether the precipitation is chiefly 

 snow or not, and for any kind of country, humid or arid, 

 where forests can grow. The evil, difficulty and danger of 

 this whole matter are in the fact that the disastrous changes 

 which result from the destruction of mountain forests do 

 not take place immediately, or with the spectacular sudden- 

 ness of scene-shifting on the stage. When the country is 

 obliged to recognize the fatal and irretrievable con- 

 sequences of the extinction of the mountain forests of Cali- 

 fornia and Colorado, the men who are now clamoring for 

 their destruction will have gone out of sight, and we shall 

 all be silent. But a civilized nation should be capable of 

 foresight, of learning without the lessons of experiments so 

 disastrous and fatal. It is matter of regret that Major 

 Powell and the admirable young men associated with him 

 are not more vitally interested in the preservation of these 

 important forests. Their indifference gives aid and com- 

 fort to the enemies of their own work, and of our national 

 civilization. 



The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch. 

 IX. — Greece. 



'I^'HE history of the few nations which we have already passed 

 ^ in review is enough to show that a stronger or weaker 

 feeling for natural beauty was never the only cause which 

 affected the development of gardening art. The literature of 

 the Jews, for instance, proves tliat they had an exceptionally 

 deep and poetic feeling for the beauty, grandeur and mystery 

 "of the inanimate world; but their gift for art was small, ahd 

 they were not wealthy or addicted to luxurious living. In con- 

 sequence, their use of gardens was comparatively restricted, 

 while the Phoenicians, who were akin to them in lack of artistic 

 capability, and were doubtless as inferior in a sentiment for 

 nature as we know them to have been in moral intensity, prac- 

 ticed gardening more generally, because they were a richer 

 and more pleasure-loving people. 



As I tried to show in my last chapter, the Greek was not so 

 devoid of a love for the beauties of nature as is commonly 

 said. He may well have loved it in an equally poetic and an 

 even purer way than the Persian, and he was certainly the 

 superior of the Roman in this I'espect. If, then, his gardens 

 were less extensive than those of Persia and of Rome, we must 

 look elsewhere for the reason. In this case, of course, it can- 

 not be found in artistic inaptitude. It lay partly in the fact that 

 the Greeks were not a rich people and they were not ruled by 

 kings and courtiers; but chiefly it lay in the fact that above all 

 other men they were the exponents of action — of the constant, 

 vigorous exercise of body and mind. The game of politics 

 was their diversion, not hunting or feasting as with the 

 Persians); the hippodrome, the theatre and the gymnasium 

 were their favorite refuges from care, not the country home 

 which so strongly attracted the Roman of the Augustan Age. 



The Greeks got their first impulse towards the creation of 

 gardens from Persia. In the early periods of their existence 

 they had neither villa gardens nor stately city sciuares. Do- 

 mestic life in the modern sense hardly existed, nor social life 

 in the Persian sense; men met in public to exercise or discuss, 

 not to enjoy themselves in idleness, and they went to their 

 homes for scarcely more than to eat and sleep. Of course 

 there were sacred groves around their temples, but these — the 

 common property of all ancient nations — were religious, not 

 artisdc, in their origin. Even such a picture as Homer paints 

 when he makes Nausicaa say to Odysseus that he will 

 "A never-felled grove find, that poplars crown, 

 To Pallas sacred, where a fountain flows; 

 And round about the grove a meadow grows 

 In which my father holds a manor-house. 

 Decked all with orchards, green and odorous, 

 As far from town as one may hear a shout,"* 



♦Chapman's translation. 



• — even so simple a picture as this can hardly have had its pro- 

 totype in Greece when Homer wrote. He must have seen 

 such homes on the Ionian coast, where Persian influence 

 worked towards beauty and luxury at a much earlier day than 

 in the peninsula itself. And all his other pictures of gardens 

 suggest little more than useful plantations — orchards, vine- 

 yards and vegetable gardens.! 



Cimon, we are expressly told by Plutarch, was the first who 

 adorned Athens with gardens, and the influence of Persia was 

 very potent in his day. He "first embellished the upper city 

 with those fine and ornamental places of exercise and resort" 

 which the Athenians "afterwards so much frequented and 

 delighted in. He set the market-place with Plane-trees, and 

 the Academy, which was before a have, dry and dirty spot, he 

 converted into a well- watered grove, with shady alleys to walk 

 in and open courses for races." Doubtless the state in which 

 Cimon found the Academy was the result of the Persian inva- 

 sion; it must have been an agreeable spot when the Pisistra- 

 tidse were in power. But Plutarch's words suffice, at all events, 

 to show that Cimon did more than had been done previous to 

 his time. As described in later years, the Academy — which 

 lay in the suburb Ceramicos — was surrounded by a wall and 

 contained marble canals, fountains, long alleys, chiefly of 

 Plane-trees, and narrower walks, called "philosophers' walks," 

 embosomed in shrubbery, all thickly intermingled with archi- 

 tectural and sculptural forms. In addition to the main build- 

 ings, there were small temples and altars, and statues without 

 nunrber; colonnades, pavilions, and isolated seats for repose; 

 and a long, oval, marble-bordered race-course. 



On the north bank of the Ilyssus was another similar resort, 

 the Lyceum, with an exceptionally fine colonnade of marble 

 decorated with paintings. Here Aristotle taught, as Plato had 

 taught at the Academy. And at a thii^d "gymnasium," called 

 the Cynosarges, laid out for the use of half-Athenians and for- 

 eigners, Antisthenes taught in later days, and from its name, 

 most likely, his scholars got their name of "Cynics." J 



Such were the places which, for the Athenian, represented 

 the splendid palace-gardens and hunting-parks of the Persian. 

 Beautiful they were, of coui'se, but with an architectonic rather 

 than a natural charm — scarcely gardens at all in the modern 

 sense, for by no means places for repose and contemplation. 

 Much the same was the magnificent "sacred grove" called 

 Altis which surrounded the temple at Olynqjia — a "forest of 

 bronze and marl.)le statues," a veritable city of lovely buildings, 

 embosomed in trees and set about with flowering plants. Car- 

 thage, too, had her public gardens, where marble and foliage 

 met on equal terms; and even in rigorous Sparta the young 

 men exercised beneath the shade of gigantic Planes. 



The form which the private dwelling assumed in the cities 

 of Greece is too well known to need description. Even in early 

 times, no doubt, its courts were planted or adorned with flow- 

 ering odorous shrubs in pots. Fruit and vegetable gardens 

 must also have been commonly attached to dwellings of any 

 pretension, and perhaps small flower gardens for the delight 

 of the secluded wives. But only when in the age of Pericles 

 power and wealth came in unprecedented measure to Athens 

 do we read of pleasure-gardens in any wider sense. Domestic 

 life, as we understand the term, still hardly existed; but the 

 wealthy courtesans who naet the men on equal terms, social 

 and intellectual, possessed beautiful gardens in which much 

 of their life was passed; and the famous "symposia" were 

 usually held in gardens or in open colonnades facing a ver- 

 durous, shadowy enclosure. Now, too, we hear of gardens 

 on the flat rgofs, and of the importation of exotic plants to be 

 cultivated in wooden boxes or woven baskets, or even in vases 

 of silver, or of clay made still more precious by the touch of 

 art. Gradually a line of villas with gardens behind them 

 stretched out of the city almost as far as Eleusis'; and, it is said, 

 few hedges or walls separated one property from another, but 

 the prospect was everywhere open and harmonious. The 

 garden of Phryne is mentioned with especial praise, and Epi- 

 curus possessed a famous one near the Academy, where, in a 

 favorable environment, he instructed his scholars in the phil- 

 osophical system which bears his name. Pliny, indeed, says 

 that "Epicurus, that connoisseur in the enjoyments of a life of 

 ease, was the first to lay out a garden at Athens; up to his time 

 it had never been thought of to dwell in the country in the 

 middle of the town." ,, ^ ,^ 



New York. ^. 0-. l^an Rensselaer. 



t"Of the sjardens of Hesperides we know nothin<^ sing;ular but some golden 

 apples. Of Alclnous, his pjarden, we read nothing beyond figgs, apples and olives. 

 The gardens of Adonis were so empty ttiat they afforded pro\'erbiaI expression, 

 and the principal part thereof was empty spaces with herbs and flowers in pots." — 

 Sir Thomas Brmvne, 



I Vitruvius's famous restoration on paper of the Athenian Academy cannot be 

 accepted aa correct. 



