March 6, 1S95.] 



Garden and Forest. 



91 



GARDEN AND FOREST, 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office : Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Profes3<->r C. S. Sargent. 



ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POST-OFFICE AT NEW YORK, N. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 1895. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Article ;— City Engineers and Public Parks 91 



Notes un North American OaUs. (Witti figures ) C. S. S. 92 



Foreign Correspondence: — London Letter tV. IVatson. 93 



Plant NoTE^ " 95 



Cultural Department :— Grapes in North-eastern Vermont. T. H. Hoslcins, lil.D. 96 



Cinerarias lVtllia?]t Scott, 97 



Nelumbiiims /^'. Tricker. 97 



A Few Annuals jf. N. Gerat-d 97 



Correspondence : — I'he Cultivation ot: Tea in America //. y. hhues. 98 



Flowerini^ House-plants for Early Winter Lor,t S. La Mance. 98 



Notes from Wellesley, Massachusetts, and its Vicinity IV. N. Craig gS 



Meetings of Societies ; — American Carnation Society 99 



R ecent Publications 99 



Notes 100 



Illustrations : — Quercus Toumevi, n. sp., Fig. 13 94 



Quercus Tounieyi, n. sp., Fig. 14 95 



City Engineers and Public Parks. 



THE new Mayor of this city, acting- under powers con- 

 ferred on him by the recent legislation, has removed 

 the entire park commission and appointed a new board. 

 The old board have forfeited public confidence in many 

 ways, but their most serious offense was that in the con- 

 struction of a pleasure drive along the shores of the Harlem 

 liiver they refused to consult with their landscape-architect, 

 and directed a city engineer to prepare plans and specifi- 

 cations and carry on the work. The people of this city 

 have come to understand that public grounds as surely 

 demand artistic treatment as public buildings do ; and that to 

 entrust the planning of a public park to one who is not 

 skilled in landscape design is as much an outrage against 

 civilization as it would be to erect a municipal building 

 without an architect. It is a pleasure to announce that 

 the new board has taken the earliest op|3ortunity to put the 

 speedway under the supervision of Mr Vaux, and to order 

 the engineer in charge of the work to report to him. This 

 elevates the skilled park-maker of the department to his 

 proper rank at the head of these works as their designer, 

 and places the engineer where he belongs, subordinate to 

 him and in charge of matters of construction under his 

 direction. 



Now, we may conceive of an engineer who has a feeling 

 for landscape, and who carries on his work with due regard 

 to its effect upon the scenery, but his education would 

 naturally give his mind another bias. When told to con- 

 struct a road between two points, nothing in his profes- 

 sional training leads him to make any effort for harmonizing 

 his work with the landscape. He often takes pride in 

 making it obtrusively distinct from nature, since in his 

 view, and this is in a manner a true view, it has a beauty 

 of its own which should be displayed. It is his business to 

 make a convenient road and build it as economically as 

 possible. What he aims at is to facilitate traffic between 

 two points, and he is not to be lured from his professional 

 duty by any appeals of natural beauty. Naturally, a man 

 whose entire training and practice has led him to ignore 

 the element of natural beauty, would be the last one to select 



for laying walks and drives in a park, for here this beauty 

 is of paramount importance. These roads and walks are 

 not for traffic ; they are not primarily for pleasure, driving 

 or walking, Isut they are prepared, as the shelters and seats 

 are, to enable the greatest number of people to einjoy the 

 beauties of the scenery with the greatest comfort. A park 

 road, therefore, which needlessly mars the landscape, de- 

 feats its fundamental purpose. Of course, we are now re- 

 ferring to park work in general, and not especially to the 

 Harlem .Speedway, in which the road is the essential ele- 

 ment. 



No doubt, the plans of the speedway will have to be 

 revised. If proper professional advice had been taken 

 before the work began, much of the picturesque slope above 

 its line would have been purchased by the city, so that it 

 could have been used to add to the dignity of this unique 

 water-side parkway, which, with proper treatment, could 

 be made one of the most beautiful of the city's possessions. 

 Certainly, on the sidewalk along the river provision must 

 be made for ample space and enough soil for a row of 

 trees, without which the road will be altogether common- 

 place and incomplete. To change the plans will cost the 

 city something, but self-satisfied ignorance, in responsible 

 places, is always expensive to the people. . It is to be 

 hoppd that the new Board will not shrink from the addi- 

 tional duty which the blunders of their predecessors have 

 thrown upon them, but will attack the work with intelli- 

 gence and resolution. 



We may add here that a large proportion of the cities of 

 this country have no professional landscape-designer, and 

 public parks and grounds are all under the charge of a 

 city engineer. Naturally, the result is painful to every 

 one who is qualified to pass judgment on a landscape. 

 Apart from the fact, as we have stated, that his training 

 has all been directed to give him skill in another direction, 

 there is another mistake which the city engineer almost 

 invariably falls into when he becomes a maker of parks. 

 This trouble, as tersely stated by Mr. John C. Olmsted, in 

 an article lately published in the Journal of the Associatio7i 

 0/ Engineerins; Societies, is, "that he is often disposed to 

 solve the problem presented by each element of a park 

 independently of every other." That is, he will lay out a 

 new piece of road one year, he will build a conservatory 

 or dig a pond the next, and he will carry on each fraction 

 of the work in a way which seems most convenient and 

 economical considered by itself without any compre- 

 hensive idea of the influence that these separate fea- 

 tures will have upon each other, or upon the park as a 

 whole. .Such work must, of necessity, be unrelated and 

 inconsistent. No city would think of erecting a muni- 

 cipal building without some architect to make a general 

 plan, or without knowing what the various apartments 

 are to be used for, or what sort of necessities are to 

 be provided for, and yet it would be quite as sensible 

 to start a city hall without any plan or to permit radical 

 and inharmonious changes in it while the building is in 

 course of construction as it is to fritter away money on 

 park construction in a fragmentary and disconnected way 

 ■ instead of working steailily toward the ideal of a compe- 

 tent designer. Wherever parks must be entrusted to a city 

 engineer, the man selected should be one of broad training 

 and liberal education, as well as technical knowledge 

 within the narrow limits of his profession. He ought to 

 understand not only that every park should have a plan 

 with consistent features and unity of motive, but he ought 

 to know enough to treat different ones so that each shall 

 supplement the detteiencies of the rest, so that all may 

 stand properly related in a comprehensive and harmonious 

 park system. Men \\\\o are endowed with the creative 

 faculty united with a genuine feeling for the a'sthetic and 

 poetic value of scenery are rare, indeed. When they ap- 

 pear, their best efforts are too often unappreciated and 

 neglected. In more than one city in the United States and 

 the Dominion of Canada designs of parks, prejKired by real 

 masters, have been nominally accepted, and then so warped 



