May 29, 1895.) 



Garden and Forest. 



21 1 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office: Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



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



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MAY 29, 1895. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Article: — The Debt of America to A. J. Downing 211 



The Chino Valley Experiment Station Charles H. Shinn. 212 



The Saguenay Region. — III Riv, E. J. HilL 213 



Plant Notes : — Rhododendron Vaseyii 214 



Cultural Department;— Orchard Notes from Western New York, 



Fyu/i'ssor L. H. Bailey. 215 



Hardy Cypripediums J. N, Gerard. 216 



Some Hardy Perennials Robert Caiiteron. 216 



Some Useful Greenhouse Climbers Uilliatn Scptt. 216 



Cyperus alternifolius W. N. Grai^, 217 



Native Violets G. IV. O. 217 



Correspondence : — The Hardiness of Pinus palustris Joseph Meehan. 217 



Notes from Wellesley T. D. Hatfield. 217 



Lewisia rediviva Charles H. Shinii 218 



Taxation for Municipal Improvements Luther G. Saml. 21S 



Recent Publications 21s 



Notes 220 



Illustration : — Blood-root, Sanguinaria Canadensis, Fig. 32 215 



The Debt of America to A. J. Downing. 



WE can hardly realize that it was not until some years 

 after the middle of the present century that any 

 American city had bes^un to make provisions for a public 

 park. New York already ranked among the world's great 

 cities, with a population of more than half a million souls and 

 rapidly increasing, and yet it had no grounds for public 

 recreation, no pleasant roads for riding and driving, no 

 opportunities for refreshing contact with natural scenery. 

 There are half a dozen cities in the country now whose 

 park area is measured by thousands of acres, and yet in 

 1 85 1, when Mayor Kingsland, of this city, had been spurred 

 to the point of proposing to devote as much as one hun- 

 dred and sixty acres of an unpopulated portion of Man- 

 hattan Island to public use as a pleasure ground, the proj- 

 ect was denounced by many eminent citizens of that time 

 as extravagantly large. The change of popular sentiment 

 between that day and this is certainly very marked, for 

 now not only have large areas been secured in the suburbs 

 to meet the future wants of the growing city, but our Leg- 

 islature has just passed an enactment compelling the destruc- 

 tion of entire blocks in the most thickly peopled parts of 

 the city in order to make space for gardens and play- 

 grounds. 



No one who has looked into the history of public parks 

 in American cities and the development of the public sen- 

 timent which brought them into being, will deny that the 

 strongest impulse which the movement received at the out- 

 set came from Andrew Jackson Downing. l\Ir. Downing 

 was born with a strong love of nature, and as his father 

 was a nurseryman he was brought up in a calling that in- 

 creased his interest in trees and planting. Reared almost 

 in sight of many of the old places on the Hudson vv'hich 

 had been planned and planted by Parmentier and others 

 of that older school, he learned while still young that a 

 landscape could be made impressive by the simplest and 

 most natural treatment. As he was to become our first 

 authoritative writer on the art of landscape-gardening, the 

 whole country has occasion to be thankful that he was in 

 this way led to adopt what was then called the English 

 style of gardening, in which, to quote his own words. 



"the spirit of nature, though softened and refined by art, 

 always furnished the essential charm, thus distinguish- 

 ing it from the French or Italian style, where one sees 

 the effects of art slightly assisted by nature.'' Downing 

 was a man of catholic views, but while he realized the fact 

 that vases and balustrades and studied symmetry might be 

 mingled with foliage enough to make a garden, yet his 

 ideal garden-scene was the primeval paradise, whose per- 

 vading beauty was found in the unstudied simplicity of 

 nature. With his natural taste refined by travel and by 

 study, Downing's Treatise on the Tlieory and Practice of 

 Landscape-Gardening, which was published in 1841, be- 

 came at once the accepted text-book of rural art in this 

 country, and this book, passing through many editions, and 

 his Rural Essays and other works, are still classics in this 

 branch of literature. It was his example and precept vi'hich 

 inspired such men as Henry Winthrop Sargent, and they 

 in turn kindled the enthusiasm of younger men, so that the 

 best private gardens in America to-day owe what is best 

 in them to his sound teachings. 



Downing was a graceful and forcible writer as well as 

 an artist of the highest intelligence, and as he had been 

 already recognized as an authority a timely series of 

 letters which he wrote for Tlie Horiiculturist on the sub- 

 ject of public parks in 1849 had a marked influence in 

 creating and molding popular sentiment in this direction. 

 These essays, which appeared month after month, and 

 were widely copied by the press, marshaled in a convinc- 

 ing vi'ay the arguments which were then fresh and original, 

 although many of them have since become a part of our 

 common knowledge and belief. He began by showing that 

 public parks were needed not only to educate the public 

 taste, but because everybody at some time felt the neces- 

 sity for this contact with nature. He showed that this 

 communion was not only a delight to people who were as 

 unsophisticated as children, but that the more thoughtful 

 and educated a community became the stronger grew the 

 passion for rural pleasures. When it was argued that the 

 people would not visit parks, even if artistic ones were 

 constructed, he pointed to the large cemeteries to prove 

 how eager all classes were to avail themselves of an oppor- 

 tunity for a visit to anything resembling a park. Mount 

 Auburn, Greenwood and Laurel Hill had been already 

 established for a quarter of a century, and that they had 

 come to be places of resort was certainly not because 

 they afforded opportunity for solemn meditation or for the 

 artistic value of the monuments reared within them. He 

 truly argued that it was because they contained bits of 

 forest-land, hills and dales, copses and glades that they at- 

 tracted throngs of visitors in cities which possessed no great 

 public gardens, and that if thirty thousand people would 

 visit Laurel Hill in one year many times that number 

 would visit a public park in a city like Philadelphia. He set 

 his argument on the highest plane at the very outset, and, 

 while recognizing the use of parks as helping to furnish air 

 and sunshine, he held that the fostering of the love of rural 

 beauty was quite as important an end, and that such a love 

 of nature helped to civilize and refine national character. 

 Mayor Kingsland's proposed park of a hundred and 

 sixty acres he pronounced altogether too scant, and argued 

 that five hundred acres between Thirty-ninth Street and 

 the Harlem was the smallest space that should be reserved 

 for the wants of the city, since no area less than this could 

 furnish a rural landscape or offer space enough for broad 

 reaches of park-land with a real feeling of the breadth and 

 beauty of green fields and the perfume and freshness of 

 nature. It was argued by some who assumed to represent 

 the laboring classes that the park would be monopolized 

 by those who ride in their carriages, and, on the other 

 hand, some of the wealthy and refined people of the city 

 complained that a park would certainly be usurped by 

 rowdies and low people. It is refreshing now to read' 

 Downing's replies to such objections. He stoutly asserted 

 that these social horrors were nothing but phantoms of the 

 imagination ; his faith was, as the event has proved, that 



