298 



Garden and Forest. 



(■Number 226. 



where claims of private owners were everywhere to be ad- 

 justed before anylliing' could be doue, tliis great barrier has 

 been overcome satisfactorily to all. In this country, where so 

 much of the lower grade of agricultural land is owned by the 

 government, there should be great hesitancy in making a be- 

 ginning, beyond the caution necessary to make sure that the 

 coiu-sc l)e tlie right one. In Europe the great difficulty has 

 been just as liere, the prejudice against anything but the free 

 use of public property and against interference of the govern- 

 ment in the business of individuals. But they have, first in 

 the moinitains where the general welfare most plainly demand- 

 ed it, by condemnatory pi'oceedings, and later, on the poorest 

 lowlands, where the direct ])rofits of forestry are gi'ealer than 

 those of agriculture, by bounties to the owners of the land, 

 made such progress during the past century that the wisdom 

 of the movement is plainly shown, and all men who have the 

 chance to know, combined with a desire for the public good, 

 write in sustaining the governmental policy of securing the 

 perpetual cultivation of forests on all the poorest lands. 



Correspondence. 



Impressions of America. — I. 

 To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir, — ]\Iy first impressions of America were received in the 

 beautiful fall of the year. I came to Boston on a Monday, 

 early in October, alter a morning sail up the harbor where 

 the dark brown summer hotels and cottages, encircled by 

 broad piazza roofs, looked to my astonished eyes like gigantic 

 fungi planted in the bare grass. After a dazed and lonesome 

 day in Boston and bewildering experiences with imposing 

 darkies and strange things to eat at a solemn hotel, I was taken 

 out to Welleslcy Hills by a kind friend, and thus introduced to 

 a suburban town while everything was quite new to nie. Our 

 voyage had been a long and a stormy one and had left my 

 mind as complete a blank as any traveler could desire. All 

 was, indeed, so new to me that it made no impression at all, 

 beyond a vague general one of great and wonderful strange- 

 ness. Some things there were to remind me of my own 

 country, Sweden, while I caught occasional glimpses that 

 recalled France. From among features of house and landscape, 

 something would flash across my vision that had no associ- 

 ation with anything at all that I had ever seen or pictured 

 infancy. Supper brought sword-fish — an animal connected 

 in my mind with museums and picture-books, not with the 

 dinner-table ; a curious vegetable, lit food for the gods in its 

 rich color and aromatic, poetically suggestive flavor, which 

 they called sweet-potato ; an outlandish, highly spiced tea, 

 which they called Oolong; a variety of light tempting breads 

 and delicious stewed fruit, all served up at once in home-like 

 abundance and suggestive of a land of new products and 

 boundless resources. 



Next morning I started on a walk through the village, full 

 of eager curiosity, unaccompanied, as I wished to receive 

 unbiased impressions. It was all very strange, utterly unlike 

 everything I had seen before of any known or tried principle of 

 arranging human dwellings. On either side of a splendid ave- 

 nue, too broad and lofty to be oppressive, arching more grandly 

 and lightly than inost avenues in Europe, little houses, as con- 

 torted and fantastic as if they represented wants and tastes 

 quite different from ours, were set in rows in the grass. Each 

 house had a straight little path leading up to the front door, 

 creepers trailing over the piazza, a few fruit-trees or a row of 

 evergreens in the grass in front of it, but not a sign of a hedge 

 or a fence visible anywhere. Flowers, too, were rare, but 

 vistas of sunny plain showed in the open spaces between the 

 houses, and in the morning light it all looked so new to me, 

 so broad and open and suffused with light, that I suddenly felt 

 as if I had climbed the Bean-stalk in the night and was wan- 

 dering about dazed in a new and strange world, of bright light, 

 quaint customs, and unbounded friendliness and good-fellow- 

 ship of intercourse. 



My walks in the woods, alone or with friends, were full of 

 delightful experiences, very bewildering at first when I en- 

 countered Blackberries that grew on trailing vines instead of 

 on stiff tough brambles, as they do in Europe, or Maples with 

 leaves so deeply indented that they look like Oaks, while the most 

 prevalent Oaks, with their regular build, their burnished foliage 

 and the clearly cut symmetrical form of their leaves, almost 

 like a conventionalized Acanthus, did not at all answer to my 

 English ideas of an Oak. The Elms were graceful, spreading 

 things, not the heavy clumps of massed foliage that I was ac- 

 customed to in England and elsewhere. In between these 



new forms and manifestations were well-known European 

 trees or features of landscape, low picturesque stone walls, 

 that I thought impossible out of stony treeless western 

 Sweden, running along below huge Chestnuts, like those I 

 had seen last in the mountains al)Ove the Italian lakes ; hill- 

 formations and road-side pondsorbitsof Oak and undergrowth 

 so characteristically French that it was like seeing a succession 

 of landscapes by Daubigny, Cazin and Rousseau. Add to this 

 the sight of the White Pine, that pride of our evergreen shrub- 

 beries, growing wild ; Sycamores and Plane-trees, with foliage 

 either much more magnificently grand or much more minutely 

 delicate than in average central European specimens ; sylvan 

 forms on the grandest scale in endless variety ; long threads 

 and tangles of Virginia Creeper thrown up among the branches 

 of the old trees like Llianas in pictures of the tropics ; or 

 something still more suggestive of the tropics, a beautiful 

 vine, now turning deep red, which I was warned against as 

 poisonous ; stray flowers of refined l)eauty in the ditches, and 

 the clearings full of a feathery shrub ; the .Sumach, inter- 

 spersed with a tall exquisite plant, the Milk-weed, eminently 

 Japanese in its pale green color and the quaint pear-shape of 

 its large pods ; more old friends in new places and unex- 

 pected glimpses into a picture-book world, until it all seemed 

 to me like the title-page of some old illustrated book of geog- 

 raphy, on wdiich plants and trees from the different countries 

 are arranged in picturesque confusion. * 



Besides the combination of opposites, the prevailing 

 impression was one of luxuriant profusion. I remember 

 passing through an orchard and being told to pick up a 

 sweet apple which fell at my feet, a thing I would not have 

 dreamed of doing in an orchard belonging to strangers in 

 Europe. A sweet apple in Sweden has a flat, insipid taste, but 

 this had a rich lusciousness of flavor and an abundance of 

 juice that seemed to me truly to symbolize America. 



Underlying all this there was something disappointing and 

 inconsistent that disturbed me, though I could not explain it 

 to myself. I can explain it now only too well, and as the ex- 

 planation is my sole excuse for setting forth all these personal 

 impressions I shall give it here. I know, now, that I was dis- 

 turbed by the inconsistency between the luxuriousness of the 

 woods and the barrenness of the gardens. In our daily life 

 I did not notice it much. The piazza, with its translucent 

 screen of vines, the still sunny air over the Apple-trees and the 

 grass, were very pleasant after my voyage, and the sociability 

 existing between the different houses in this Jack-o'-the-Bean- 

 stalk land was very quaint and amusing. But every walk in 

 the woods made the bare front yards I passed on my way 

 home seem more and more astonishing and finally painful 

 to me. 



Since then the well-known fascinating power of America has 

 been at work, and I have learned to look upon her more as a 

 country which I have a right to be interested in and to criticise 

 from the standpoint of my sympathy and admiration than as a 

 foreign land to be observed with cold and dispassionate cu- 

 riosity. Further acquaintance with suburban districts and 

 gardens has only served to deepen and give clearness to my 

 first impressions. New England seems the land of boundless 

 resources, of unlimited possibilities of beauty within the fine 

 art of gardening. But the fine art of gardening is as yet only 

 a luxury of the wealthy. 



Milton, Mass. 



Cealia IVaerii. 



The Wellesley Gardens. 

 To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir, — The gardens at the country home of Mr. H. H. Hun- 

 newell, at Wellesley, Massachusetts, are certainly unique, and 

 rank among the very best examples of modern horticulture in 

 the United States. In extent and completeness they resemble 

 the spacious old gardens of Europe more closely than most 

 others in America, and the forms of gardening carried out are 

 so numerous and well maintained that the place has hardly a 

 superior anywhere. The natural features of the place have 

 been carefully studied, its beauties emphasized, and its less 

 interesting portions relieved by plantations in which tlie trees 

 are artistically grouped, or arranged in vistas which carry the 

 eye to where distant woods and skies unite upon the horizon- 

 line. Th-? house itself is situated on something of an emi- 

 nence, overlooking the picturesque Lake Waban, whose 

 shores exhibit beautiful lines with jutting bluffs, and sweeping 

 inlets, and they are finely wooded on all sides. The buildings 

 of Wellesley College rise grandly on the right, their classic 

 designs and lively colors imparting brightness and a certain 

 oriental luxury to the scene. The place, too, has taken on 



