August io, 1892.] 



Garden and Forest. 



373 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Officb: Tribiwe Building, Nhw York. 



Conducted by Professor C S. Sargent. 



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



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10, 1892. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGR. 



Editorial Article ; — Taste Indoors and Out 373 



By Bic)'cle to the Waverley Oaks. — I Sylvester Baxtey. 374 



The Sugar Maple. (With fieure.) Floy L. Wright. 375 



Notes on the Flora of Sniylhe County, Virginia. — II. . .A-nfta Mm-ray Vail, 375 



Italian Garden Tools Louise Dodge, 376 



New or Littlk-known Plants ; — Aster amethystinus. (With figure.) 377 



Foreign Correspondence : — London Letter W. IVatson. 377 



Cultural Dep.'\rtment : — Strawberries, Old and New C. E. Hunn 379 



Southern Tomato Blii^ht at the North Professor Byron D. Halsted. 379 



Violet Disease '. E. O. Orpet. 3S1 



Chrysanthemums T. D. H. 381 



Hardy Narcissus E. O. Orpet. 3S2 



Correspondence : — A National Wild Flower Exhibition. 



Professor Williavt R. Lazenhy. 3S2 



A Tropical Plant-house ..T.D. Hatfield. 383 



Notes 3S4 



Illustrations ; — Aster amethystinus. Fig. 63 37S 



A Sugar Maple in Ohio, Fig. 64 380 



Taste Indoors and Out. 



THAT cultivated Americans have a natural sense of 

 fitness in dress and household adornment is admit- 

 ted by even the critical French nation, which is more se- 

 cure than any in matters of taste ; but when they undertake 

 to deal with the problem of the arrangement of grounds it 

 is curious to see how their sense of proportion and appro- 

 priateness fails them, and how people who would not per- 

 mit a discordant rug in their drawing-rooms or an ugly 

 book-case in a library or an undesirable horse in their 

 stables, will allow incongruous trees and shrubs to be 

 planted, and unsightly rockeries and flower-beds to be cul- 

 tivated in the wrong places about their houses. The per- 

 ception of breadth and unity seems hard for them to attain, 

 possibl)'' because people are by nature more imitative than 

 original, and our civilization as yet affords them but few 

 good examples to copy. 



In an untraveled department of art people are apt to go 

 astra}'", to consider that what thej^like is necessarily a good 

 thing. Original conservation makes men hesitate to make 

 new departures. They fear to cut away a tree because it is 

 itself beautiful, and fail to grasp the broad effects of landscape 

 that ma)' result from judicious destruction. A vein of sen- 

 timenlalism, of association, of fancied picturesqueness, 

 mars their final effects. Women, epecially, may be great 

 in a flower-garden — they are seldom great on an estate 

 where prettiness, variety, daintiness, delicacy are required — 

 there the)'- shine ; but landscape-gardening on a large scale 

 is, after all, a masculine art, and requires a certain manly 

 vigor of treatment, an unhesitating despotism, that the gen tier 

 sex deprecate as cruel and unnecessary. Women may be 

 generally held responsible for the false details we so much 

 deplore, because American men, as a general thing, are 

 too much occupied to give much attention to their grounds 



and leave their arrangement to their gardener and their 

 womankind. 



The former is naturally a good right arm, sometimes 

 opinionated and lacking in that broad experience only to 

 be obtained by travel and study. In his own sphere he 

 shines, but it is not his business to be an artist. When he 

 attains that distinction he abandons gardening and looks 

 for work of wider range and greater opportunities. 



But there is no reason why a woman of taste should not 

 master the science of outdoor beauty, and conform her 

 arrangements to its rules rather than to her own caprice. 

 It is not an exact science, to be sure, but still landscape- 

 gardening has its laws as well as household arrangement, 

 laws which, while permitting great variety, still give a test 

 by which to distinguish between the true and the false, the 

 meretricious and the really beautiful. The knowledge of how 

 to create and to preserve the beauty of one's surroundings is 

 surely as valuable as a sure taste in carpets and draperies, 

 but it is rarer to find. That it prevails more widely in the 

 older world is partly due to the more stable conditions of 

 residence, the maintenance of an estate by one family for 

 many generations, an early familiarity with cultivated 

 grounds, and free access to public places and parks which 

 have been laid out by men of real knowledge and highly 

 trained perceptions. 



Here we come to the subject in our maturity, a man 

 buys a place after he has made his fortune, accepts the con- 

 ditions of his predecessor without question, or goes to work 

 to alter them without much consideration. The mistress 

 of the estate, with still less training and experience, un- 

 dertakes to decide where things shall be planted, and what 

 they shall be, often with melancholy results. Sometimes 

 the theory of letting things alone is carried to excess. 

 Wild shrubs and weeds are allowed to encroach too closely 

 upon a stately house ; dignity is sacrificed to a picturesque- 

 ness which is out of place. The fact is ignored that things 

 which in themselves have beauty are not necessarily ap- 

 propriate for formal uses. To understand the proper sub- 

 ordination of nature to art requires the most subtle percep- 

 tion and trained skill Again, the relation of fences to an 

 establishment is not always given due consideration. 

 There is a taste in gate-posts as well as veranda-columns, 

 which often goes astray. Refinement in every detail is as 

 essential in well-kept grounds as in a drawing-room ; a 

 false note struck is a distress ; a picturesque object in the 

 midst of a formal arrangement is a mistake. Overcrowd- 

 ing is a prevailing fault ; there is excess of decoration 

 where quietness should prevail ; feeble and unimportant 

 shrubs and trees are allowed to overpower more valuable 

 neighbors to the detriment of the place ; gay flowers are 

 planted where they are out of key with the surroundings ; 

 clutter takes the place of repose ; a thicket supplants a 

 pleasing group of trees or shrubbery. 



k\\ this shows that taste can be highly cultivated in one 

 direction, and starved in another, and' the question is, 

 which stands for the highest type of civilization, a knowl- 

 edge of the fitness of things in the interior of the house, or 

 the same knowledge applied to its surroundings.^ Taste 

 in outside matters is certainly rarer than in household 

 decoration or in architecture ; a demand for the landscape- 

 architect is in this country almost an evolution of to-day. 

 That he is sorely needed the condition of many country 

 places shows, and there is a call for men of genius in the 

 profession to establish a standard, not necessarily a con- 

 ventional or a rigid one, but something which shall afford 

 a criterion of taste in the arrangement of pleasure-grounds 

 and make of the adornment of countr)' places a less hap- 

 hazard thing than it is to-day, when it depends almost en- 

 tirely upon individual fancy. 



Life in the country gains more and more a hold upon 

 our branch of the English people, and we begin to develop 

 the same interest in it that has characterized the older 

 branch, as our habits become more settled and permanent. 

 The time is probably coming when the nomadic habits of 

 Americans will change for a more conservative way of 



