446 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 239. 



ties of carpet-gardening, forming a huge disk, thirty-three 

 feet in diameter, with the usual iigures and dots of a clock- 

 dial around the edge. On the dial move two long poles, 

 decorated with flowers, and forming the hands of this 

 novel clock, which keeps time with sufficient regularity. 

 The hands are attached by a simple mechanism, sunk be- 

 low the centre of the bed, and driven by a small water- 

 motor. Where circumstances favored, we should say that 

 an improvement on the carpet-bed dial might be made by 

 surrounding a circular tank of aquatic plants with a 

 sloping bank, on which the figures of the clock-dial could 

 be made with the usual dwarf variegated plants, the whole 

 being surrounded by a railing. It would be easy to set 

 a box, containing the mechanism for driving the hands, 

 in the middle of the tank, and the waste vi'ater from the 

 motor could be utilized as the regular tank supply." These 

 words are a surprise in a journal which usually upholds 

 good taste in horticultural as in other matters. The 

 guardians of our parks and the gardeners who make them 

 need to be told that horticultural arrangements should be 

 artistic, and not of a kind calculated to encourage a crude 

 taste by creating showy horticultural toys which appeal to 

 childish curiosity. These arrangements must be either of a 

 natural sort or of a formal and palpably artificial sort, 

 according to existing conditions. But, whatever the type, 

 the same canons of taste which govern the proper orna- 

 mentation of a building ought to control the ornamenta- 

 tion of a garden or park. This fact is the one which most 

 needs teaching — the fact that gardening is an art in as 

 true a sense as painting, sculpture or architecture. To 

 imitate a dial-plate with flowers and set wooden or 

 metallic hands to moving around it by clock-work is not 

 to design as an artist would. The arrangement which the 

 American Architect commends is of the same class as the 

 striking "floral devices" which often encumber our parks, 

 cemeteries and the lawns of country-places. If Paris has 

 its floral clock, Chicago has its floral sun-dial, the shadow 

 upon which is cast by a talll inclined post composed of 

 House-leeks. The fact that this style is common in Europe 

 may explain its existence here but cannot excuse it. 



The Woodcock Oak. 



THE White Oak is one of the most familiar trees in the 

 forests of north-eastern America, and yet we rarely 

 see a tree of this species which has reached its full lateral 

 expansion. The primeval Oaks of our forests grew like 

 other forest-trees, with long, straight stems, and when the 

 forests were cleared avi^ay, if individual trees vi'ere left 

 standing, they showed nothing of the character which they 

 would have had if the)^ had grown in the open ground. 

 At least a century is required for one of these Oaks to reach 

 maturity, and much more than a century is needed before 

 it attains those dimensions which mark it among our other 

 trees as the very type of sturdiness and strength. Since 

 the first clearings were made only an individual here and 

 there has been allovi'ed an opportunity to throw out its huge 

 branches with the bold horizontal sweep which charac- 

 terizes the tree in our illustration on page 450. 



We have already published pictures of several famous 

 White Oak-trees, including the Waverly Oaks, but only 

 when we have portraits of several individuals can the full 

 expresssion of the tree be apprehended. We are, therefore, 

 glad to give an illustration of this "Woodcock Oak," as it 

 is called, which stands about four miles east of Bedford 

 Station, and one mile west of Bedford village, in West- 

 chester Count)^ New York. It is near the angle made by 

 the Hook road and the highway between the two points 

 mentioned above. Five feet above the ground it measures 

 fourteen feet two inches in circumference, and two feet 

 above the ground its girth is nearly seventeen feet. Its 

 branches cover a circle of a hundred feet in diameter, and 

 it is in all its proportions worthy to be classed among 

 the notable trees of a region where fine trees are not rare. 



Pine Bank. 



ONE of tire most Ijeautiful spots which have been acquired 

 by tire energetic Park Commission of Boston for tlie re- 

 freshment of tlieir fellow-citizens is the old estate called Pine 

 Bank, on the border of Jamaica Pond. As the readers of Gar- 

 den AND Forest have already been told, the urban pleasure- 

 ground called the Back Bay Fens, recently laid out by Mr. 

 Olmsted, is to be connected with the Arnold Arboretum by 

 the Riverdale Parkway, which will skirt Jamaica Pond ; and 

 several estates fronting on the pond, which is really a good- 

 sized lake,, have already been secured for this purpose. None 

 of them is as beautiful or as peculiar in its beauty as Pine 

 Bank, long the homestead of the Perkins family. This con- 

 sists of some fourteen acres of thickly wooded ground, con- 

 siderably elevated above the water-level and approached by 

 Perkins Street. The original house was built in 1802. In 1847 

 it was torn down and a new one erected; this was destroyed 

 by fire in 1869, and tlie present dwelling was constructed on 

 the same site, I believe by a French architect. It is a two- 

 story building of stone and terra-cotta, with three gables and a 

 square projecting porch on the principal or lawn front. The 

 carriage-drive sweeps up to the doorway on the opposite front, 

 passing through thick growths of fine trees — Pines, Elms, Ma- 

 ples, Birches, Poplars and Buttonwoods. Here nature has not 

 been conspicuously interfered with, only just enough to make 

 the drive sfeem not a wild woodland road, but a fitting ap- 

 proach to a dignified home. Near the house are two deep, 

 roundish, natural depressions in the ground, lovely grassy 

 basins, which give this part of the place an individual accent, 

 looking like little green ponds overhung with shadowy trees. 

 On either side of the house the trees approach it nearly, and 

 the stables are so shielded by them as not to be a disturbing 

 element in the scene, as they too often are in small American 

 country-places. 



The other side of the grounds, fronting on the water, are 

 still more attractive. Here the verdant surroundings are not 

 disturbed by drive-ways or walks. The porch opens directly j| 

 upon the lawn, and the smooth emerald grass extends for a \ 

 considerable distance to the border of the steep high banks 

 which overhang the pond. There are no flower-beds and no 

 disturbing horticultural embellishments of any kind. But on 1 

 either side the lawn is enframed by the thick naturally grow- I 

 ing masses of trees, and in front the water and the opposite 

 shore of the pond are seen through a screen of big Pine-trunks 

 and feathery foliage, so that no more truthfully expressive 

 name than Pine Bank could have been chosen for this delight- 

 ful home. When I visited it some years ago it was uninhab- 

 ited, and its effect was as of the home of some Sleeping Prin- 

 cess, where summer must perpetually reign, for the thick 

 plantations absolutely shut out the noisy world behind it, and 

 so screened the water-view that one found it hard indeed to 

 remember that a big and busy city lay only a few miles away, 

 and that other homes of busy modern people might be reached 

 by a few moments' walk. Nothing more exquisitely retired i 

 and self-contained, nothing more poetically beautiful, com- | 

 plete and slumberous, could be imagined than Pine Bank as it 

 then appeared ; and when one recollected that the days of 

 fairy-tales were over, and sought for an actual modern pur- 

 pose to which Pine Bank might appropriately be put, it seemed 

 as though it ought to be bought by some sentimental philan- 

 thropist and its name changed to " Honeymoon Hall," to sig- 

 nify that it would perpetually be preserved as a place of 

 retirement for successive young couples unable to fly for a 

 brief period further afield. 



Now it is to be given to the people of Boston for their per- 

 petual use, the handsome house will be preserved, and, I 

 hope, the grounds will not be altered. Very few such charm- 

 ing and individual spots can exist in the neighborhood of our 

 large towns ; and this one will be invaluable as an object-lesson 

 in the great art of treating — or of letting alone — home-grounds 

 of an essentially woodland character. The flight of worn 

 stone steps which leads down from the edge of the lawn to 

 the water-side, originally belonged to the old Hancock House 

 on Beacon Street, in Boston, and was secured by Mr. l^erkins 

 when this house was destroyed. " They are valuable as relics," 

 writes Mr. Perkins now to the Park Commissioners, "because 

 the most distinguished persons of colonial and revolutionary 

 times have ascended and descended them in going to and 

 from the hospitable door of the old mansion-house." I think 

 they could not be put to a better use to-day than to serve the 

 tired artisans and lively boys of Boston as an approach to the 

 pleasure-boats which, one fancies, will be provided for their 

 use beneath the edge of the beautiful lawn of Pine Bank. 



For one, I am thankful to the Park Commissioners of Bos- 



