November 9, 1892.] 



Garden and Forest. 



529 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



rUIiLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office : Tkibune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



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



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1892. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles : — The Beautiful in the Surroundin_s:s of Life 529 



Encouraginj^ Children in the Intelligent Planting and Care of Trees . . 530 



Mount Desert — A Foreigner's Impression Cecilia M'ne^-n. 530 



Botanical Notes from Central Texas E, N. Plank. 531 



Mid-October in West Virginia Mrs. Danske Dandritig;e. 532 



Plant Notes : — Dendrobium chrysotoxum. (With fio;ure.) A. Diinmock. 534 



New OR Little-known Pijints : — Halesia tetraptera Meehani (With figure.) 



C. S. S. 534 



Foreign Correspondence : — London Letter W. Watson. 534 



Cultural Department: — Plants for Summer Decoi-ation Win. Tricker. 536 



Foliage-plants W. H. Taplin. 537 



Wuitering Sti'awberry-beds O. W. Blacknall. 537 



Correspondence : — Forests in California Carl Pttrdy. 538 



Late Flowering of Jacltman's Clematis J. Woodward Manning. 538 



Periodical Literature 538 



Exhibitions ; — The New York Chrysanthemum Show 539 



Notes 540 



Illustrations : — Dendrobium chrysotoxum, Fig. 90 533 



Halesia tetraptera Meehani, Fig. gr 535 



The Beautiful in the Surroundings of Life. 



MR. HAMERTON has well defined the word "land- 

 scape" as meaning "the visible material world, 

 or all that can be seen on the surface of the earth by a man 

 who is himself upon that surface." Wild landscape — the 

 scenery of the natural world — possesses infinite interest 

 and charm for those of us who live caged in towns and 

 cramped in houses, and we greatly enjoy both traveling 

 in search of it and reading the praise of it. No age of the 

 world has ever brought forth so many delightful books 

 about the woods, the mountains and the sea-shore. The 

 beauty of natural scenery stirs us as does the finest music. 

 As Mr. Symonds has noted, "there is a profound sym- 

 pathy between music and fine scenery; they both affect 

 us in the same way, waking strong but undefined emotions 

 which express themselves in ' idle tears ' or evoke thoughts 

 which lie, as Wordsworth said, ' too deep for tears ' beyond 

 the reach of any words." It seems as if our extreme 

 dehght in the beauty of wild landscape, tending, as it 

 seemingly does, " to destroy habits of clear thinking and 

 to sentimentalize the mind," had caused us to overlook for 

 the time the supreme importance of that part of landscape 

 which is necessarily not wild — the landscape of our daily 

 lives — the humanized scenery of the earth. This prevalent 

 carelessness concerning the landscapes of every-day life is 

 something remarkable. Here are our rich men paying 

 enormous sums for painted landscapes to be hung in their 

 houses while they permit the real landscape about them to 

 become ugly in the extreme. Here are poorer people 

 spending liberally for journeys in search of the picturesque 

 while what might be the picturesqueness of their own 

 neighborhood is unperceived or destroyed. 



But there are signs that a better day is coming. Some 

 parts of our great America are even now beginning to stir 

 with eager desire for beauty. It is true, the desire is un- 

 formed, and our work is too often based upon mistaken 

 conceptions of that beauty which is our hope, and yet we 



must be thankful when the desire appears among us, for it 

 is something which distinctly ennobles the life of every 

 man and nation in whose heart it is born. Possessed by 

 it, we are compelled to strive and strive again to find "the 

 secret of the beautiful," the foundation upon which beauty 

 is built, the nature of that growth of which beauty is the 

 flower. We shall make our mistakes like other men. We 

 shall attempt to attain our heart's desire by forbidden and 

 impossible ways. We shall probably fell noble forest-trees 

 to make room for brilliant exotics. Perhaps we shall curve 

 our roads because we think we like curves, or build our 

 houses according to some pattern we admired in a foreign 

 land. But, even so, there is hope for us. We shall learn 

 in the end. And, meanwhile, so rash and willful and so 

 generally unsuccessful are we in all this field of work that 

 it may be worth while to look back for a moment over the 

 long story of the evolution of landscape in the hope that 

 we may find therein that key to the secret of the really 

 beautiful which we seek. 



Not to name others, Mr. Ruskin, in his early essay on 

 the Poetry of Architecture, has been before us here. He 

 finds man in primitive ages living precariously upon wild 

 nature, and causing little or no change in the appearance 

 of the wilderness around him. When, at last, he is forced 

 to increase his food-supply, he takes some wild thing like 

 maize and plants it in the glades of the forest, and stores 

 the crop in granaries set up on stakes. When he desires 

 to shelter himself, he contrives frail tents like the Bedouins 

 or the Red Indians, or he walls the mouths of canon caves, 

 or he builds earthern pueblos hardly to be distinguished 

 from the arid ground on which they stand. As he comes 

 to cultivate broad stretches of the earth, he works marked 

 changes in scenery. He fells the woods and marks off 

 fields and draws lines of roads across the country. He 

 plants avenues and orchards, he makes gardens and vine- 

 yards, he builds farmsteads of as many types as there are 

 differing climates and differing social circumstances, he 

 builds villages and cities, he rears palaces and temples, 

 doing all to meet his needs and to express his life ; and so 

 long as he is sincere and straightforward in his work, 

 mother Nature stands ready to adopt it as her own, and to 

 make of it landscape rich in meaning and pathos such as 

 no primitive wilderness can show. 



Look for a moment upon a typical valley of the interior 

 of our own New England. We are standing upon the 

 eastern wall of upland. The village, with a mill or two 

 and a church or two, lies below us at the mouth of a gap 

 in the northern hills. Southward the- valley broadens to 

 contain a fresh green intervale. Opposite us the western 

 wall of the valley is an irregular steep slope of rising 

 woods, with numerous upland farms scattered along the 

 more level heights above. The central intervale, the 

 flanking woods, the village gathered at the valley's head — 

 the whole scene before us possesses unity and beauty to a 

 degree which interests us at once. And how was this 

 delightful general effect produced .? Simply by intelligent 

 obedience to the requirements of human life in this valley. 

 The village grew what it is for the sake of nearness to the 

 great water-power which rushes from the gap in the hills. 

 The intervale was cleared and smoothed for raising perfect 

 hay. The steep side hills have been maintained in woods 

 because they are too steep for agriculture, and because, if 

 they were cleared of trees, their sands and gravels would 

 wash down upon the fertile land of the intervale. Similarly 

 upon the upland farms, the greenery along even the tiniest 

 brooks has been preserved in order to obviate that waste- 

 ful washing away of soil which results from carrying 

 plowing to the edges of the water-courses. Throughout 

 the landscape before us it is most interesting to note how 

 beauty has resulted from the exercise of common sense 

 and intelligence. The every-day forces of convenience, 

 use and true economy have here conspired with Nature 

 to produce beauty, and this beauty is of a very different 

 and much more satisfying kind than that which tries to 

 found itself on mere caprice or fashion. 



