52 



Garden and Forest. 



[March 28, 18 



consequence of his permission ; and it was these parts and 

 not the wilder ones which gave most assistance to the artist. 

 An instinctive love for beauty had doubtless often tried to 

 express itself in the neighborhood of dwellings, absent 

 though the idea of art had been from the mind of their in- 

 habitants ; nature herself is so good an artist that even in 

 her bondage she had worked admirably and with more 

 suavity and gentleness than in her free estate ; and the 

 mere utilitarian treatment of the land had also accidentally 

 given rise to happily suggestive features. Take, for exam- 

 ple, the lawn, which is so essential a feature of almost every 

 artistic design in landscape. It is not true to say, as often 

 has been said, that nature never suggests a lawn. But it is 

 true to say that she did not suggest it to those English 

 gardeners who developed it so beautifully. They must 

 have been inspired by the artificiall)^ formecl meadow-lands 

 and glades of the England of their time. 



But all the semi-natural, semi-artificial beauty of England 

 would not have taught them how to make beautiful parks 

 and gardens had they not been taught as well by their own 

 imagination. What they vi^anted to create were landscapes 

 which should charm from all points of view and should 

 bear close as well as distant examination ; and, moreover, 

 landscapes which might titly surround the habitations of 

 man and accommodate his very various needs and pleas- 

 ures. Such landscapes we can no more expect to find in 

 nature — even in cultivated, semi-artificial nature — than 

 landscapes painted upon canvas. That is, while we can 

 imagine a natural spot v\'hich would be an appropriate set- 

 ting for a hunter's lodge or a hermit's cell, we can imagine 

 none which woidd appropriately encircle a palace, a man- 

 sion, or even a modest home for a man with civilized 

 habits and tastes. Every step in civilization is a step away 

 from that wild estate which alone is really nature ; and the 

 further away we get from it, the more imagination is 

 needed to brmg the elements of existence which nature 

 still supplies into harmony with those which man has 

 developed. The simplest house in the most rustic situation 

 needs, at least, that a path shall be cut to its door ; and 

 to do so much as cut a path in the most pleasing possible 

 Vi'ay needs a certain amount of imagination, of art. How 

 much more, then, is imagination needed in such a task as 

 the laying-out of a great estate where subordinate Iniildiiigs 

 are to be grouped around the chief one, and all are to be 

 accommodated to the main unalterable natural features of 

 the scene, where a hundred minor natural features are to 

 be harmoniously disposed, where convenient courses for 

 feet and wheels are to be provided in every direction, 

 where gardens and orchards are to be supplied, where 

 water is to be made at once useful and ornamental, and 

 where every plant, whether great or small, must be beauti- 

 ful at least in the sense of helping the beauty of the general 

 effect.'' The stronger the desire to make so artificial an 

 aggregate of features look as though nature might have 

 designed it, the more intimate must be the artist's sympathy 

 with the aims and processes of nature and the keener his 

 eye for the special opportunities of the site ; but also the 

 stronger must be his imaginative power, the firmer his 

 grasp of the principles and processes of his art. 



M. G. Vi7?i Rensselaer. 



Bridge at Leathertor, England. 



T^ 



■"HIS very ancient bridge spans one of the small streams on 

 Dartmoor, in the south-west of England. Its construc- 

 tion is sufficiently explained by the picture — two land-piers and 

 one stream-pier are connected by long spanning-stones wliich 

 carry parapets made up of large irregular blocks. It is hardly 

 necessary to point out the degree to which this bridge com- 

 bines picturesque beauty with durability, or to explain the fit- 

 ness of such bridges for rural situations in our own country. 

 In the immediate vicinity of a very dignified house so rude 

 and unarchitectural a bridge would perhaps be out of place ; 

 and the same is true of those portions of an urban park where 

 formality rules or where architectural works of importance are 

 in view. But in the sequestered, naturally treated portions of 



parks, a bridge of this sort would be entirely appropriate; and 

 carrying a road or footway near a country home of modest 

 character or in a village suburb it would be a most charming 

 feature. Naturally we have no wish to suggest that this bridge 

 need be copied either in its special form or in the size and dis- 

 position of its stones, although in both these respects it would 

 be an excellent model. It is illustrated merely to show how 

 very simply a stone bridge may be built, and how incompara- 

 bly lietter in effect it is than the ugly constructions of iron or 

 the rough assemblages of planks with which in this country 

 we are so familiar. Weather-beaten boulders as old as those 

 in this bridge at Leathertor, and as appropriate for bridge- 

 building, lie by every New England stream, and it would need 

 no high degree of skill to put them to service. But we seem 

 to have thought the bare, straight lines of iron more beautiful 

 than the infinite variety of form and surface and color of our 

 moss-grown stones. It is full time we changed our minds. 



After the Great Snow Storm. 



T GATHERED pink and white blossoms of the Spring Beauty 

 ■*■ on the loth of the present month, and on the 12th thev 

 were under the drifting snow of what will pass into history 

 as the great storm of March, 1888. 



The wild weather of that day gave me no little concern with 

 regard to the old trees near my house. As a consequence, I 

 twice faced the storm at its height and took brief notes as to 

 the action of the wind upon them. I was curious, too, to 

 know which species was suffering most from loss of branches 

 ar ^ general mutilation. The snapping and crashing heard 

 above the wind's roaring suggested universal destruction. 

 Judging from past wind-storms, I looked for the leveling of the 

 fourteen Pines near the house, or at least that the trunks alone 

 would remain standing ; liut these unaccountably escaped all 

 serious injury and are still the same sorry-looking irregularities 

 they have been for the last twenty years. 



It is not a litde strange that the long rows of White Pines 

 planted by Joseph Bonaparte in his park near Bordentown, N.J., 

 more than sixty years ago, have escaped serious breakage 

 from wind, encrusting snow and ice-encased twigs — the three 

 causes that have, separately and combinedly, effected the un- 

 crowning and disfiguring of the Pines at home, which are no 

 more exposed and scarcely three miles away. Do not 

 these trees generally require planting in clusters, so as to 

 be self-protecting, or to tie intimately associated with other 

 trees? A lone Pine is very pretty and poetical, but hereabouts 

 it is as uncertain as the average white man. 



But to return to the forest in the storm. Of a hundred or more 

 large trees, Oaks, Chestnuts, Birclies, Gums, Liquidambars, 

 Persimmons, Catalpas, Beeches and Sassafras, occupyingsome 

 three acres of southward sloping hillside, but one, a large 

 Chestnut, was uprooted, and this was lifted bodily from the 

 g;rouud and carried several feet from where it had stood. 

 "The others were twisted; liranches were interlocked, and 

 several so shaken and wormed about that the closely wrapping 

 Poison Ivy was detached, an occurrence I should never have 

 dreamed could liave taken place. Where branches were broken, 

 they were, as a rule, detached from the trunk of the tree as 

 though seized at their extremities and twisted off Although 

 the wind remained in one direction, it evidently became a 

 whirlwind among the tree-tops, as shown by the direction of 

 the fall of several large limbs. One large branch of an enor- 

 mous Beech was broken off, but still holds by long cables of 

 twisted strips of bark, as though the storm had repented and 

 tried to repair the damage by tying it on again. 



Of the several species of trees I have mentioned, no two are 

 of like toughness in the texture of their wood, and in this 

 storm the weaker and more brittle kinds did not suffer as 

 much as the tough old Oaks. Nor were the detached branches 

 worm-eaten and so abnormally weak. I was confronted with 

 contradictions whichever way I turned. Associate these with 

 wind having a velocity of fifty-four miles an hour and air 

 full of sand-iike snow, and realize how easily one could become 

 liewildered. 



In the more exposed upland fields not a tree suffered, the 

 l)ig Sassafras, sixty-two feet in height, not losing even a twig. 

 Stranger still, the scattered Beeches and White Oaks that have 

 retained their withered leaves all winter, hold them still. In 

 short, the home woods suffered very little, and what damage 

 there is occurred where I least expected to find it. Where the 

 exposure was greatest, there ever)' tree successfully weathered 

 one of the severest storms on record. The shrubbery, seed- 

 ling Oaks and Beeches, puny Cedars and trim little Junipers 

 were bent to the ground and remained prostrate for three or 

 four days. The snow has now melted and all are again erect; 



