Garden and Forest. 



[February 29, iSiSS. 



The Forests of tlie White Mountains. 



NEW HAMPSHIRE is not a peculiarly wealthy State, 

 but it has some resources scarcely equaled by 

 those of any of its sisters. The White Mountains, though 

 worth little to the farmer, are a piece of real estate which 

 yields a sure and abundant income by attracting tourists 

 and their money ; and this revenue is certain to increase, 

 unless blind mismanagement interposes. The White 

 Mountains are at present unique objects of attraction ; 

 but they may easily be spoiled, and the yearly tide of 

 tourists will thus be turned towards other points of inter- 

 est whose owners have had more sense and foresight. 



These mountains owe three-fourths of their charms 

 to the primeval forest that still covers them. Speculators 

 have their eyes on it, and if they are permitted to work 

 their will the State will find a most productive piece of 

 property sadly fallen in value. If the mountains are robbed 

 of their forests they will become like some parts of the 

 Pyrenees, which, though much higher, are without interest, 

 because they have been stripped bare. 



The forests of the White Mountains have a considerable 

 commercial value, and this value need not be sacrificed. 

 When lumber speculators get possession of forests they 

 generally cut down all the trees and strip the land at 

 once, with an eye to immediate profit. The more con- 

 servative, and, in the end, the more profitable manage- 

 ment, consists in selecting and cutting out the valuable 

 timber when it has matured, leaving the younger growth 

 for future use. This process is not very harmful to the 

 landscape. It is practiced extensively in Maine, where the 

 art of managing forests with a view to profit is better un- 

 derstood than elsewhere in this country. A fair amount 

 of good timber may thus be drawn from the White Moun- 

 tains, without impairing their value as the permanent 

 source of a vastly greater income from the attraction they 

 will offer to an increasing influx of tourists. At the same 

 time the streams flowing from them, and especially the 

 Pemigewasset, a maiii source of the Merrimac, will be 

 saved from the alternate droughts and freshets to which 

 all streams are exposed that take their rise in mountains 

 denuded of forests. The subject is one of the last im- 

 portance to the mill owners along these rivers. 



F. Parkman. 



Landscape Gardening. — A Definition. 



SOME of the Fine Arts appeal to the ear, others to the 

 eye. The latter are the Arts of Design, and they are 

 usually named as three — Architecture, Sculpture and Paint- 

 ing. A man who practices one of these in any of its 

 branches is an artist ; other men who work with forms and 

 colors are atthe best but artisans. This is the popular belief. 

 But in fact there is a fourth art which has a right to be 

 rated with the others, which is as fine as the finest, and 

 which demands as much of its professors in the way of 

 creative power and executive skill as the most difficult. 

 This is the art whose purpose it is to create beautiful com- 

 positions upon the surface of the ground. 



The mere statement of its purpose is sufficient to estab- 

 lish its rank. It is the effort to produce organic beauty — 

 to compose a beautiful whole with a number of related 

 parts — which makes a man an artist ; neither the produc- 

 tion of a merely useful organism nor of a single beauti- 

 ful detail suffices. A clearly told story or a single beau- 

 tiful word is not a work of art — only a story told in beauti- 

 fully connected words. A solidly and conveniently built 

 house, if it is nothing more, is not a work of architecture, 

 nor is an isolated stone, however lovely in shape and sur- 

 face. A delightful tnit, a graceful line, does not make a 

 picture ; and though the painter may reproduce ugly 

 models he must put some kind of beauty into the reproduc- 

 tion if it is to be esteemed above any other manufactured 

 article — if not beauty of form, then beauty of color or of 

 meaning or at least of execution. Similarly, when a man 



disposes the surface of the soil with an eye to crops alone 

 he is an agriculturist ; when he grows plants for their 

 beauty as isolated objects he is a horticulturist; but when 

 he disposes ground and plants together to produce 

 organic beauty of effect, he is an artist with the best. 



Yet though all the fine arts are thus akin in general pur- 

 pose they differ each from each in many ways. And in 

 the radical differences which exist between the landscape- 

 gardener's and all the others we find some reasons why 

 its affinity with them is so commonly ignored. One dif- 

 ference is that it uses the same materials as nature herself 

 In what is called " natural" gardening it uses them to pro- 

 duce effects which under fortunate conditions nature mieht 



, o 



produce without man s aid. Then, the better the result, 

 the less likely it is to be recognized as an artificial — artis- 

 tic — result. The more perfectly the artist attains his aim, - 

 the more likely we are to forget that he has been at work. 

 In " formal " gardening, on the other hand, nature's materi- 

 als are disposed and treated in frankly unnatural ways ; 

 and then — as a more or less intelligent love for natural 

 beauty is very common to-day, and an intelligent eye for 

 art is rare — the artist's work is apt to be resented as an im- 

 pertinence, denied its right to its name, called a mere 

 contorting and disfiguring of his materials. 



Again, the landscape-gardener's art differs from all others 

 in the unstable character of its productions. When sur- 

 faces are modeled and plants arranged, nature and the 

 artist must work a long time together before the true result 

 appears; and when once it has revealed itself, day to day 

 attention will be forever needed to preserve it from the de- 

 forming effects of time. It is easy to see how often ne- 

 glect or interference must work havoc with the best inten- 

 tions, how often the passage of years must travesty or 

 destroy the best results, how rare must be the cases in 

 which a work of landscape art really does justice to its 

 creator. 



Still another thing which affects popular recognition of 

 the art as such is our lack of clearly understood terms by 

 which to speak of it and of those who practice it. "Gar- 

 dens " once meant pleasure-grounds of every kind and 

 " gardener" then had an adequately artistic sound. But as 

 the significance of the one term has been gradually spe- 

 cialized, so the other has gradually come to denote a mere 

 grower of plants. " Landscape gardener " was a title first 

 used by the artists of the eighteenth century to mark the 

 new tendency which they represented — the search for 

 "natural " as opposed to "formal " beauty ; and it seemed 

 to them to need an apology as savoring, perhaps, of 

 grandiloquence or conceit. But as taste declined in Eng- 

 land it was assumed by men who had not the slightest 

 right, judged either by their aims or by their results, to be 

 considered artists ; and to-day it is fallen into such dises- 

 teem that it is often replaced by " landscape architect. " 

 This title has French usage to support it and is in many 

 respects a good one. But its correlative — "landscape 

 architecture " — is unsatisfactory ; and so, on the other 

 hand, is " landscape artist, " though "landscape art " is an 

 excellent generic term. Perhaps the best we can do is to 

 keep to "landscape gardener,'' and try to remember that it 

 ought always to mean an artist and an artist only. 



M. G. van Rensselaer. 



Floriculture in the United States. 



T the beginning of the present century, it is not prob- 

 _ _ able that there were 100 florists in the United 

 States, and their combined green-house structures could 

 not have exceeded 50,000 square feet of glass. There 

 are now more than 10,000 florists distributed through every 

 State and Territory in the Union and estimating 5,000 

 square feet of glass to each, the total area would be 

 50.000,000 feet, or about 1,000 acres of green-houses. The 

 value of the bare structures, with heating apparatus, at 

 60 cents per square foot would be $30,000,000, while the 

 stock of plants grown in them would not be less than 



