64 



Garden and Forest. 



[April 4, 18 



passing whims dictate, and pile it casually about in our 

 various rooms. At least there are not so many of us who 

 do these things to-day as there were ten years ago; and all 

 of us are well aware that they ought not to be done. 



Yet they are just the things which almost every-one does 

 outside his home. If he has " no taste for nature " him- 

 self, he puts his grounds into the hands of a gardener with- 

 out inquiring whether he has any qualifications beyond a 

 knowledge of how to make plants flourish. And if he has 

 such a taste himself, it means, in a vast majority of cases, 

 a mere love for being out-of-doors, for planting things, and 

 for watching them grow. At the most, it is apt to mean 

 no more than a taste for nature's individual productions — 

 a love for trees, an interest in shrubs, a passion for flowers, 

 or all these three together. The cases are very rare in which 

 it means a taste at all analogous to what we understand 

 by a taste for art ; that is, an appreciation of organized 

 beauty — of the beauty of contrasting yet harmonious lines 

 and colors and masses of light and shade, of intelligent de- 

 sign, of details subordinated to a coherent general effect. 

 Yet it is only such an appreciation as this which means a 

 real taste for nature's beauty and which can make the sur- 

 roundings of our homes really beautiful. 



Of course, in this, as in every art, the "collector" has 

 not only a right to exist, but an important role to play ; but 

 his is not the proper role to play when the adornment of 

 one's home is the chief desire. 'When this is our desire, it 

 is of far less importance what we have than how we have 

 it. The quality of our plants is far more important than 

 their quantity — and by quality is implied not rarity, nor 

 even perfection of development, so much as fitness to the 

 special places they hold in whatever general scheme may 

 have been adopted. Composition, grouping, is the first 

 great essential, even in a yard so small that shrvibs must 

 take the place of trees. M G. van Rensselaer. 



Anglomania in Park Making. 



'XV/'ITHIN the area of the United States we have many types 

 ' ' of scenery and many climates, but in designing the sur- 

 roundings of dwellings, in working upon the landscape, we 

 too often take no account of these facts. On the rocky coast 

 of Maine each summer sees money worse than wasted in en- 

 deavoring to make Newport lawns on ground which naturally 

 bears countless lichen-covered rocks, dwarf Pines and Spruces, 

 and thickets of Sweet-fern, Bayberry and Wild Rose. The 

 owners of this particular type of country spend thousands 

 in destroying its natural beauty, with the intention of attaining 

 to a foreign beauty, which, in point of fact, is unattainable in 

 anything like perfection by reason of the shallow soil and 

 frequent droughts. 



I know too many of these unhappy "lawns." Ledges too 

 large to be buried or blasted protrude here and there. They 

 are bare and bleached now, though they were once half smoth- 

 ered in all manner of mixed shrubbery ; the grass is brown 

 and poor wherever the underlying rock is near the surface, — 

 all is ugliness where once was only beauty. 



Moreover, if the lawn were perfect and " truly English," how 

 would it harmonize with the Pitch-Pines and Scrub-Birches and 

 dwarf Junipers which clothe the lands around ? No. The 

 English park, with its great trees and velvet turf, is supremely 

 beautiful in England, where it is simply the natural scenery 

 perfected ; but save in those favored parts of North America 

 where the natural conditions are approximately those of the 

 Old Country, the beauty of it cannot be had and should not be 

 attempted. 



To be sure, the countries of the continent of Europe all have 

 their so-called English parks, but the best of these possess 

 little or none of the real English character and charm. The 

 really beautiful parks of Europe are those which have a cliar- 

 acter of their own, derived from their own conditions of cli- 

 mate and scene. The parks of Paulovsk, near St. Petersburg, 

 of Muskau, in Silesia, of the 'Villa Thuret, on the Cape of 

 Antibes in the Mediterranean, are none of them English, ex- 

 cept as England was the mother of the natural as distinguished 

 from the architectural in gardening. The Thuret park, if I 

 may cite an illustration of my meaning, is a wonderland of 

 crowded vegetation, of ways deep, shaded by rich and count- 

 less evergreens, of steep open slopes aglow with bright Ane- 

 mones. Between high masses of Eucalyptus and Acacia are 



had glimpses of the sea and of the purple foothills and the 

 gleaming snowpeaks of the Maritime Alps. In the thickets 

 are Laurels, Pittosporums, Gardenias, etc., from the ends of 

 the earth ; but Ilex, Phillyrea and Oleander are natives of the 

 country, and Myrtle and Pistacia are the common shrubs of 

 the sea-shore, so that the foreigners are only additions to an 

 original wealth of evergreens. The garden also has its Palms 

 of many species, with Cycads, Yuccas, Aloes and the like; but 

 the Agaves are common hedge plants of the country, and 

 strange Euphorbias grow everywhere about ; moreover, the 

 more monstrous of these creatures are given a space apart 

 from the main garden, so that they may not disturb the quiet 

 of the scene. M. Thuret saved the Olives and the Ilexes of 

 the original hillside. He did not try to imitate the gardening 

 of another and different country or climate, but simply worked 

 to enhance the beauty natural to the region of his choice. 



At the other end of Europe all this is equally true of Pau- 

 lovsk. Here, at the edge of the wet and dismal plain on 

 which St. Petersburg is built, is a stretch of upland naturally 

 almost featureless, but which, thanks to a careful helping of 

 nature, is now the most interesting and beautiful bit of scenery 

 the neighborhood of the Tsar's capital can show. A consid- 

 erable brook, in falling from the plateau to the plain, has worn 

 in the gravel of the country a crooked and steep-sided valley, 

 and this, the only natural advantage of the park-site, with its 

 banks darkly wooded and the stream shining out now and 

 then in the bottom, is the chief beauty of the completed park. 

 The dead level of the plateau itself is broken up into irregu- 

 lar strips and spaces given to water, meadow, shrubland or 

 woodland, — a pleasing intricacy. The grass is only roughly 

 cut, the edges of the waterways are unkempt, the woods are 

 often carelessly l>eset with Cornus, Caragana or Siberian Spiraea. 

 In the woods are only hardy and appropriate trees — Oaks, Al- 

 ders, Poplars, Pines and the like, — few trees are handsome 

 enough to stand alone, but there are Spruces, pushing up 

 through Scarlet Oaks, and White Birches set off against dark 

 Firs and Prostrate Junipers spreading about Birch-clumps, and 

 no end to the variety of similar thoroughly native and appro- 

 priate beauties. Here is no futile striving after the loveliness 

 of England or any other foreign land ; no attempting the 

 beauty of a mountain country or a rocky country or a warm 

 country or any other country than just this country which lies 

 about St. Petersburg ; here also is no planting of incon- 

 gruous specimens and no out-of-place flower-bedding. 



The park of Muskau teaches the same lesson, and under 

 conditions closely resembling those of our Middle States. In- 

 deed, American trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants are very 

 numerous in this noble park ; the Tulip-tree, Magnolia, Wild 

 Cherry, Witch Hazel, Withe-rod, Bush Honeysuckle, Golden 

 Rods and Asters are harmonized with native plants on every 

 hand. It would be next to impossible to find an American 

 park in which these things have been planted as freely. 



Our country has her Russias, her Silesias, her Rivieras ; and 

 many types of scenery which are all her own besides. Are 

 we to attempt to bring all to the English smoothness? Rather 

 let us try to perfect each type in its own place. 

 Boston. Charles Eliot. 



Conifers and their Cultivation. 



"T T is a point of theory that it is not safe to manure the land 

 ■'■ in winch Conifers are planted, so that there will be any 

 danger of bringing the fertilizer into direct contact with the 

 roots ; at the same time, I can affirm from the experience of 

 many years, that every variety of this great and beautiful class 

 of trees will prosper in a rich soil better than in a poor one, 

 and in a soil that is moderately moist better than in one that is 

 naturally arid. Yet it is true that when both coniferous and 

 deciduous trees are planted in a very poor and dry soil the 

 Conifers will be likely to do rather better than the others. 



Most gardeners and cultivators of Conifers cherish the old 

 English superstition that the great thing about a coniferous 

 tree is its leader, the top shoot, which points directly upward 

 and leads in the growth of the tree. If by any accident this 

 shoot is broken oft', they regard the plant as ruined ; and if by 

 accident, instead of one leader, there come to be two, the 

 situation, in the opinion of these cultivators, is monstrous and 

 without remedy. But, after many years' constant study and 

 cultivation of Conifers of every kind — American, European, 

 Asiatic — I am prepared to maintain that this superstition 

 is even more absurd than the general run of such cranky 

 creations of the human mind. There is no description of 

 tree which stands the use of the pruning-knife better than 

 the Conifer ; and there is no part of a Conifer which 



