346 



Garden and Forest. 



[September 12, 1888. 



between two very lig-ht-colored Willows — the combination 

 ugly in itself, and not properly softened by masses of a 

 soberer hue. And then look in every direction at the scores 

 of formal flower beds planted solid with the crudest hues that 

 the ingenuity of the gardener's craft has been able to produce. 

 Were nine-tenths of them away the garden would profit im- 

 mensely, and the value of tlie remainder would be as greatly 

 increased. There is often a place for such beds in a garden 

 design, and in the Public Garden there is a very good place. 

 The long, straight path, taking in the conspicuous bridge and 

 ending at Washington's statue, is a formal feature dictated by 

 convenience, and might appropriately and with good effect be 

 bordered throughout with formal beds. Thus the garden 

 would be enlivened, yet its more natural parts .would not be 

 disturbed, and the taste of the public for such beds would be 

 as well met as by the multitude of beds which are now mis- 

 placed. Misplaced they are indeed. Nowhere can one walk 

 a hundred steps without coming upon a new one, nowhere 

 can one look in the hope of finding a restful verdant view 

 without seeing them scattered about at random in the most 

 glaringly false situations. Nor is it easy, upon examination, 

 to find one of them which is intrinsically good in color. The 

 Coleus "Golden Bedder," with its vivid, impure yellow tint, 

 and the " Crystal Palace Gem " Geranium, with its cherry- 

 colored blossoms in contrast with yellow-green leaves, are 

 among the most hideous products of recent horticulture, and 

 some of the Alternantheras are almost as bad. Yet it would 

 l)e impossible to count the hundreds of these plants which 

 have been employed ; and even when better ones are used 

 they are seldom well combined. Greatly as the modern gar- 

 dener loves the bedding-out system, he has small idea of 

 the possibilities of beauty it might possess in hands guided 

 by a good eye for form and color. The " crazy quilt " seems 

 to be the work of art which he most earnestly-desires to rival. 

 There is, however, at least one instance in the Public Garden 

 of a really good design — the central panels, to nortli and 

 south of the border which encircles Washington's statue, 

 and whicli is chiefly composed of those succulent-leaved, 

 low-growing, formally-shaped plants (Sedumsand Echeverias) 

 which above all others are adapted for the purpose. Here 

 tlie combination of a brown-leaved Oxalis, starred by a few 

 small yellow blossoms with the pink-streaked blue-grays of 

 .Stone Crops, is adnn'rably accomplished as regards both line 

 and color. If the edging close to the statue and the interven- 

 ing Palms were removed, and if all the panels of the border 

 were as good as these two, the arrangement would be a 

 model of excellence, alike in execution and in application. 



But these formal beds of gaudy color are not the only things 

 which help to make the Public Garden as restless and inhar- 

 monious as possible. Wherever, on the edges of the lawns, 

 there is not a bed, there is sure to be a tropical plant utterly 

 out of keeping with its environment — a Screw Palm, an 

 Agave, a Yucca, an Auraucaria, a Dracjena, or an India- 

 rubber tree. Or if not one of these, then a tree or shrub with 

 vivid leaves or an eccentric form. Looking northward from 

 the bridge, for instance, one sees, to the left of the water, 

 first a vase tilled with an intfermi.xtiu'e of hardy and tropical 

 plants, then a Golden Poplar, a yellow Retinospora, a Kilmar- 

 nock Willow; then a Golden Elder in a pot, backed by a small 

 English Elm, another Golden Poplar, and a wand-like Irish 

 Yew; then a little Weeping- Willow, and a half dead, pendulous 

 Purple Beech, overhanging an immense bed of Coleus, in the 

 shape of a double horse-shoe ; this between the winding path 

 and the water, and across the path another big bed casually 

 placed on a sloping piece of lawn and flanked by an India- 

 rubber plant and a Draca^ia that looks a good deal like a 

 broom on end — all within the space of a few feet, in a spot 

 where surely some natural arrangement was called for, and 

 all in no sense combined or disposed, but spotted about at 

 random. It is needless to ask where is the peacefulness, the 

 repose, of such a landscape passage — where is its sense, its 

 beauty of any sort .'' It has variety enough and to spare, but 

 no trace of unity ; contrasts of the most glaring kind, but no 

 faintest shadow of harmony. Nothing helps the effect of any-' 

 thing else, and nothing looks well in itself being so palpably 

 out of place. Of these poor, misused, forlorn looking tropical 

 plants, something the same may be said as was said of the 

 formal beds — lioth l)ecause they are known not to be natural 

 products of our clime, and because they are formal, architec- 

 tural, in expression, their place is in combination with archi- 

 tecture. On the bridge, or by the pedestal of a statue, some 

 of them might look well. Mingled with shrubberies, or iso- 

 lated on a lawn, they are ruined themselves and ruin their 

 surroundings. 



More than this might be said of the defects of the jnililic 



garden — something, for instance, of the many vases which 

 are also isolated on the lawns and even in the middle of the 

 pond; of the plot which is filled with Aloes, Agaves and Cacti, 

 in futile imitation of a Mexican garden, crowded together so 

 their own forms do not show, and as out of place here as a 

 giraffe fietween the traces of a Boston Herdic ; of the rock- 

 garden built up under an Elm tree, in a flat situation, and filled 

 with another heterogeneous mixture of inappropriate plants. 

 But all I wish to do is to beg the many lovers of nature and 

 lovers of art who daily cross this garden to stop a moment 

 and ask themselves whether it is really as it should be, and, 

 as well as I could, to indicate the point of view froin which 

 such an inquiry should be made. And for this purpose surely 

 enough has been said. M. G. Van Rensselaer. 



Marion, Mass. 



[The Public Garden in Boston has many defects, and 

 it certainly does not represent, as might perhaps be 

 expected, the true and actual condition of the gardening 

 art in this country, as judged b)' its best examples. It 

 must be said, however, that the garden has been greatly 

 improved under its present management, and that in sev- 

 eral respects it is much less objectionable than it was a 

 few years ago. It is now much better kept in every way 

 than formerly ; the number of flower-beds has been re- 

 duced, and several useless walks have been done awa}' 

 with. The radical faults with the garden have come 

 largely from an entire disregard of any fixed or estab- 

 lished plan for planting, if any one has ever had any such 

 plan or any clear or definite idea on the subject. Flower- 

 beds have been made, and trees and shrubs have been 

 stuck in year after year, not as a part of a carefully studied 

 plan, but haphazard, here and there, or wherever a piece of 

 open turf seemed to offer an opportunit}^ to place a horti- 

 cultural novelty. The result has been that the garden is 

 now spotted over in every direction with the most incon- 

 gruous, and often the most absurd, plants, and that there 

 is nowhere, in a garden of twenty-five acres, a single 

 quiet stretch of turf or a single spot where the e)'e can find 

 repose. This feeling of a want of restfulness, too, is in- 

 creased by the fact that the boundaries have been left 

 too much exposed, so that it is impossible, within the 

 garden, to obtain anything like a feeli-ng of being in the 

 countr)'. The cost of maintaining the garden is enor- 

 mous; much of this money could be saved and the garden 

 immensely improved, if half the flower-beds and a great 

 many of the walks were turfed over. The bedding 

 gardening, both spring and summer, while perhaps no 

 worse in design and execution than that seen in Hyde Park 

 and in Battersea Park in London, certainly is not artistic. 

 The plants are not always well selected and the combina- 

 tions of colors are often appalling. The truth is, that the 

 artistic arrangement of bright colored flowers or foliage 

 plants in masses, Avhether they are Tulips or Coleus and 

 Scarlet Geraniums, requires great artistic feeling, long 

 practice and rare good judgment. Gardeners rarely pos- 

 sess the first of these qualities, while artists, who might 

 make harmonious combinations of color, lack the techni- 

 cal knowledge and the interest in such combinations. 

 The strongest argument against the bedding out system 

 as a system is found in the difficulty of finding men 

 who can do it in a truly artistic manner. The French 

 make such combinations of color better than any 

 other people, but even in Paris really good com- 

 binations of colors, are rather the exception than 

 the rule. English work of this sort, as might have 

 been expected, is certainl)' far inferior to the French, 

 while outside of Chicago, and possibly Pittsburgh, there is 

 nothing so bad in the United States as the bedding in the 

 public and many of the private English gardens. Another 

 objection to elaborate bedding gardening — and this is true 

 as well of any absorbing specialty in gardening — is that it 

 inevitably leads to the neglect of other departments. The 

 Public Garden well illustrates this. Constant daily atten- 

 tion is given to the flower-beds, which are weeded and 

 pinched and cut religiously, while the grass is allowed to 

 be overrun with weeds, the edgings of the walks are 



