I 12 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 474 



the rest of their class with some wholesome respect for 

 public sentiment if they take no delight in rural beauty. 



Sculpture in Gardens. 



" T F those restless spirits that possessed the Gadarene 

 swine were to enter into the statues of Edinburgh, and 

 if the whole stony and brazen troop were to hurry and 

 hustle and huddle headlong down the steepest place near 

 the city and into the deepest part of the Firth of Forth, art 

 would sustain no serious loss.'' This is the picturesque lan- 

 guage of Lord Rosebery in a recent speech, and it is quoted 

 by Mr. William Robinson in his paper, The Garden, in an 

 article in which he briskly attacks the use of sculpture in 

 gardens. He goes on to say that the Pall Mall Gazette, in 

 commenting on Lord Rosebery s words, expressed the wish 

 that the "London monstrosities" would unite for the same 

 sort of rush into the Thames Mr. Robinson's comment is 

 that when politicians and journalists begin to ask for deliv- 

 erance from the statuary with which city squares and 

 streets are adorned the lovers of nature are not likely to 

 be infatuated with this kind of adornment for gardens, 

 although there seems to be a renewed effort by some 

 writers on garden art to make more of stone and less of 

 verdure. It is often observed that good statues are more 

 rare than good examples of painting or of the other fine 

 arts, and this is one reason why the use of statuary in gar- 

 dens is rarely effective, because a bad statue, however well 

 it may be placed, can never be pleasing. Sculptors of dis- 

 tinction, as Mr. Robinson reminds us, do not usually con- 

 cern themselves with garden designs, and when the architects 

 or landscape-gardeners attempt to imitate the human form 

 the work is foredoomed to failure. Probably no one who 

 realizes the proper use of natural beauty in a garden would 

 think of it as a place for exhibiting bad art in stone or 

 cement. Every one has seen beautiful old walls in Eng- 

 lish gardens, and there is a kind of beauty in the architec- 

 tural features of the old Italian gardens, although many 

 people suspect that it is the beauty of decay ; that the 

 broken columns and crumbling statues are more impressive 

 now than they were in their prime, from the very fact that 

 their dilapidation tells their age and invests them with a 

 halo of romance. However, we will let Mr. Robinson 

 speak for himself, and quote the main part of his article : 



Many foreign gardens are bestrown witli statues and sculp- 

 ture, though in northern countries like ours a statue of real 

 value as a work of art deserves to be protected by a building 

 of some kind, and the scattering about of numerous statues of 

 third order of artistic value, or of no merit at all, which we 

 see in some Italian gardens, often gives a very ugly effect. If 

 a place is used for the exhibition of sculpture, well and good. 

 But let us not in that case call it a garden, as it ceases to be one 

 in the true sense. The great costs of such works should pre- 

 clude their use, if there is no other reason, and getting the 

 many beautiful living things which our gardens may be a 

 home for, is the best use for the money we spend on them. 

 The dotting of statues about the public and private gardens of 

 Paris and London is destructive of repose, exactly in the de- 

 gree to which it is carried. In Britain, statues are often of 

 cast material, and what their effect is all who have seen them 

 know. The people who use gardens to be spotted about with 

 works of art do not understand that the garden is the best of 

 all places to show the work of nature, and the most beautiful 

 of natural forms is what one should expect to see here. The 

 earliest recollection I have of any large garden or country-seat 

 is of one strown with the remains of statues, and to explain its 

 effect I quote from one of the novels of Monsieur Victor Cher- 

 buliez : " He passed before the open gate of a spacious garden 

 which formerly presented to the admiration of visitors beauti- 

 fully straight alleys bordered with nicely trimmed globe and 

 cone-shaped Yews, shrubs arranged in angles or in chess- 

 board form or devised to imitate a wall, with sheared trees and 

 statues everywhere. It was one of those classical gardens 

 whose planners prided themselves upon being able to give 

 nature lessons in good behavior, to teach her geometry and 

 the fine art of irreproachable line. But nature abhors such 

 lines. She is a reluctant pupil of geometers, and submits to 

 their tyranny with an ill grace. The garden which Lionel en- 

 tered had been badly kept after the death of the Baron, and 



decay had degenerated into ruin. The large basin no longer 

 held any water, and the dolphins which once spouted it from 

 their throats seemed to be asking each other why they were in 

 this world. But the statues had suffered most. Moss and a 

 green damp had invaded them as if some plague or leprosy 

 had covered them with sores, and pitiless time had mutilated 

 and insulted them. One had lost an arm, another a leg, and 

 almost all, their noses. There was a Neptune with a damaged 

 face and nothing left but his beard and half his trident. Rain 

 water stood in the hollow neck of a Jupiter without a head, and 

 a little Pan, with his back against a rock in a thicket, stood 

 where he had blown his pipes for near two centuries, but he 

 had no longer any pipes or hands or breath." 



Mr. Robinson adds to this a suggestion which certainly 

 ought to be considered, namely, that while stone will wear 

 away in any climate, it will crumble most rapidly in the 

 cold north, where frosts and thaws and rain and drought 

 occur in such severe succession. Stone-work, wherever it 

 is unprotected in northern latitudes, rapidly disintegrates. 

 The face of a marble statue will be seamed and scarred in 

 a few years, and stone balustrades and terrace- work quickly 

 decay. 



Pinus palustris in France. 



SO far as I know, the two trees figured on page 1 15 are 

 the only Long-leaved Pines of respectable size now 

 existing in France. They stand at Geneste, some eight 

 miles from Bordeaux, near the border of the sand hillocks 

 which stretch to the sea and near the famous Medoc dis- 

 trict. And yet the Longdeaved Pine once created consid- 

 erable excitement in France, and large returns were 

 anticipated from planting it. The journals and reviews of 

 about 1830 contain many references to the tree, and Francois 

 Andre Michauxread a lecture before the Royal Agricultural 

 Society in praise of its timber. He considered the name 

 Palustris, given to it by Miller, as inappropriate in view of 

 the sandy soil where the forests of this Pine grew, and he 

 added that, if we can judge from the language of Miller 

 himself, there were more specimens of the tree growing in 

 English gardens in the middle of the last century than there 

 were in his own time. Michaux stated that trees near 

 Philadelphia had endured a temperature of fifteen degrees, 

 Reaumur, uninjured, which testified to its hardiness, and 

 considering its ability to grow in the poorest soil, in connec- 

 tion with the beauty, strength and durability of the wood 

 and its capacity to produce turpentine, it ought to become 

 of economic importance in the south and west of France. 



In the same year seeds were distributed by the Minister 

 of Agriculture among all who were willing to experiment 

 with them, and quite a quantity was sown in Fromont, the 

 celebrated establishment of Soulange-Bodin, to furnish 

 amateurs with the young plants. Souiange-Bodin made 

 an extensive report in 1S31 of his sowings, and referring 

 to the prospects of the tree he says that " it ought to suc- 

 ceed in the Live Oak region," which was an accurate 

 statement. 



To return to Geneste. The estate was then owned by 

 Monsieur Ivoy, a gentleman interested in agriculture and 

 forestry, who planted in his park a good many American 

 trees, especially Oaks and conifers. In 1 83 1 he sowed some 

 poor seed of Long-leaved Pine, and the twenty-three seed- 

 lings that resulted looked like tufts of grass without stems 

 at the end of the year. Some of these were planted not far 

 from the house, and thirteen years later they were all thrifty 

 but one, the largest being twelve metres high. The only 

 care given to the trees was some superficial hoeing, and 

 last December one of the trees measured eighteen metres 

 in height, and another sixteen metres, while the circum- 

 ference of the first at one metre from the ground was 1.70 

 metres, and of the other was 1. 50 metres. 



Close to these Long-leaved Pines is planted a Loblolly 

 Pine, and the volume of this tree is more than twice that of 

 the Long-leaved Pine. We gather from the notes of Mon- 

 sieur Ivoy that they were planted the same year. Another 

 plantation of Pinus palustris was made in 1827 by Mrs. 

 Aglae Adanson in her park near Moulins. Three or four 



