March 31, 1897.] 



Garden and Forest. 



121 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office: Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POST-OFFICE AT NEW YORK:. N. V. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31, 1897. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Article: — Garden Design 121 



The Ideal Grape. T. !'. Mituson. 122 



The Cy press-free ot Tule. (With figure.) 123 



The Flower Industries of Southern France and Paris Edward Conner: 123 



Foreign Correspondence: — London Letter W. Watson. 124 



Plant Notes J. N. Gerard. 126 



Cultural Department: — Erythroniums J. N. Gerard. 126 



Fancy-leaved Caladiums G. W Oliver. 126 



Nelumbiurns and Hardy Nvuiphoaas IV. Tricker. \-2-j 



Soils and Potting '. T. D. Hatfield. 127 



Azalea Indica William Seott. 12S 



Correspondence: — Is the White Pine Doomed? .. B. E. Fernovu 128 



The New Forest Reserves H T. Etwes 129 



Exhib tions : — Spring Flower Show in P.oston 129 



Notes.. 130 



Illustration : — The Cypress-tree of Tule, Fig. 15 125 



Garden Design. 



I AST November Mr. Inigo Thomas delivered one of his 

 _^ periodical addresses on Garden Art before a London 

 society of architects, and it has been published in successive 

 numbers of The American Architect and Building News. 

 This lecture, like the one he delivered a year ago, and 

 which was also republished in this country, is interesting, 

 and to a certain extent instructive, although it contains 

 nothing which had not been said in The Formal Garden in 

 England, a book written by Mr. Thomas in collaboration 

 with another young architect', Mr. Reginald R. Blomfield, 

 some half-dozen years ago. Mr. Thomas describes with 

 sympathy some of the old gardens of Italy, of Scotland and 

 of England, and almost induces the reader to share with 

 him a little of the enthusiasm which he thinks he feels over 

 Yews pleached into cubes and obelisks, geometrical designs 

 in Box and compartment gardens. We cannot but agree 

 with him that there was design of these old places, and 

 that even in northern latitudes and in modern days it 

 might be possible, under certain conditions, to connect a 

 garden of this sort with certain kinds of architecture that 

 would be satisfying from many points of view. But Mr. 

 Thomas does not rest here. He continues to deny that 

 there can be anything like art in gardens of any other kind. 

 He theorizes upon the assertion, so often made, that in the 

 very nature of things such an art as landscape-gardening 

 is impossible, and that formal gardens alone show any- 

 thing like design. This means that one can have a certain 

 narrow architectural training and skill and yet possess no 

 sympathetic appreciation of charming scenery and no 

 feeling for natural beauty. Painters of landscape know 

 that there can be beauty of composition in trees and 

 shrubs and grass naturally arranged, and few people have 

 their sense of beauty so deadened by technical study that 

 they do not enjoy this beauty as it appears in nature. 

 Whenever a planter so models his grounds and so ar- 

 ranges the elements of verdure he employs as to give to 

 the beholder the impression of a beautiful natural group, 

 there can be no question but that he has created a work 

 of art. 

 The fact is that there is more than one kind of a garden 



and that gardens are made to fulfill many different pur- 

 poses. It is not logical, therefore, to hold that because 

 one kind may be good for a certain restricted use all the 

 other kinds are essentially bad. Of course, there are bad 

 gardens of all kinds, and the most sturdy reactionist would 

 hardly claim that all formal or architectural gardens are 

 good, and we have, therefore, tried to learn what are the 

 essentials of a good garden according to Mr. Thomas. He 

 asserts that he is advocating principles, and the most com- 

 plete statement of them is found in a passage where he 

 insists primarily on "an enclosure, decided and uncom- 

 promising, not of sunk fences or iron palings, but of good 

 honest masonry high enough to cast broad shadows early 

 and late and keep the wind from the flowers and fruit- 

 trees ; then subdivisions either by subsidiary walls or 

 hedges of Yew or Box, almost as dense as the masonry 

 itself; then that the proportioning of the surface of the 

 ground has much the same treatment that the designer 

 deals out to the facade of a building." Now, there are 

 many places and many climates where a garden treated on 

 this plan by a genuine artist could be made a most appro- 

 priate and attractive addition to a house, but every reader 

 can recall some country place without its high and uncom- 

 promising wall which has the same sense of shelter and 

 seclusion by its position and distance from the roadway 

 and its background of foliage, and perhaps its protection of 

 a belt of shrubbery dense enough to serve as a hedge. We 

 know many charming places in America that would be 

 disfigured by a high-walled enclosure with subdivisions as 

 dense as a wall. And yet we should like to see some artist 

 of real creative ability attempt a garden of this kind in 

 connection with a house of some pretensions in America. 

 Formal gardening as it is known here means little more 

 than ribbon lines, or geometrical flower-beds and a straight 

 hedge or two, and it would be an education in garden-art 

 to see an American realization of Mr. Thomas's ideal. We 

 have few opportunities here to see high garden walls such 

 as Mr. Thomas commends. These walls have a genuine 

 use in England, for against them fruit-trees and vines are 

 trained to catch the warmth of the scanty sunshine. We do 

 not train our Pear-trees or Peach-trees on espaliers in this 

 country, and perhaps in our bright sunshine the walls 

 would look hard and staring. Since art is the decoration of 

 a service and never runs counter to common-sense princi- 

 ples or every-day usefulness, it may well be that each 

 country and climate should develop a style of gardening 

 distinctly its own, and we probably should make quite as 

 serious a mistake in adopting the design of a garden which 

 would be beautiful and useful in England as we did in the 

 beginning of the century in using so many of the trees and 

 shrubs which flourish in England, and in not availing our- 

 selves of the treasures of our woods. 



But what we set out primarily to notice was an error 

 into which Mr. Thomas falls at the beginning of his address, 

 and which ought not to go uncorrected. His model gar- 

 den is one of symmetrical spaces whose design bears a 

 decided relation to the architecture of the house. Indeed, 

 he asserts that nothing else is a real garden and that what 

 has passed under that name for nearly a century would 

 have been called a wilderness in better days. But he adds 

 — and here is the error — that the leading purpose and chief 

 interest of planters who use the natural arrangement is to 

 have a " growth of rare shrubs and plants." This is fun- 

 damentally false and it shows how superficial Mr. Thomas's 

 information is in regard to landscape-art. The real 

 master of garden-art is not a mere horticulturist nor one 

 who aims to gather a collection of rarities and have a 

 museum of living plants. There are, it is true, enthusiasts 

 who take pride in showing visitors the latest Cypripedium 

 or a new Birch from Manchuria that no one else has grown. 

 This passion, however, can exist without the slightest taste 

 in the arrangement of plants or the slightest feeling for the 

 poetical charm of a landscape. To the real master of the 

 natural style of landscape-art the individual plant is only 

 an element in a picture, and it is always subordinate to the 



