November id, i 8g 7 . J 



Garden and Forest. 



439 



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. NOVEMBER 10, 1897. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



TAGE. 



Editorial Articles : — New Dangers to Public Parks. 439 



Report of Boston Park Commissioners 440 



Notes on Cultivated Conifers. — VI C. S. S. 440 



Plant Notes: — Spiraea arguta. (With figure.) 442 



Foreign Correspondence: — London Letter it*. Watson. 442 



Cultural Department : — Carnation Notes William N. Craig. 444 



The Storing of Bulbs E. O. Orfet. 445 



The Forest: — Natural Reforestation on the Mountains of Northern Colo- 

 rado. — II Professor Charles S. Crandall. 4 4r> 



Exhibitions : — Chrysanthemums in P.oston 447 



Notes 44S 



Illustration : — Spiraea arguta. Fig. 56 443 



New Dangers to Public Parks. 



IN praising the man whose recent death means a 

 heavy loss to the readers of this journal, and in 

 noting his long usefulness as the most keen-eyed and 

 devoted defender of the public parks of New York, the 

 daily papers have dwelt forcibly upon the dangers which 

 threaten these parks from the "assaults of the ignorant and 

 vicious." But the parks are threatened by other dangers, 

 newer than these, more subtile and insidious, less easily 

 recognized as dangers, and therefore less likely to be 

 frankly and forcibly resisted. And the consciousness of 

 this fact greatly augments, among those who keep close 

 watch upon our parks, the regret which every intelligent 

 American must have felt when he heard of the death of 

 Mr. Stiles. 



The ignorant and the vicious have long been enemies 

 of the parks — persons who deny their utility because it 

 cannot be translated into terms of dollars and cents ; 

 those who are eager to injure them for the sake of 

 giving to the city something, advantageous, perhaps, in 

 its own way, which they think of more " practical 

 benefit " ; who wish to exploit them for their own profit 

 or who plan to fill them with ugly objects ; who 

 barbarously injure their grass, trees, flowers or monu- 

 ments for their own mischievous pleasure : or who 

 think they know more about caring for them than their 

 professional superintendents, and therefore try to " arouse 

 the public " whenever a dying tree is cut or any other 

 needful and desirable work proposed. 



These people represent the unintelligent, uncultivated 

 and unconscientious elements of the population. They 

 are now recognized as enemies of the public, which in 

 some degree is on its guard against them. Teachers, cham- 

 pions and leaders are still needed to defend the parks from 

 their possible attacks. But the public is now easily roused 

 to oppose their worst efforts ; and it is probable that no such 

 bold assault upon Central Park will again be attempted 

 as the effort made a few years ago to run a speedway 

 through it, or the equally horrible one to turn part of 



it into a barren parade-ground. Ami the public may like- 

 wise be counted upon, although not so confidently, to 

 forbid the attempts of individuals to dot it with penny-in- 

 the-slot machines or newspaper kiosks, or otherwise to 

 disfigure it and to pervert it from its true service for the 

 profit of personal greed under the pretense of supplying 

 special ''conveniences" or "pleasures" to its frequent- 

 ers. 



The danger to our pleasure-grounds from engineers 

 necessarily employed upon them, bul devoid of the right 

 artistic feeling and unwilling to abide by the counsels of 

 landscape-gardeners, has recently been dwelt upon in these 

 pages and may for the moment be passed by. What we 

 wish now to point out is that it seems probable that more 

 and more schemes to further definitely intellectual or 

 aesthetic ends will be prosecuted without due regard to the 

 integrity and beauty of our parks as works of landscape-art, 

 and that the patrons of science and literature and of art 

 of other kinds are likely to try to injure our great artistic 

 creations like Central and Prospect Parks. And this is, of 

 course, a very insidious danger, as the schemes may be 

 worthy in themselves, and the people who urge them are 

 those whom the public has been told it should trust most 

 implicitly in intellectual and artistic matters. 



It is at least a question whether the new Public Library 

 should have been allowed to claim the site of the old 

 reservoir on Fifth Avenue, which otherwise would have 

 been added to the area of Bryant Park. The Metropolitan 

 Museum should not have been given a site within Central 

 Park, but placed beyond its limits, as the Museum of 

 Natural History was upon its western borders. And the 

 stand which Mr. Stiles took, as Park Commissioner, in 

 opposing the desires of the Botanical Society — which, if 

 carried out, will seriously impair the peculiar beauty of 

 Bronx Park and its utility as a public pleasure-ground- 

 must convince all the readers of this journal, who know 

 of his devotion to botany and horticulture and to the 

 task of spreading an interest in them among the people at 

 large, that here, too, a great mistake has been made, and 

 by just the kind of persons who ought to be trustworthy 

 guides with regard to the right conservation of the 

 public's park-lands. 



These few instances illustrate one phase of apprehension 

 — the danger that buildings for public purposes will more 

 and more absorb the narrow and precious spaces set apart 

 for the people's refreshment and enjoyment. Each such 

 instance is deplorable in itself and as a precedent for 

 future enterprises of similar kind. Nor is New York the 

 only city which needs to be warned along these lines. 

 The beautiful park which Mr. Olmsted laid out in Buffalo 

 is threatened with the erection of buildings which would 

 be public benefits if placed elsewhere, but public misfor- 

 tunes as features in a naturalistic park. Even the small 

 and incomparably precious State Reservation at Niagara 

 Falls has had to be defended against a misfortune of a like 

 sort; and there is no town in the United States whose 

 parks are safe in this respect. It is high time that the pub- 

 lic should awaken to the fact that no buildings whatso 

 except those absolutely required for park purposes proper, 

 should be allowed within a park, and that the projectors of 

 all others should buy their own sites 1 >r, if these must be pur- 

 chased with public money, thai they should be placed 

 outside of park limits. 



This is not merely because every loot of open public 

 land is precious as such and should be held sacred to serve 

 the health, the refreshment, and the outdoor pleasures of the 

 people. It is also because, almost without exception, our 

 pleasure-grounds are works of landscape-art in the exact 

 sense — naturalistic parks — and are necessarily injured in 

 their artistic character by the intrusion of buildings even of 

 [he most beautiful kinds. This is the point which many 

 artists do not understand, and. therefore as they are 

 naturally regarded as the highest authorities in arl 

 matters the damage which may be done to our parks by 

 those who have not a true comprehension of them is. per- 



