44© 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 507. 



haps, more to he dreaded than that from any other class of 

 men. 



It was hailed as a very good sign when, only a few years 

 ago, American architects began to interest themselves in 

 the environment of their buildings, and to regard it as an 

 integral part of the works of art which they wished to 

 create ; but there are many indications that it is 

 not always realized that while in some cases planted 

 grounds must be mere adjuncts to buildings, in other 

 cases the grounds are themselves the primary and im- 

 portant work of art, and that in the latter case no 

 artificial object should be placed within them which does 

 not serve their own proper purposes or enhance their 

 own intrinsic beauty. As yet architects and sculptors 

 do not always understand these truths. Individually and 

 in corporate ways they have recently shown a great interest 

 in the parks ; they have done many things to improve 

 them, and have prevented the doing of many things which 

 would have injured them. But they have also proposed, if 

 not achieved, some things which would be of lasting 

 detriment ; and the danger is that, as their interest in 

 our pleasure-grounds develops they will more and more 

 come to regard them as mere frames and settings for 

 their own products, or possible exponents of their own 

 gardening ideas. If sculptors and architects ever regard 

 our parks simply as "good places" for the display of 

 monuments and statues, they may grievously wrong the 

 community by defacing its most precious artistic posses- 

 sions. A man naturally intent upon showing his own work 

 to advantage is easily tempted to think that the best site for 

 it is the place where it will be most conspicuous; and the 

 wide-open areas of a park specially appeal to his desires 

 in so crowded and ill-planned a city as New York ; but 

 it is certainly clear that parks like Central Park are in 

 themselves more valuable, even from the artistic point of 

 view, than any object which can be placed within them, and 

 that their beauty is of such a kind that it may easily be 

 marred by the intrusion of an object in itself artistic. An 

 architect may find it difficult to realize that the creation 

 of a formal passage may fatally injure a work of landscape- 

 gardening, planned in accordance with artistic laws less 

 fixed and rigid than those of their own art, but none the 

 less logical and binding, and this point of view sometimes 

 leads him to think he understands the whole subject and is 

 capable of " improving " the best work of such a master as 

 Mr. Olmsted. This is no vague and unsupported assertion. 

 It is well known that one of the most prominent and highly 

 cultivated architects in New York has long declared that a 

 straight boulevard ought to be run all along the eastern side 

 of Central Park, within its borders, and has actually pre- 

 pared a plan for such a boulevard and wished to have it 

 adopted by the city authorities — a plan for a piece of in- 

 artistic vandalism quite as glaring as the once-proposed 

 speedway along the opposite side of the park. 



In short, Central Park and almost all other American parks 

 are naturalistic parks — are works of landscape-gardening, 

 and their artistic value and greatest usefulness will be im- 

 paired by the intrusion of any building, however excellent 

 it may be in design or useful in purpose, or of any statue 

 or other monumental work, however great its artistic or 

 historical value. Our great parks are country parks, and 

 they are valuable to city communities not as museums 

 or statue galleries, but as bits of country where the weary 

 and discouraged can draw new breaths of life and hope 

 from country sights and scenes. 



industriously carried on during the year. About two mil- 

 lions and a half are still needed to finish them accord- 

 ing to the original designs of the landscape-gardeners, 

 including nearly $300,000 for buildings. The Commissioners 

 suggest, however, that these estimates can be considerably 

 reduced. The most significant thing in the report to those 

 interested in the best development and care of the Boston 

 parks is the announcement that during the year the services 

 of a competent superintendent and general manager for the 

 system have been secured, and that the irresponsible dual 

 management, which has always-existed since Boston has 

 had parks, has at last been abandoned. 



The following extract from the report of the landscape- 

 gardeners, Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot, to the Commissioners 

 is of such general interest to all parkmakers that we are 

 glad of an opportunity to reproduce it for their benefit : 

 "There are certain parts of the parks, especially along the 

 borders of waters and in existing rocky woodlands, where 

 we have designed to have unusually wild and natural 

 effects. For the gardener to plant in such situations exotic 

 trees and showy garden shrubs and perennials would go 

 far toward defeating the essential elements of our designs. 

 The roads and paths of 'country parks' are placed in cer- 

 tain positions so as to command certain landscapes or bits 

 of scenery thus and so, and conversely the vegetation, 

 which in this climate makes the scenery, must be con- 

 trolled, encouraged or modified accordingly. Unless 

 planting, thinning and clearing are thus done sympatheti- 

 cally, the courses of the roads become meaningless and 

 their cost is wasted." 



The Twenty-second Annual Report of the Commission- 

 ers of the Department of Parks of the City of Boston is 

 before us and shows that up to the end of last year the 

 Department had expended $6,165,780.47 for land and 

 $7,568,099.24 for construction, or with $13,356.10 for bet- 

 terment expenses, a total of $13,747 -35.81, against which 

 $361,334-96 has been collected for betterments. The re- 

 port shows that the work of completing the parks was 



Notes 011 Cultivated Conifers. — VI. 



THUYA, or Arbor-vita, is a genus of four species, two 

 being North American and two east Asiatic. It is 

 well distinguished by its erect cones ripening at the end of 

 iheir first season and composed of oblong, slightly imbri- 

 cated, acute scales usually with from two to four seeds 

 under each scale. All the species are pyramidal aromatic 

 trees with flattened, lateral, pendulous or erect branchlets 

 disposed in one horizontal plane and forming an open 

 distichous spray, and dimorphic leaves. The species are 

 grouped in two sections — Euthuya, to which belong the 

 two American and the Japanese species, and which is dis- 

 tinguished by pendulous branchlets and thin, leathery, 

 oblong, acute, mucronulate cone-scales, those of the two or 

 three middle ranks being larger than the others and fertile, 

 and by its compressed light chestnut-brown seeds with 

 broad lateral wings and minute hilums. The second sec- 

 tion, Biota, with a single Chinese species, is distinguished 

 by erect branchlets and thicker and conspicuously umbo- 

 nate cone-scales, the lowest four usually being fertile, and 

 by its much-thickened dark red-purple seeds rounded or 

 obscurely angled on the back and marked by large oblong 

 conspicuous hilums. 



The type of the genus, Thuya occidentalis, the Arbor- 

 vitae of gardens, is a native of eastern North America, 

 being distributed from Nova Scotia to the shores of James 

 Bay and Lake Winnipeg, and southward through the 

 northern states and along the Alleghany Mountains to 

 southern Virginia. It is an inhabitant of wet ground, 

 often at the north covering great areas of springy swamp- 

 lands with impenetrable forests or growing on the rocky 

 borders of streams in situations where its roots can obtain 

 an abundant supply of water, while at the south, where it 

 is comparatively rare, it is found only on the banks of 

 mountain streams. Under favorable conditions it occa- 

 sionally attains the height of fifty or sixty feet and forms a 

 stout much-branched and buttressed trunk sometimes six 

 feet in diameter. Such specimens, however, are excep- 

 tionally large, and trees thirty or forty feet in height, with 

 trunks two or three feet in diameter, are much more com- 

 mon. The Arbor-vita- was probably the first American 

 tree cultivated in the Old World, as it was known in Paris 

 gardens before the middle of the sixteenth century, and 



