382 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 344. 



most popular varieties can all be bought of our growers. 

 If it has been our purpose to try some of the rare species 

 of Tulips or the new or rare varieties of Narcissi, Fritil- 

 laries, Scyllas, Ornithogalums or other plants of this class, 

 we should have ordered the bulbs months ago from Euro- 

 pean houses, as was recommended in these columns 

 at the proper time. But our own dealers keep a large 

 stock of the most approved varieties, so that every garden 

 can be furnished with great abundance and variety. In- 

 deed, the best way for one who is something of a novice 

 is always to buy of American seedsmen, and if he wishes to 

 enlarge his collection he can study the European cata- 

 logues another year and order his seedsman to import for 

 him such varieties as are not kept in stock here. 



The point to be emphasized is that we cannot have a 

 spring garden if we wait until spring to make it, any more 

 than we can have a corn crop by planting the seed in 

 autumn. There will be many bright days yet, but every 

 hour of growing weather will be needed to prepare our 

 plants for facing the winter in good condition, so that they 

 will promptly respond to the first impulse which comes with 

 the annual resurrection in spring. A good gardener must 

 always be working for the future, and sometimes for the 

 distant future, and this discipline of forethought and 

 patience and hope is not the least of the advantages which 

 come to him who tries in earnest to make the most of his 

 opportunities in a garden. 



Carpet Bedding. 



WHOEVER has listened to popular criticism of the 

 gardening in a public park has observed that no 

 part of it attracts so much attention as the bedding plants, 

 and especially those which are worked into what are 

 known as carpet or pattern beds. The reason is not far 

 to seek : here are striking displays of bright and even 

 gaudy colors, formal and pronounced lines, or ingenious 

 imitations of all sorts of objects. All this appeals at once 

 to the average beholder who has never learned to grasp 

 firmly the elusive principles of beauty in any composition ; 

 it gives something that the eye catches and the mind com- 

 prehends without exertion ; and the admiration so easily 

 excited finds ready expression in words. This kind of 

 popular sentiment as to gardening-art is, of course, to be 

 deplored. It takes pleasure in garish colors and strong con- 

 trasts, and shows a degree of taste not much higher than that 

 of the child who is fascinated by the glitter of an express- 

 wagon painted bright red and blue. It recognizes with 

 satisfaction the skill of the artist who has developed some- 

 thing like a portrait of Columbus or Cleveland out of thickly 

 planted Alternantheras and Pyrethrums, or has fashioned a 

 map of the world or man-of-war out of Houseleeks and Eche- 

 verias. It is not the accuracy of the resemblance to objects 

 animate or inanimate which these plants show in their un- 

 comfortable positions ; it is not the fact that the thing is 

 done well, but that it is done at all, that excites admiration. 

 It is like the satisfaction of the crowd at a display of fire- 

 works when the likeness of some public man is blazoned 

 in many-colored lights. "There's George Washington! 

 there's his wig, and there's his chin ! How clever !" Yet 

 the portrait is of the rudest kind. 



Pattern bedding is every season producing imitations of 

 endless objects, from a spray of leaves to a butterfly, and 

 from a roll of carpet to a pair of gates. Numberless designs 

 are wrought out in curved and straight lines, and sheets 

 of pronounced color all through the land ; very few can 

 be said to have any genuine artistic merit. This kind of 

 gardening, therefore, having been now practiced for many 

 years, would seem to be a failure. As an imitative art (if 

 there is such a thing as imitative art) it is certainly a failure. 

 Probably nobody ever tried it as an idealizing art, so that 

 there appears at first that little is left for it to do. 



And yet formal gardening provides material for artistic 

 effect which natural gardening does not furnish. It can 

 command defined lines of any shape, and even masses 



of color brilliant or subdued ; surely these are resources 

 of great value when directed by cultivated taste. That 

 material of this kind can be useful and sufficient for beauty 

 appears on the walls and floors of every house where there 

 is a carpet, picture-frame or wall-paper of formal design. 

 There is nothing essentially crude or vulgar in masses of 

 brilliant hues, as Titian and Raphael well knew when they 

 clothed their Madonnas and nobles in robes of gorgeous 

 red and blue. But when they had the boldness to use 

 the most glowing pigments as the motive for an entire 

 picture, they had the skill which enabled them to 

 adjust all accessory and surrounding tints to increase 

 its brilliancy and decrease its garishness. And until 

 the artist in red and yellow Alternantheras has ac- 

 quired a perception of color-proportion in some de- 

 gree analogous to theirs, he will be always liable 

 to make elementary mistakes, however thorough his 

 knowledge may be in the formidable nomenclature of his 

 materials ; for the average carpet-bedder is to the artist 

 what the color-grinder is to the painter. Even the dullest 

 planter is fairly safe in combining herbaceous plants and 

 flowering shrubs, though of the most vivid hues, for 

 Nature, if left to herself at all, will generally refuse to pro- 

 duce ungainly contrasts of form or color ; but any one 

 who meddles with the level and unbroken masses of shorn 

 bedding-plants throws away this ready-made means and 

 seizes special tools that none but peculiarly skilled work- 

 men understand the use of. It is not wonderful, then, that 

 there are so many costly and laborious compositions in 

 public parks and on private lawns which earn and 

 deserve no more than a smile of astonishment or con- 

 tempt. 



It need not be assumed, however, that the devising of 

 neat and appropriate formal bedding cannot be achieved 

 without a high degree of artistic skill. Plenty of color 

 schemes are accessible to the study and application of any 

 one with a fair amount of artistic feeling. A designer thus 

 equipped will use his materials, not with a view to violent 

 contrasts, but harmonies of tints, and will be able to pro- 

 duce an arrangement of lines and tones at once seemly and 

 striking and restful to the eye, instead of tiring. Beds of 

 this kind, which are not puerile caricatures of unsuitable 

 objects or conflicts of hostile colors, have their own pecu- 

 liar uses, to which nothing else is quite so well adapted. 

 There are various phases of what is called architectural 

 gardening, where terraces, stone balustrades and edgings 

 and rectangular lines of walk prevail, where these regular 

 curves and surfaces of clear color seem in peculiar har- 

 mony with the shaven turf and geometrical lines. There 

 are places at the angles of roads or walks, and the junction 

 of them with buildings, which suggest a regularly plotted 

 scheme of Alternantheras or Echeverias to fill out and 

 consist with the pronounced forms all about them. And in 

 places such as these, where preciseness and formality 

 seem to be suggested by the surroundings, a bed of 

 sheared plants in regular lines may be used for the sake of 

 its own beauty and the contrast it affords to less artificial 

 forms of gardening. But where a red and yellow star or a 

 multicolored Catherine-wheel is apparently dropped into 

 the middle of a lawn, it is an excrescence, for whose exist- 

 ence no possible excuse can be found. 



If bedding in set forms, therefore, is to be really an 

 adorning of our gardens, it must be kept to its right place. 

 It must be made to show its resources not so as to call up 

 vain comparisons with incongruous things, nor to intrude 

 mere meaningless patches of red and blue into quiet 

 expanses of turf. Probably the highest success in work of 

 this character will be found along the line of the most con- 

 ventional imitation of suitable objects. The forms we see 

 everywhere carved in stone, stamped on book-covers, 

 woven into fabrics, worked in wood or metal, were de- 

 rived originally from the lines of a leaf or plant, or from 

 some simple geometrical figure, a circle or triangle, all of 

 them modified to best suit the material in which they are 

 used. Designs developed in this way, guided and re- 



