492 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 355. 



within three or four feet of the point where they separate 

 from the trunk, and then the branches still remaining on 

 these limbs are sawed off so as to leave stubs a few inches 

 long. The result is, that what was once a Norway Maple, 

 for example, with a symmetrical top and a trunk some 

 twelve or fifteen inches in diameter, is left a mutilated 

 stump, with a score of raw wounds to invite spores of fungi 

 of various kinds, which will certainly kill the tree in time. 

 It will linger on a few years, an unsightly and misshapen 

 object, ruined by the mistaken kindness of persons whose 

 purpose was to add to its beauty and insure its longevity. 



Now, no trees need systematic pruning as much as street- 

 trees. They need to be kept to a certain shape, and in 

 many cases they ought never to be allowed to grow be- 

 yond a certain size. But street-trees will never be pruned 

 properly unless the men who do the work are directed 

 by some one with knowledge and experience. It is of 

 little avail to complain that this work is done badly 

 so long as every man is permitted to treat the trees 

 in front of his own lots as he chooses, for it is too 

 much to hope that the great mass of the dwellers in 

 our cities will ever know enough about trees and 

 their habits to care for them properly. The only safe 

 course, as we have insisted before, is to place the street- 

 trees of every city and town under the charge of some 

 competent official. We mean by this not only that 

 some man should be named to superintend the prun- 

 ing, but that the whole work of planting and subsequent 

 care should be put under his control. This official should 

 not only know enough to select the proper varieties, 

 but he should know how to plant the trees so that they 

 will make an even and symmetrical growth, and how 

 to keep them properly pruned and protected from the 

 attacks of disease and insects and animals. But the care 

 should begin still farther back, that is in the nursery itself, 

 and if there were a competent commission in every city as 

 there is in Washington, to conduct the nursery, it would be 

 all the better. Every one of a row of street-trees should 

 be a perfect specimen, and all should be of uniform size and 

 shape. If a city controlled its own nurseries this essential 

 could be more easily secured. But, in any case, no street- 

 tree should be planted until it has passed the most rigid in- 

 spection. Even if the work has been done in the best manner 

 possible from the very beginning, the trees in the city will 

 need constant supervision as they grow. They are sur- 

 rounded by a hundred dangers here which never threaten 

 them in the open country. But, after all, they have 

 no more dangerous enemy than the men who have 

 equipped themselves to prune them by the job, for they 

 come in the garb of protectors, and the ignorant and un- 

 wary are actually induced to pay them for destroying what 

 they profess to save. 



Imagination in Gardening. 



THERE is no doubt that in our day landscape-garden- 

 ing is occasionally carried to a greater degree of 

 perfection than ever before. The great park systems of 

 some of our cities are without rivals in the Old World, and 

 'there are private grounds here where true artistic feeling 

 in composition is expressed by most exquisite arrange- 

 ments, and a truly artistic sense of the requirements of the 

 situation. But there is a question whether most of the 

 private gardens nowadays are constructed with the same 

 sense of the picturesque which used to make English gar- 

 dens the expression of their owners' individuality. Those 

 gardens were, and, no doubt, often still are, whimsical, but 

 they meant something ; and even their mistakes showed a 

 healthy sort of interest in the subject, and in the disposition 

 of their treasures there was a care beyond what is mechan- 

 ical and perfunctory, and something better than a mere 

 imitation of their neighbors. 



Italian gardens, with all their formality, still retain that 

 imaginative charm. There is an expression of stateliness, 

 of mystery, of classic grace about them that makes the 



forlornestof them interesting to this day. The mossy foun- 

 tains crumbling to decay, the rows of feathery Cypresses, 

 the cool thickets of Ilex, in which the nightingales sing 

 even at noonday, the resting-places from which are 

 glimpses of scenery, all suggest the planning of those 

 pleasure-grounds by and for those who were true lovers of 

 nature, and to whom the garden was a frequent resort and a 

 continuous joy. The same is true of French gardens, 

 where the imagination is governed by the restraints of that 

 Gallic taste which pervades most things of a decorative 

 kind constructed by that keenly perceptive people. Even 

 the Dutch gardens are expressive, if not of the imagination 

 of the Netherlanders, at least of their most marked character- 

 istics — orderliness, practicality, straightforwardness and 

 simplicity. 



In England there may be a want of taste, but never a 

 lack of imagination, and here we have constant evidence 

 of the delight taken by men of eminence in statecraft and 

 letters in the construction of ingenious gardens, which 

 were intended at least to express their owners' ideas of the 

 picturesque. Queer enough some of those ideas may have 

 been, and, where the wealth of the proprietor permitted, 

 imagination too often ran riot and admitted monstrosities 

 into the scheme ; but at bottom, the idea that a garden 

 should be an individual expression, even of an owner's 

 whim, was not a bad one, since through reckless experi- 

 ment one sometimes arrives at a great truth. Certainly it 

 was a thousand times more hopeful a symptom than the 

 senseless repetition and imitation from which one suffers 

 in many would-be magnificent places in our own country. 

 In the grotesque conceptions of the eighteenth century 

 there was at least a struggling idea, while in the monoto- 

 nous and constantly recurring arrangements which we too 

 often see now, no idea whatever enters, except to be con- 

 ventional. 



It is possible that the lack of a leisure class in this coun- 

 try may account for a good deal of this monotony in our 

 large places. Still there are more men here than one would 

 suspect who care something about gardens, and who are 

 willing to give them some time and attention. But this 

 interest rarely becomes strong enough to excite any 

 original thinking, and comparatively few men have any 

 conception that there is such a thing as a possible pic- 

 ture in every plot of ground, with a definite meaning in the 

 mind of its creator. In Europe there is a certain tradi- 

 tionary art in planting which has descended through suc- 

 ceeding ages, and some of this came to these shores with 

 our forefathers, so that the "early gardens of America bore 

 its impression more than do those of the present day, which 

 for the most part are mere collections of more or less curi- 

 ous and beautiful plants. It was the element of fancy 

 which made the old gardens beautiful and dear, so that to 

 this day they retain their charm, even if their fashion has 

 passed away. They exhale the aroma of the imagination 

 which created them and so retain a perennial hold upon 

 us. Even the grottoes and the statues which we now con- 

 demn seem no more out of place in an eighteenth-century 

 garden than thequaintnessesin the literary style of the epoch. 

 The essential thing is to have some ideal and some mode 

 of expressing it, a style which is our own and not that of 

 our fathers or grandfathers — and, above all, not that of 

 our neighbors. When we once have a style the perfecting 

 of it is but a matter of time and study and adaptation to 

 our changing circumstances. 



The genius of Lord Bacon did not disdain to concern 

 itself with the reformation of national taste in England in 

 the matter of gardens, and he wisely suggested winter or 

 evergreen gardens, and the preservation of rude and neg- 

 lected spots as specimens of wild nature, and though in 

 his day that suggestion did not bear much fruit, it, no 

 doubt, opened the minds of his readers to new light upon 

 this important topic ; so that when in the reign of Charles 

 the Second the genius of Le Notre began to make itself felt 

 in France, there were thinking men in England ready to 

 comprehend his rare ability, and the King himself sum- 



