194 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 166. 



planting will be checked rather than developed. It is a 

 difficult matter to make trees thrive in cities ; they must be 

 carefully selected for the purpose, and special attention 

 must be given to planting them if they are to struggle suc- 

 cessfully against the hardships of a city life. Uniformity 

 is essential in a street plantation, and uniformity can only 

 be obtained by planting in one street trees of one kind, 

 and by planting them all in the same way — that is, with the 

 same amount of soil about their roots and equal chances 

 for obtaining moisture. If each of a dozen men, living in the 

 same street, should exercise his individual taste in selecting 

 the tree to be planted before his door— one planting an Ash, 

 another an Elm, another a Maple, the next a Spruce, a Pine, a 

 Catalpa or a Sycamore — and if the trees are furnished with 

 soil according to the intelligence or liberality of the indi- 

 vidual planter, it will not require any very great expendi- 

 ture of imaginative force to picture to the mind what this 

 row of trees will look like at the end of ten years. A line 

 of lamp-posts, each selected according to the fancy of the 

 citizen in front of whose house it was placed, would be less 

 grotesque and objectionable. 



The decoration of city streets with trees is a proper and 

 excellent thing : its importance is recognized in most of 

 the great cities of the world, and in some of them it has 

 been carried out in an admirable manner. It is a part of 

 street construction, however, just as much as paving or 

 the setting of curb-stones, and unless it can be done well 

 under an intelligently studied system by the municipal 

 authorities themselves, it had much better not be done at 

 all. If the citizens of Boston feel any doubts with regard 

 to the advantage of good street-planting over bad street- 

 planting, they have only to compare their delightful Beacon 

 Street mall with the older plantations at the eastern end of 

 Commonwealth Avenue. 



The Gardens at Monte Carlo. 



MANY are the sins that have been committed in the laying 

 out and building of American towns, but the greatest 

 of all, perhaps, has been the neglect or defacement of their 

 water-fronts. Whether the adjacent water is ocean or great 

 river, lake or little stream, we seldom see its shores turned to 

 the best advantage, and often they present a more deplorable 

 aspect than any other part of the town. In New York tumble- 

 down, malodorous, muddy wharfs, flanked by streets which 

 are frequently pools of water, line a shore that ought to be 

 encircled by well-built, well-kept piers, and even the precious 

 little expanse of Battery Park is daily threatened with curtail- 

 ment ; in Boston the back yards of Beacon Street houses lie 

 along the wide estuary where a stately, tree-bordered espla- 

 nade should have stretched ; and the river or brook which in- 

 tersects a country town is most often edged by rickety sheds 

 or fringed with ragged weeds, and is spanned by bridges as 

 perishable as they are ugly. Of late years public attention 

 has, indeed, been directed to the subject of water-fronts, and 

 much has been done to secure them, in the outskirts of great 

 cities, against the disfigurement that has overtaken them in 

 portions already built. The parks at Chicago have been laid 

 out with a wise sense of the value of the lake-frontage. Boston 

 has claimed for similar purposes certain stretches of the Back 

 Bay Shore, and New York has constructed Riverside Drive 

 and bought the water-front near Pelham. But there is need 

 that more should be done in this direction and that we should 

 learn from older countries the art of beautifying the water- 

 fronts we are beginning at least to reserve. All foreign coun- 

 tries are full of examples of this art, whether it has been em- 

 ployed merely to dignify reaches of shore that must be put to 

 commercial use or to create ornamental promenades and gar- 

 dens. The quays at Antwerp are as good in their more pro- 

 saic way as the Thames Embankment in London. The Elbe 

 at Dresden is not defaced by the structures that line its banks, 

 though they are not all terraced promenades, but include 

 steamboat-landings, private grounds, hotels and restaurants. 

 At Rouen the chief hotels look out on a river crowded with 

 shipping, yet look on a scene devoid of squalor or architec- 

 tural meanness. At Lyons the great stream rushes between 

 close-pressed ranks of tall buildings, yet a fine drive runs by it 

 in many places, and everywhere the shore is agreeable to look 

 upon. At Prague there is a truly magnificent series of wide 

 esplanades upon which some of the finest buildings in the city 



have been placed, and a succession of bridges where the new- 

 est wrought-iron span does not seem out of artistic keeping 

 with the famous great stone bridge which, until some of its 

 arches were swept away last summer, had stood intact since 

 medieval times. And so one might pass from land to land 

 and town to town, only to find that everywhere the water- 

 front is valued and everywhere is intelligently treated, with 

 parks or avenues if possible, and if not, at least with respecta- 

 ble buildings and cleanly shores. 



The picture we give on p. 200 shows a peculiarly charming 

 treatment of a water-front. As possessing the only public 

 gaming-house still open in Europe, Monaco would in any case 

 attract a multitude of visitors. But its development would 

 never have been so great, and it would never have drawn 

 thousands of tourists who do not come for the sake of 

 gaming, had its situation not been so marvelously beautiful. 

 The town itself, and the promontory of Monte Carlo where 

 the Casino stands, overlook from their rocky heights the vast 

 blue expanse of the Mediterranean, and the gift of nature has 

 been sedulously enhanced by the intelligence of man. The 

 drives along the cliff-edge are admirably planned, and, like 

 the Casino gardens, show what may be achieved when archi- 

 tecture and horticulture are combined by an artistic hand. 

 Monsieur Edouard Andrg, the famous French landscape-gar- 

 dener, never did a better piece of work than here, and the effect 

 of his planting has been increased by the skill of gardeners who 

 have caused Palms and other exotic plants to grow with extraor- 

 dinary luxuriance. The treatment is somewhat formal, as befits 

 the neighborhood of stately buildings and the presence of per- 

 petual crowds of visitors. But there is no monotonous regu- 

 larity in the arrangement either of the terraces and balustrades 

 or of the sub-tropical plants which give such a singular charm 

 to the spot in the eyes of travelers fresh from the wintry north. 

 We can imagine what such a shore would be were this an 

 American watering-place. It would doubtless not be given 

 up to utter neglect and dishevelment, but a wooden paling 

 would probably replace the marble balustrade, board walks 

 the gravel slopes and marble steps, badly chosen trees in in- 

 harmonious variety the orderly avenue, and a stretch of Coleus- 

 beds the beautifully grouped shrubbery. Of course, the exact 

 treatment appropriate at Monaco would not be appropriate in 

 a northern American watering-place ; but something of the 

 same orderliness, dignity and beauty ought to be secured far 

 more often than it is. And while, in American country places, 

 picturesqueness, rather than symmetrical stateliness, is usually 

 appropriate, there are cases where it would be best to try for 

 the more formal architectural charm which distinguishes the 

 Casino gardens at Monte Carlo. 



How We Renewed an Old Place. 



IV. — CLEARING UP. 



THE forlornness of an old, neglected farm is largely owing 

 to the condition of its trees and shrubs, which, being left 

 to themselves, take on a tumble-down, half-dead look that 

 often belies their real condition. A few decayed trees bring 

 all the others into disrepute, like a grog-shop in an otherwise 

 respectable neighborhood, and untrimmed shrubs are as un- 

 becoming as unkempt hair. 



When we came to examine matters at Overlea, as we named 

 our acquisition from its command of the meadow, we found 

 that a good sweeping and dusting would do wonders for it, 

 and with that enthusiasm for setting to rights inborn in the 

 New England breast, we prepared for a grand redding up. 



While the grading of the knoll was going on preparatory to 

 building the house, our factotum, appropriately named Blos- 

 som, since his function was to adorn the place, was busily 

 employed in removing all the unsightly dead limbs from 

 among the live ones, and in hewing down such old Pear and 

 Apple-trunks as proved hopeless. 



The logs and branches were dragged away to the wettest 

 place in the meadow at the back of the knoll, and transformed 

 into a corduroy road, by which one could pass dry-shod out 

 into the rear street. This floating rubbish, supported by the 

 tangled grass on the marsh, formed a foundation upon which, 

 after inserting a plank water-way at the bottom, for the ebb 

 and flow of the tide, we subsequently built a substantial 

 carriage-road of stones and gravel, which now affords a back 

 entrance to the stable and kitchens. 



The palings of the fence were removed for kindlings, but 

 the posts and rails were left to form a slight boundary until 

 the hedges and tree-rows should be fairly established ; the 

 straggling shrubs were trimmed into better shape, the Box- 

 arbor clipped and cleared of weeds, trailing vines were taught 



