July 15, 1891.] 



Garden and Forest. 



325 



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-CI.ASS MATTER AT THE POST OFFICE AT NEW YORK, N. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 1891. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles :— The Planting of Home Grounds 325 



The Organization of the Trustees of Public Reservations 326 



Rules to aid Persons in Recognizing the Poisonous Species of Rhus. 326 



Dijon — I Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer. 326 



How We Renewed an Old Place.— XIII Mrs. J. H. Robbins. 327 



The Weeds of California.— II Professor E. IV. Hilgard. 328 



New or Little-known Plants : — Drymophlseus olivseformis. (With figure.) 



IV. Watson. 330 



Populus Monticola. (With figure.) C. S. S. 330 



Cultural Department:— Stray Notes from the Arnold Arboretum. — IV... .P. C. 330 



Hardv Plants > E, O. Orpet. 332 



Currants E. P. Powell. 332 



Notes from the Harvard Botanic Garden At. Barktr. 333 



Cucumbers, Lettuces Professor IV. IV. Tracy. 333 



Correspondence : — The Red -flowered Dogwood Thomas Median <&■= Sons. 333 



The Destruction of the Pines Miss E. F. Andrews. 333 



Narcissi in Ireland and Elsewhere J. N. Gerard. 334 



A Weeping Apple-tree E. P. P. 334 



Recent Publications 334 



Periodical Literature 335 



Notes 33° 



Illustrations : — Populus Monticola, Fig. 56 329 



A Fruiting Specimen of Drymophleeus olivseformis. Fig. 57 331 



The Planting- of Home Grounds. 



r^HE union — a happy marriage it should be — be- 

 JL tween the house beautiful and the ground near 

 it," says a writer in a recent number of The Garden, "is 

 worthy of more thought than it has had in the past, and 

 the best ways of effecting that union artistically should in- 

 terest men more and more as our cities grow larger and 

 our lovely English landscape shrinks back from them." 

 This writer, we may divine from the initials signed to 

 the article, is Mr. William Robinson, whose essays and 

 books have already had an excellent influence upon con- 

 temporary gardening art in England. We are not sur- 

 prised, therefore, to find that, in speaking of the ground 

 near a country house, he should advocate treating it in a 

 manner which will harmoniously unite it with the land- 

 scape beyond, thus making a beautiful whole of the near 

 and distant surroundings of the house. This ground he 

 calls " the garden," although this term is more generally 

 understood as meaning something in the nature of an 

 enclosure, where plants are grown without any thought 

 for harmony of general effect, or for the proper connection 

 between all the spaces which the eye can compass in a 

 single view. Taking "garden" to mean all the grounds 

 close to the house — the "home-grounds," as is sometimes 

 said — he explains that there are situations, as on the hill- 

 sides of Italy, where the nature of the spot prescribes a 

 formal, semi-artificial garden. But, he continues, "the 

 lawn is the heart of the true English garden, and as essen- 

 tial as the terrace is to the gardens on the steep hills " ; 

 and, in general, these words are true for America as well. 

 There is less need in America than in England to protest 

 against formal gardens where such lawns, with appropri- 

 ate framings and backgrounds of foliage, should exist. In 

 this country we are not very fond of designing "geometri- 

 cal gardens," even in those occasional cases where some 

 natural or architectural peculiarity would sanction their 

 existence ; and it would be difficult to discover American 



homes where " on level ground the terrace walls cut off 

 the view of the landscape from the house, and, on the 

 other hand, the house from the landscape." Nevertheless, 

 there are other errors in garden'design into which we are 

 as apt as the English to fall, and we should be doubly 

 anxious to avoid them, as our architects seem to be suc- 

 ceeding better than the English in creating that "house 

 beautiful" which must be the centre of the complex ulti- 

 mate picture. That is, if Mr. Robinson's taste in such 

 matters can be trusted, " most of the houses built in our 

 time," in England, " are so bad that even the best garden 

 could not save them from contempt"; but, though we 

 often build bad houses too, and though our average efforts 

 are less ambitious than those of Englishmen, many of our 

 country homes are so good architecturally that one thinks, 

 with a pang, how much more beautiful they would be 

 were their " home-grounds" properly arranged and planted. 



How to plan and plant such gardens as these is the 

 problem to be considered. We will suppose that the house 

 has been advantageously placed, that it looks out upon a 

 beautiful landscape, and that the intervening space is of 

 such an extent and character that it can be made an har- 

 monious link between the house and the landscape, giving 

 the house a fitting environment when seen from a distance, 

 and the landscape a fitting foreground w r hen seen from the 

 house. The two questions then are, How to plant, and 

 What to plant. 



As regards the manner of planting in such cases much 

 has already been said in these columns, and it may suffice 

 briefly to repeat that there should, if possible, be a wide 

 extent of lawn or lawns to give repose and unity to the 

 picture, with surrounding plantations, varied in mass and 

 sky-line, to enframe the lawns and connect them with the 

 landscape ; that open outlooks should be left to reveal the 

 most beautiful portions of the distance, while disagreeable 

 objects are masked from view ; and that roads and walks 

 should be as few and as inconspicuous as convenience will 

 permit. If a good landscape-gardener is employed, these 

 arrangements will be planned and their preliminary por- 

 tions will be executed without much trouble to the owner. 

 But in settling the question what to plant in completing 

 them the landscape-gardener, in America as in England, 

 often seems in need of guidance as well as the owner, and 

 when his views are just, the owner too often interferes 

 with their development or adds inharmonious details of his 

 own as the years go by. 



Mr. Robinson is partially right when he says that most 

 people who care for gardens (still taking the word in the 

 wider sense he gives it) suppose that they are made for 

 plants, and that " if a garden has any use it is to treasure 

 for us beautiful flowers, trees and shrubs. " Yet this idea 

 of a garden's function is too narrow, and devotion to it 

 often deforms even small gardens which have no purpose 

 except to surround the house agreeably, still more often 

 deforms larger ones which serve as a foreground for a 

 beautiful prospect. A garden is, beyond question, a place 

 where beautiful plants are to be fostered ; but it is also an 

 entity which should be beautiful as a whole and in har- 

 mony with its surroundings. And, however well planned, 

 its beauty may be spoiled, and a look of painful artificiality 

 may be given it if its contents are injudiciously selected. 

 Therefore we must dissent from Mr. Robinson when he 

 says, "The true use and first reason of a garden is to keep 

 and grow for us plants not in our woods, and mostly from 

 other countries than our own." The true use of a garden 

 is to grow for us beautiful plants of such a kind that their 

 association will form a beautiful whole, beautifully in keep- 

 ing with the house and the surrounding landscape. In 

 fitting it for this use we are at liberty to get our trees, 

 shrubs and flowers where we will, provided we introduce 

 none which, by a discordant note, will mar the general 

 effect, which must be determined by the character of the 

 local landscape. To be harmonious, and therefore beauti- 

 ful, a garden, over which we see the Berkshire hills or the 

 valley of the Hudson, must be evidently an American gar- 



