August 19, 1891.] 



Garden and Forest. 



385 



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



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19, 1891. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles :— Architectural Fitness 3 8 5 



The Creation of a General Board of Commissioners 386 



The Seeding of the Bamboo J- Lowrie. 386 



How We Renewed an Old Place.— XVI Mrs. J. H. Robbins. 387 



New or Little-known Plants:— New Orchids R. A. Rolfe. 388 



Plant Notes :— Phalaenopsis Schilleriana. (With figure.) M. Barker. 389 



Some Recent Portraits 3 8 9 



Cultural Department: — Russian and Polish Pears T. H. Hoskins, M.D. 389 



Mistakes in Growing Strawberries J. M. Smith. 391 



Rose Notes W. H. Tallin. 391 



Hardy Plant Notes E. O. Orpet. 392 



Some New Tufted Pansies 39 2 



Orchid Notes M. Barker. 392 



Correspondence : — Dr. Schlich's Handbook of Forestry .. .. James W. Pryor. 393 



Experiments and Expedients E. P. Powell. 393 



A Good Example Francis Skinner. 393 



Recent Publications 393 



Notes 395 



Illustration :— Phalsenopsis Schilleriana, Fig. 64 390 



Architectural Fitness. 



AMERICANS are gradually learning that fitness, ap- 

 propriateness, is the foundation of all artistic 

 excellence, and, though the lesson is not yet fully ac- 

 quired, we are making visible progress toward the realiza- 

 tion of this quality in our various classes of buildings. The 

 improvement is perhaps most manifest in our country 

 houses, which we design with a more intelligent regard for 

 the requirements of site and environment than we did even 

 ten years ago, and a truer sense of the fact that in such 

 houses simplicity is a cardinal virtue. There has been a 

 reaction against conventionality on the one hand, and 

 against ostentation on the other, and it has been inspired 

 by a new-born feeling for architectural fitness. 



But in a reaction men are almost certain to go too far, 

 and so it is not surprising to find that in trying for sim- 

 plicity we sometimes fall into rudeness. This shows, of 

 course, that we have not fully understood the meaning of 

 fitness as an architectural term ; we have remembered that 

 a structure should harmonize with its surroundings, but 

 have forgotten that it should also harmonize with the ideas 

 of cultivated men and women who are the heirs of all the 

 ages, living in a state of superior enlightenment, and in- 

 heriting the practical processes as well as the tastes of 

 countless generations of skillful builders. Moreover, in 

 thus trying to express part of the significance of the word 

 fitness, we may miss true simplicity ; for civilized, intelli- 

 gent men can produce rude-looking structures only by an 

 effort so deliberate and self-conscious that it lays them 

 open to the charge of affectation. 



We cannot object to an Adirondack camp or a fishing- 

 lodge or a hill-side studio, be it ever so rough and rude. 

 It is designed as a shelter in a semi-savage sort of exist- 

 ence, and may be as appropriate to the temporary needs 

 and pursuits of its inhabitants as to the wild scenes 

 amid which it stands. But when costly buildings in 

 civilized neighborhoods are built for permanent use in 



imitation of the materials and methods naturally adopted 

 for temporary homes in the wilderness, it may be ques- 

 tioned whether the interests of true simplicity, or of true 

 appropriateness,- are subserved. 



The tendency to which we have referred finds many 

 illustrations in the use of boulders, or roughly cut stones, 

 in constructions which should wear a refined and dignified 

 aspect, as well as a simple one. Undoubtedly, this prac- 

 tice has been largely inspired by the example of Richard- 

 son. An architect so original, strong and skillful as he 

 could not fail to influence profoundly the general course of 

 his art ; and, as with every great master, this influence has 

 been partly for good, partly for evil. Few other build- 

 ings in this country, and certainly no other small building, 

 have excited so much attention, been so often described, 

 pictured and discussed as the gardener's lodge which he 

 built, of huge rough boulders, in the village of North 

 Easton, near Boston. It is, indeed, a picturesque and in- 

 teresting piece of work, but it has certainly been imitated 

 in ways which Richardson never anticipated, and he would 

 have been distressed by a sight of some of the progeny it 

 has engendered. 



In certain places and for certain purposes the use of 

 boulders, whether large or small, is not only allowable, 

 but praiseworthy. It is both sensible and appropriate to 

 use them, for example, in the foundations or the basement 

 of a country house on land where they abound and can 

 be had at little cost and trouble. But even in such spots 

 as this it is seldom desirable that whole houses should be 

 built of them, for we do not want an American country 

 home to wear the aspect at once rude, unrefined and pon- 

 derous, which their sole employment gives. 



In other parts of New England one may wisely use, 

 instead of boulders and for a similar purpose, stones 

 roughly split from neighboring granite-ledges ; but, again, 

 and for the same reasons, it is seldom wise thus to con- 

 struct a whole house. We want simplicity and we want 

 solidity, but we do not want coarseness or the affectation 

 of simplicity. A house with an interior such as every 

 American demands, made comfortable by a hundred in- 

 genious devices and beautiful by the skilled work of a 

 score of different artisans, should have an exterior of con- 

 sonant expression ; and rough-hewn stones or roughly 

 cemented boulders cannot give this expression. 



But it is not only in private country homes that our 

 methods of using stone are frequently erroneous. Country 

 churches and public buildings, and even the most ambi- 

 tious city structures, are often open to criticism in this re- 

 spect. Even in urban parks the effort to adapt the archi- 

 tectural work to rural surroundings may be a departure 

 from genuine simplicity. A park is one of the most 

 complicated and refined of the artistic creations of man- 

 kind ; and its beauty and unity may be impaired if any 

 feature of man's creating does not show the same kind 

 and degree of skill and refinement as the others that sur- 

 round it. A park must depend for the most part upon 

 nature for its charm, but it must also conspicuously depend 

 upon art ; and it is trite to say that when art is set to 

 work its activity should be frankly and clearly confessed. 

 No matter how rural in character a park may be, or how 

 pure and undisturbed the sylvan charm of some of its 

 remoter parts, there is no place where the work of man 

 ought to be done with greater skill, more perfect finish, or 

 (using the term in its best sense) a franker artificiality. 

 Almost all such work is done in this manner in all our 

 parks. Their driveways are not constructed like country 

 roads of even the better sort ; their lawns are not left like 

 fields to a growth of untended grass ; nor are their shrub- 

 beries allowed to grow in the wild luxuriance so beautiful 

 beside a rural highway. When the engineer and the horti- 

 culturist are thus showing the highest level to which 

 modern science and art have attained, the architect should 

 work in a spirit similar to theirs. Structures which look 

 rough, casual, almost barbaric and affectedly simple are 

 not appropriate in a carefully tended pleasure-ground, 



