12 INTRODUCTION. 



A. J. Downing warmed the hearts of his countrymen to a new love 

 and zest for rural culture. In the department of suburban 

 architecture, the work so charmingly begun by him has been 

 carried forward by Vaux and a host of others, whose works are 

 constantly appearing. But in the specialty of decorative gardening, 

 adapted to the small grounds of most suburban homes, there is 

 much need of other works than have yet appeared. Downing had 

 begun in the books entitled "Cottage Residences and Cottage 

 Grounds" and "Country Houses," to cover this subject in his 

 peculiarly graceful as well as sensible style ; but death robbed us 

 of his pleasant genius in the prime of its usefulness. Since his 

 time many useful works have appeared on one or another branch 

 of gardening art ; but not one has been devoted entirely to the 

 arts of suburban-home embellishment. The subject is usually 

 approached, as it were, sideways — as a branch of other subjects, 

 architectural, agricultural, and horticultural — and not as an art 

 distinct from great landscape-gardening, and not embraced in flori- 

 culture, vegetable gardening, and pomology. The busy pen of the 

 accomplished Donald G. Mitchell has treated of farm embellish- 

 ment with an admirable blending of farmer-experience and a poet's 

 culture ; but he has given the farm, more than the citizen's subur- 

 ban lot, the benefit of his suggestions. Copeland's "Country 

 Life " is a hand-book grown almost into an encyclopaedia of garden 

 and farm work, full of matter giving it great value to the farmer 

 and horticulturist. Other works, too numerous to mention, of 

 special horticultural studies, as well as valuable horticultural an- 

 nuals, have served to whet a taste for the arts of planning as well as 

 planting. Some of them cover interesting specialties of decorative 

 gardening. It is a hopeful sign of intelligence when any art or 

 science divides into many branches, and each becomes a subject 

 for special treatises. But books which treat, each, of some one 

 department of decorative gardening, should follow, rather than 

 precede, a knowledge of the arts of arrangement, by which, alone, 

 all are combined to produce harmonious home-pictures ; and for 

 precisely the same reason that it is always best to plan one's house 

 before selecting the furniture — which, however good in itself, may 

 not otherwise suit the place where it must be used. 



