The Desert and the Wilderness shall rejoyce, and the waste ground 

 be glad and flourish as the rose. 



— Isaiah xxxv: i. 



' 1583 Edition. 



GARDEN APPROACHES TO THE NATIONAL 

 MONUMENT 



Mount Desert Island is remarkable for the vigor with 

 which the hardy herbaceous plants that make the beauty and 

 dehght of northern gardens grow in favorable locations on it, 

 and for their brilliant bloom. There, too, bloom follows bloom 

 unbrokenly from spring to fall, keeping fresh the sense with 

 constant change. 



To establish in connection with the national park — using 

 the word, as elsewhere in this paper, in its popular sense — a 

 splendid permanent exhibit of these hardy plants, gathered 

 for their beauty's sake from the whole temperate world, has 

 been from the first, like the wild gardens and the wild life sanc- 

 tuaries intended in the park itself, an essential feature of the 

 plan from which the park resulted. 



Nothing could be devised that would be more useful in 

 furthering the development of a true art of gardening and 

 landscape gardening in this country than such an opportunity 

 to observe and study at their best the hardy plant materials 

 which it must use. And nowhere else upon the Continent could 

 a wider or more representative public be found to appreciate 

 and profit by it than comes each summer to the Island — a 

 public that will come henceforth in constantly increasing num- 

 bers as the park, with its great waiting gifts of interest and 

 beauty, is developed in accordance with the broadly formu- 

 lated plans of the Secretary of the Interior and National Park 

 Service. 



With this in view, an opportunity for such a hardy plant 

 exhibit in the form of garden walks extending from the park, 

 which occupies the Island's mountain range, towards Bar 

 Harbor, its most general and famous point of entrance, has 

 been secured, and plans for it are being now worked out. 



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