12 
INTR OB U C TION, 
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 suhurhan-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 encyclopsedia 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. 
