PARK AND CEMETE.RY. 
. 376 
\ 
For one thing the German people are 
not lovers of the country and of the 
natural landscape as the English and 
American people are. Country life is 
now just in the process of discovery in 
Germany. For the first time in the his- 
tory of the nation, wealthy people are 
resorting to the suburbs. There are nu- 
merous and important land speculations 
now afloat in the making of “garden 
cities and villa colonies,’^ which are 
merely vernacular names for such sub- 
urbs as Boston, New York, Chicago, 
Minneapolis and Denver have known 
for years. And these are the fields in 
which Germany landscape art is now 
thriving. 
In these suburbs the people are mak- 
ing their first experiments with the sin- 
gle detached dwelling-house surrounded 
by a garden. Neither in city nor coun- 
try have such single-family garden 
houses been known heretofore. The 
peasant family in its little dwelling 
comes the nearest to forming an excep- 
tion, but this does not really affect the 
case. Now these new suburban houses 
are being designed by the best German 
architects, who are having a whole lot 
of fun at it, and while they have not 
yet reached anything like the beauty of 
design known in England and America, 
they are doing as well as could be ex- 
pected with their means and traditions. 
The point of main interest for us is 
. that they are also designing most of 
the gardens along with the houses. 
The situation then sums up to this : 
The present activity in garden making 
is largely in the hands of architects; 
and these men, though admirably trained 
in architecture and general art, are 
decidedly green and awkward at the 
making of suburban places. Moreover, 
they have no training in landscape gar- 
dening. Of course architects in Eng- 
land and America and evervwhere else 
insist on designing gardens without any 
training in landscape art, but they at 
least have the traditions of country life 
back of them, and some of them can 
actually tell a hydrangea from a plum 
tree. 
There are two great and common mis- 
takes in landscape gardening. One is 
to make a garden without any flowers 
in it ; the other is to have a mess of 
plants assembled without any design. 
The former extreme is the architect’s 
error ; the latter extreme is often achiev- 
ed by the nurseryman, gardener or flor- 
ist. In America we have usually been 
at the mercy of the nurseryman and the 
florist ; but the German architects are 
now doing what they can to balance the 
account. 
Here is an instructive example. I have 
just been studying a series of plans sub- 
mitted in a big contest where large 
prizes were offered for the best designs 
for “house gardens.” There were 299 
designs submitted. Of these 84 received 
some sort of prize, and these prize designs 
are the ones I have had the pleasure 
of studying. Every blessed one of these 
is an architect’s design — not a gardener’s 
design in the prize list ! As I did not 
see the other 200 odd plans submitted, 
I cannot tell whether the gardeners were 
turned down by the jury, or whether 
they did not compete. I am writing 
these lines with a copy of the first-prize 
design (1,000 marks) spread on the 
table before me. I have computed the 
areas, and I find that almost exactly 
one per cent of the garden area is de- 
voted to perennials, that three-tenths 
of one per cent is assigned to “flowers,” 
and that the total' amount of lawn .in 
this “garden” is only six per cent of 
the total area. Yet nearly fifty per cent 
of the w'hole thing is given to gravel 
walks ! They make the design. Now I 
submit that it is an absurdity to call such 
a project a garden. Furthermore, in a 
country where plants grow' — say in 
America, England or Germany — it is 
nothing less than an abomination for a 
client who ought to have a garden to 
have a gravel Sahara foisted upon him 
in its place. It is selling goods under a 
false label, and the pure-food law ought 
to be extended to cover such cases. 
It can be said that these German ar- 
chitects’ designs are good — as designs ; 
but as gardens they are a delusion. 
These ideas, however, do not have a 
complete monopoly of the field in Ger- 
many, by any means. The best recent 
book on landscape gardening written 
in any language ( and I cannot conscien- 
tiously except my own) is by a German. 
This man was Willy Lange, a landscape 
gardener in the suburbs of Berlin and 
a teacher in the Horticultural School in 
Dahlem. Now Herr Lange is an ex- 
tremist in the other direction, though 
he is not such an extreme extremist as 
the man who took the 1,000-mark prize, 
and he by no means eschews design. 
Only he wants his gardens running 
over full of flowers, and the design is 
a thoroughly subordinate matter. 
Herr Lange believes in w'hat we in 
America call the natural style of gar- 
dening. In actual practice his work 
comes nearest to that of Mr. Warren H. 
Manning of Boston of any in our coun- 
try. He has a method, fully worked 
out On scientific lines, in thoroughgoing 
German fashion. He calls it the bio- 
logical-physiognomical method ; but it 
would fit better to our use of language 
to call it the ecological method. Very 
roughly stated, this theory, 'asserts that 
plants should be assembled in a garden 
in their natural relationships — placing 
together those plants which associate 
with one another in nature, placing 
such plant society in its proper soil and 
on its proper geologic formation. The 
complete development of this theory 
forms an interesting study, and, whether 
one is w'illing or not to make this the 
whole controlling principle in garden 
planting, one cannot help seeing that it 
is a very useful idea. Herr Lange is an 
active, capable teacher, too, and is send- 
ing out a considerable body of students 
each year pretty well steeped in his the- 
ories, so that we may assume that the- 
biological-physiognomical method will 
eventually make an impression on the 
world. 
At least one other important influ- 
ence must be taken into account in judg- 
ing the present situation- — that is the in- 
fluence of existing parks. There are 
a number of fine old parks in various 
parts, of the country. Here about Ber- 
lin we have the Tiergarten, Treptow 
Park, Babelsburg and Sans Souci, besides 
large stretches of public forest. With 
the exception of parts of Sans Souci, 
these parks exemplify an}'thing better 
than the architectural style of gardening. 
I have already written of the Tiergarten 
as a magnificent stretch of woods. The 
main part of Sans Souci is glorious nat- 
ural or naturalistic woods and lawns. 
Babelsburg was designed by Prince 
Pueckler, and Treptow Park by G. Mey- 
er, both famous students of the English 
style of landscape gardening. The parks 
themselves are well-developed and highly 
satisfactory examples of the English nat- 
ural style, where trees and shrubs and 
informal sheets of water and stretches 
of lawn make up a panorama of amiable 
scenery. 
These same landscape gardeners, and 
others in their day, chiefly under the 
influence of Repton and other English 
workers, planned many important parks 
in all parts of Germany, which today, 
with the development of 75 to 100 years, 
are splendid e.xamples of the achieve- 
ments of that golden period in landscape 
art. I visited with great delight two of 
the best of these parks in Silesia, de- 
signed by Pueckler, and I will include 
with this letter a couple of the photo- 
gest, however, faintly, the breadth and 
graphs which I made. They will sug- 
power of these works of art; and we 
may feel fairly sure that the people who 
have once kown such landscape garden- 
ing will not be long satisfied w'ith ce- 
ment walls, gravel w'alks and a pretty 
squirting fountain such as the architects 
are giving them. 
