64 
PARK AND CEMETERY 
Landscape Problems of tbe Lawn Plan CemeterT'. 
In a series of articles on “The Modern Rural 
Cemetery” that have been appearing in The Gar- 
deners’ Chronicle of America, Henry F. Torrey has 
the following to say of “The Landscape Lawn Plan” 
in the May issue of that journal; 
The landscape lawn plan, like the best work of 
the park designer, has for its basic principle the 
Avorking out to its fullest beauty of some scheme of 
landscape effect which nature herself has suggested, 
but the adaptation of such a landscape scheme to 
practical use as cemetery ground presents a series 
of new problems which would not be encountered 
in park work. 
The growing preponderance of monumental struc- 
tures upon the lawns so disturbs the balance of 
the most carefully arranged planting that a ceme- 
tery landscape must necessarily be considered un- 
finished long after a park planting would present 
the picture which the artist had designed. Even in 
Spring Grove, the birthplace of the landscape lawn 
system, Wm. Salway has been called upon to sup- 
plement and complete the landscape work of so 
great a master as Adolph Strauch himself. 
While the cemeteries have been developing their 
new beauty of naturalness and simplicity, there has 
also been great progress in monumental art, so that 
the stone work in the modern cemetery is, from the 
sculptor’s or architect’s viewpoint, of far higher 
average merit than could be found in any cemetery 
of years ago. 
So impressed are some monument makers by the 
beauty of their handiwork that I have been urged 
by some of the smaller men in the business not to 
permit trees to be planted in the ground laid out 
in burial lots lest their falling leaves should stain 
the stone work. 
Each superintendent has to plan his own scheme 
of landscape art for the harmonious development 
of the best beauty of his own cemetery, between 
this extreme of cemetery sections depending wholly 
upon their crowded rows of monuments for “land- 
scape effect,” and the other limit, the ideal of the 
most enthusiastic lovers of nature’s handiwork who 
would see the burial plots in lawn sections un- 
marred by any dressed or sculptured memorial of 
stone or bronze, or mounded grave, and would use 
only the beauty and dignity of perfect trees and of 
natural boulders for memorial purposes above the 
level of the turf. So that each proprietor would 
own not merely his little rectangular plot, but 
would be the owner of a component part of the 
broad, beautiful landscape in which it is set. 
The differences in the initial features of the 
grounds to be used for a cemetery are not less im- 
portant than its special characteristics of topog- 
raphy and climate. These variations, with the con- 
ditions which the recognized rights of the lot own- 
ers impose upon the superintendent, give to the 
landscape lawn system an entirely different defini- 
tion in the minds of the respective superintendents 
of the different cemeteries. 
The one may find his entire acreage in cultivated 
fields, with hardly a tree to break the horizon, so 
that he begins at once a search for large specimen 
trees and shrubs and plans close planting for quick 
foliage effect, looking with long foresight to the 
future growth and development of trees and plants 
to paint beautiful landscapes upon the smooth can- 
vas of his bare fields. 
Another, finding a too abundant growth of trees 
upon his ground, is at once called upon to solve 
problems in practical forestry, and sees that all his 
future care of the ground involves a forestry treat- 
ment which differs from the old world development 
of the science as an industrial art, since the ceme- 
tery or park engineer deals with the aesthetic side 
of the subject and must apply his work of forest 
conservation and utilization to the development of 
