PARK AND CEMETERY. 
7 5 
of cases they are never used and need never have 
been built. Trees and shrubs would generally rather 
grow where the surfaces are undisturbed; if they 
need disturbance and “making,” such lands are 
most costly and undesirable for public grounds. 
Operations of the kind are only pardonable where 
some overcrowded community exists which from its 
foundation has been destitute of foresight, or where 
some nuisance needs abatement. The selection of 
grounds in country communities are frequently 
most extraordinary and unhappy, and give evidence 
of downright jobbery. Bridges are built across lit- 
tle dells and bogs when a road beside them would 
be adopted by everybody but the architects, and 
roads and paths are constructed by the mile which 
require a good sized police force to keep people upon 
them. Such work is worse than waste and is not 
advocated by people of sense. Roads are never 
beautiful in themselves. However well they are 
kept, however necessary they maybe, they are but 
barren strips. Yet their convolutions and twist- 
ing on a piece of paper is often the sole thing that 
is either admired or understood. Some of the best 
taste that has ever been lavished on the ground was 
conveyed to it direct from the artists mind. A land- 
scape gardener who is master of his material and his 
ideas, no more needs a plan to aid him in conveying 
them to the ground than a great painter needs a 
plan for a series of landscapes. If the work is to 
be delegated, it is of course another matter, but the 
gardener who loves his work and pursues it for other 
than mere money, is only too well aware that his 
most subtle touches can never be delegated, on any 
but the most pigmy scale. Others may profess to 
comprehend his directions and his compositions, but 
it never happens that they arrange material as he 
himself would do. For this reason chiefly the best 
work of the world has been and is done under the 
direct , almost despotic supervision of the gardener, 
whether with or without the intervention ol paper 
plans is immaterial. 
THE LOUISVILLE MEETING OF THE PARK AND OUT- 
DOOR ART ASSOCIATION. 
The Louisville Board of Park Commissioners 
sent out an invitation to park commissioners, 
park architects and park engineers of the United 
States to meet in Lousville on the 20th and 2ist of 
May for the purpose of discussing matters pertain- 
ing to the development and construction of pleas- 
ure grounds for the people. The invitation was ac- 
cepted by delegates from thirteen states and im- 
mediately resulted in the formation of an organiza- 
tion founded on lines suggested in a letter from 
Mr. Charles Eliot shortly before his death. 
Mr. John B. Castleman, President of the Louis- 
\e Board of Park Commissioners was made Pres- 
ident, L. E. Holden of the Cleveland Board of Park 
Commissioners, Vice President, and Warren H. 
Manning, Landscape Architect, Boston, Mass., 
Secretary and Treasurer. A committee was ap- 
pointed to present a constitution and by-laws at 
the next meeting which is to be held at Minneapo- 
lis, June 23rd, 1898. It was voted to make the annual 
dues $2.00 a year. The following papers were read: 
“The True Purpose of a Large Public Park” by John 
Olmsted, Brookline, Mass. — “The Use and Management 
of Public Parks by Col. Andrew Cowan, Louisville, Ky. 
— “Water Garden Decoration” by James Gurney of St. 
Louis, Mo. — “Parks and Municipal Art” by Harry W. 
Jones, of Minneapolis, Minn. — ‘‘Rural Parks in a Prairie 
State, by Thos. H. MacBride, of Iowa City, Iowa. — 
“Park Planting” by Wm. S. Egerton, of Albany, N. Y. — 
“The Value of Paiks as Investments and Educators” 
by L. E. Holden, of Cleveland, Ohio. — ‘The Metropoli- 
tan Park System of Boston” by W. T. Pierce, of Boston, 
Mass. — “Park Design and Park Planting” by Warren H. 
Manning, of Boston, Mass. 
M. L. Johnson, of New Orleans, read an inter- 
esting history of the park development in his city 
and Mr. Egerton gave a brief outline of the clas- 
sifications and duties of a park superintendent. 
The visitors to the meeting were tendered a ban- 
quet by the park commissioners and citizens of 
Louisville, and they were also given an opportunity 
to examine the park system. 
PARK DESIGN AND PARK PLANTING. 
The following paper was read by Mr. Warren H. 
Manning, landscape architect, at the convention of 
the Park and Out-Door Art Association: 
When land is selected for park purposes, it 
should be done with a view to developing for a 
town or city a park system in which provision can 
be made for different forms of recreation for differ- 
ent pieces of ground, each piece being specially 
adapted to the purpose for which it is to be used 
and all so situated that they can be linked together 
by carriage ways, foot ways or water ways, and in 
this selection topographical features or existing 
vegetation, rather than property lines, should de- 
termine boundaries. A skillful park designer, in 
making such a selection, will almost intuitively 
catch upon the leading expression of each tract and 
outline in his mind a plan for its proper develop- 
ment almost as soon as he has become thoroughly 
familiar with it and thus decide quite definitely as 
to boundaries at an early period. 
Park designing is a creative art requiring a high 
degree of intelligence, cultivated common sense, a 
great fund of practical information, keen powers of 
observation and inborn good taste to enable the de- 
signer to perceive the leading expression and to de- 
sign a plan that will meet all the practical require- 
ments of the problem economically and convenient- 
ly and produce a final result that will be a picture 
harmonious in all its details. A skillful park de- 
signer is not an engineer, an architect a gardener, 
a geologist or a botanist, but he must have a gen- 
eral knowledge of all these and other callings in 
