92 
PARK AND CEMETERY. 
of detail. This garden lasted for fifty years, when 
William Third introduced the Dutch garden and 
the zenith of formal gardening was reached. 
The Dutch gardening with the Italian and 
French are the three modern styles of architectural 
gardening. The Crusaders are supposed to have 
created a taste for building and gardening in the 
north of Europe, and it is known that gardening 
was first brought to a high state of perfection in 
the Netherlands. The wealth of Holland enabled 
the Dutch to import foreign plants, and they are 
famous for having carried the cultivation of bulb- 
ous flowers, such as the hyacinth and narcissus, to 
a craze. Their ornamental gardening differed little 
in design from the French, both styles being char- 
acterized by symmetry and abundance of ornament. 
In their flat country, however, their long straight 
canals and grassy terraces were distinguishing feat- 
ures of their style. They were adorned with trees 
in pots or planted alternately, and closely clipped 
to the utmost regularity. The quaint and gro- 
tesque were strongly characteristic and made it 
popular in many parts of Europe. This introduc- 
tion by William of the Dutch style into England as 
it did in France, rendered gardening still more op- 
posed to nature. Verdant sculpture was in great 
esteem. Clipped box and yew hedges, fantastic 
trees, splendid iron gates and rails, graduated 
grassy slopes, terraces and parterres, straight and 
broad gravelled walks, terminated by temples, stat- 
tues and obelisks, heavy balustrades supporting huge 
flower pots, geometrical fish ponds, jets of water, 
diminutive islands approached by Chinese bridges, 
sea-nymphs and river-gods, everything geometric, 
fantastic and cumbrous were considered of the ut- 
most taste in garden art. This was the condition 
of gardening in England when the reaction began, 
a reaction caused by this high state of artificiality, 
the advanced taste of the civilized world, and the gen- 
eral tendency of all Europe to a greater naturalness. 
A. Phelps Wyman , 
Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y. 
(. To be continued.) 
LAWN WEEDS. 
A correspondent in the New England Farmer 
gives some interesting notes on the above subject. 
Although differing from Emerson in his general de- 
scription of a weed, he touches a responsive chord 
in his remarks. He says: A weed is a common 
plant which grows where it is not wanted. Whether 
or not any particular plant is to be catalogued as a 
weed depends upon the standpoint of the observer. 
A person going into the country from the city sees 
fields gorgeous with the common white daisy (Chry- 
santhemum leucanthemum), which to his eyes is 
beautiful. To the farmer, however, in whose hay- 
field it grows it is only the much-hated white weed, 
which he would gladly exterminate. The village 
man, or the suburbanite, has his own ideas of weeds. 
Broadly speaking, a weed is any plant other than 
fine grass and white clover which grows in his lawn. 
Plantain. Foremost among these pests which 
encourage backache and foster ill-temper and pro- 
fanity is the plantain (Plantago major). Few plants 
multiply with such facility, and few are harder to 
exterminate. No lawnmower has been devised 
which has any effect upon this weed. The broad, 
heavily ribbed leaves cling so closely to the ground 
that the knives pass over them in vain. You rise 
early several times a week, and at the risk of mak- 
ing yourself disliked among your neighbors, vow 
that you will mow the flower-stalks at any rate, yet 
after you have carefully mown the entire lawn, and 
your time has expired, you look back to see num- 
bers of the stiff spikes flaunting their pollen-laden 
flowers in your face. The common plantain is given 
as a native of the country, with another species 
naturalized from Europe. When New England was 
first settled plantain was called “Englishman’s 
foot” by the Indians, who said that it sprang up 
wherever the Englishman trod. No one who has ob- 
served the rapidity of its growth will wonder at the 
Indian’s mistake. There is only one method of re- 
lieving your lawn of this pest, and that is to get 
down on your hands and knees, or hire somebody 
else to do so, and with a knife or trowel sever the 
roots below the surface, then pull the plant up. 
This you must do every day, and then at the close 
of the season you will find from a hundred to a 
thousand plants, according to the area of your lawn, 
which have defied your skill. After you have pulled 
up a plantain you will be dismayed to find that you 
have exposed a bare spot in the grass correspond- 
ing to the plant removed. Then you wonder which 
looked the worse, the plantain or the vacancy. 
Chickweed. Another plant which will invade a 
large portion of the lawn unless carefully restrained 
is the chickweed. The common chickweed (Stel- 
laria media) is a tender trailing plant, yet it has a 
wonderful power of propagation, and will flourish 
amid conditions which will make the grass look fire- 
swept. The appearance of the chickweed belies its 
character. Its thin stems and smooth leaves seem 
weak and insignificant, but it pushes them through 
the grass in every direction until nothing else is visi- 
ble. As the chickweed grows and blossoms close 
to the ground, the mower leaves it also unmolested 
as it passes over, so that the lawn can be ridden of 
it only by hand. 
Another species of chickweed which grows in 
much watered lawns, and is possibly even more 
