PARK AND CCA\CTCRY. 
59 
Carpet Beds in Parks. 
There appears to be the greatest and most irre- 
concilable difYerence of opinion between the natural 
school of landscape .gardeners and the florists and 
other plantsmen, respecting the merits of carpet- 
bedding in public parks. The landscape gardeners 
insist that the designed bed is unnatural in effect, 
inartistic and irrelevant to its surroundings, and this 
position cannot be successfully assailed. The gar- 
deners, on the other hand, declare that the greater 
number of the visitors to the parks demand beds of 
design, and that, moreover, the love of color and of 
formality is inborn in the human mind. This position 
is also unassailable. ' If both contestants are right, 
how are the two ideals to be brought into harmony? 
Before attempting to answer the question, we 
must first discover what the purpose of a park is. It 
is generally asserted that the park is made for the 
purpose of affording recreation and entertainment 
to the people. This is no doubt true, and yet these 
aims must be taken in their broadest and most lib- 
eral sense. Libraries and art galleries and muse- 
ums may be said to exist for much the same pur- 
pose, and yet we all admit that their mission is 
quite as much to instruct as to entertain. In fact, 
they entertain because they instruct us without our 
knowing it. It is important, then, that they instruct 
us truthfully and fundamentally. The park, I take 
it, should be a public educator. It should repre- 
sent the best emotions and aspirations of the soul. 
The modern evolution of the race points to nothing 
more clearly than to the fact that we are growing 
away from the old formalisms and artificialisms into 
a freer and broader atmosphere of naturalness. The 
history of the evolution of the landscape gard- 
en — that area which is given nature like effects — is 
a continuous chronicle of the emergence from con- 
ventionalism or fashion into a love and interpreta- 
tion of nature. Judged by this history, the modern 
naturalistic school of landscape gardening, in its es- 
sential features, must endure. Carpet-bedding is a 
mere accessory conventionalism, a fashion, which 
has no relationship to the general onward progress 
of the art of making landscape gardens. It is clear, 
therefore, that it has no place in any general scheme 
or design of park-making. It is a mere trivial acces- 
sory, tolerated to appease a feverish taste which it, 
itself, has been largely the means of awakening. 
Yet I would not discard the carpet-bed outright. 
It will disappear with the further evolution of the 
race. I like to see good carpet-bedding, for the 
same reason that I like to sed a curious mechanism, 
— it exhibits the ingenuity and patience of the mak- 
er. Now the place for the carpet-bedding is all to- 
gether, in some place set aside for it and somewhat 
cut off from the landscape gardening. It is of 
exactly the kind as the Zoological Garden, and the 
eagle cages. It is properly a part of the museum. 
I often think that park superintendents ought to 
charge admittance fees to such areas, where those 
who are curious to see specimens and wonders can 
satisfy their desire, in the same way as they can by 
going to a museum or a menagerie. If, then, the 
carpet-beds are kept off the landscape — where they 
are mere interjections — there can be no possible 
objection to their use. 
It is a specious argument of the friends of these 
formal beds, that people demand color. Of course 
they do, but that is not proof that they want color 
in this form. Let some bold gardener put the same 
amount of color into a free and easy planting — into 
a generous, good-natured border of hollyhocks, 
phloxes, asters, golden-rods, lilies, and the like, — 
and then see how the laced and primped and fea- 
tureless carpet-bedding will suffer in the comparison! 
For myself, I find little recreation in our city parks. 
I go there to see the sights, and I walk and gaze 
until tired out. When I want recreation, I go into 
the fields or woods, and sit down and rest. 
L. H. Bailey. 
Golden Gate Park. 
Some of these days the parks of San Francisco 
will be famous as far as civilization extends. Gold- 
en Gate already ranks among the notable parks of 
America, and its natural advantages are such that 
with proper care it must increase in beauty for 
many years to come. The great Presidio military 
reservation and Sutro Heights, complete, with 
Golden Gate, a picturesque chain of parks which 
cover several thousand acres, and overlook for miles 
the Pacific Ocean, the Bay of San Francisco and the 
bold promontories of the Marin Coast. It is now 
proposed to build a broad and splendid boulevard 
extending southwards from this chain of pleasure- 
grounds and curving around the mountains on the 
western side of the Sahta Clara Valley to San Jose, 
thirty miles distant, and to plant it with double 
rows of palms and other rare trees. The scheme 
has been taken up with so much energy by the 
Half Million Club and other progressive organiza- 
tions of San Francisco that its accomplishment ap- 
pears probable. 
Returning to a more detailed description of 
Golden Gate, the first and most notable of Cali- 
fornia parks, the reader must conceive of the San 
Francisco peninsula as a high and rugged mass of 
rocky hills, sand dunes and narrow valleys. It is 
really the northern end of one of the many mount- 
ain chains which constitute what is called the Coast 
Range of California. Winds and fogs sweep across, 
but it is almost frostless, and capable of wonderful 
horticultural results, in skilled hands. Aside from a 
