PARK AND CCnCTCRY 
77 
to mankind, both commercially and socially. 
In a country of so vast an area and with climatic 
conditions so varied, the establishment of such 
parks is a matter that should receive close atten- 
tion as a question of public policy. Our gover- 
ment agricultural experiment stations play an im- 
portant part in the economy of the country, but 
cannot supply, the place of the botanical garden, 
carried out to its possibilities. The Royal Gardens 
at Kew have benefited the world to an extent un- 
known to the people at large, and their influence have 
been world wide. 
Mr. John F. Cowell is the director of the Botan- 
ic Garden of Buffalo. In area the tract comprises 
about I 55 acres. 
Nature Versus Art. 
Although stiffness and formality have of late 
years in a great measure disappeared from the flow- 
er garden, thanks chiefly to the persistent preach- 
ing of the apostles of Nature v. Art, one is often 
discouraged by chancing upon gardens, some of 
them large, some but a yard or two in extent, up- 
on which evident and loving labor has been expend- 
ed, with a result that makes the heart of the lover 
of Nature sick within him. Who does not know 
the flint or clinker erections, fashioned with infinite, 
but fiendish ingenuity, of some railway or coast- 
guard stations? Once, indeed, at one of the former 
I saw a spar and clinker locomotive that must have 
taken months to complete. These receptacles gen- 
erally contain a few Wall-flowers, Antirrhinums, or 
Marigolds, flowers that with their natural setting of 
brown or red earth or grass verge have a simple 
charm that they are effectually bereft of by their 
blatant caskets. To such gardeners, however, a 
sense of delicacy makes it difficult to speak one’s 
thoughts. I always find when it comes to the 
point that I am too much of a coward to condemn 
to the proprietor what to him is evidently such a 
source of pride, and end by leaving him to worship 
the goddess Flora after the manner of his mistaken 
sect, which, alas! is not be met with only in the 
small plot of the working man, for in many a large 
garden the time-honoured motto est celare artem 
is glaringly ignored. 
I have in my mind a public garden which might 
be very beautiful; even with all the sins of com- 
mission that have been perpetrated within its bord- 
ers it is still beautiful. The first impression forced 
upon the stranger on entering is that the gardener’s 
chief aim is to impress upon the public’s notice the 
grandmotherly care that he takes of his charges. 
Nothing is allowed to grow 6 inches high without a 
stick and a tie. Torture at the stake is apparent 
on every side. During the last summer bushy 
Fuchsias were planted in quantity and their shoots 
tied to yellow Bamboo canes, some of the speci- 
mens being fixed up with as many as twenty; in 
fact, the poor plants seemed always of secondary 
importance to conspicuous sticks that spread them 
out so stiffly. A bed of giant Sunflowers had inch- 
square stakes over 6 feet in length driven into the 
ground beside each plant before the latter were 2 
feet above the soil; consequently, until the flowers 
were produced and growth completed, the stakes 
were the chief feature of the plot, and some of the 
plants not growing over 4 feet high never attained 
to more than two-thirds of the height of their res- 
pective supports. The most striking error, how- 
ever, in the matter of staking in this garden occur- 
ed in the case of a flowering Aloe (Agave amer- 
icana). I noticed the flower-spike just as it pro- 
truded from the huge serrated leaves; so evidently 
had the ever-watchful staker, for a deep excavation 
was being commenced at a distance of about 3 feet, 
and on the next occasion of my passing a gigantic 
mast about 20 feet in height, like an emerald-green 
scaffolding pole, towered over the abashed succu- 
lent. As the spike, far slenderer than its bulky 
wooden companion, grew it was securely fastened 
at intervals to the pole, which was eventually short- 
ened to about 12 feet, the height of the Aloe’s 
flower-spike. Now if support had been necessary 
in this case, it could have easily been given in a 
way that would have been almost unnoticeable, but 
as bad gales do not occur during the English sum- 
mer, and as the Aloe’s candelabra weather in their 
thousands many a bitter gale in their native hab- 
itats without being levelled to the ground, the in- 
ference is that the disfigurement was entirely 
gratuitous. It spoilt the quaint effect of the Aloe’s 
inflorescence and was merely a monument of mis- 
judgment. 
On the largest piece of turf in the garden of 
which I write, the name of the town is cut out in 
letter beds, which are planted with Pyrethrum 
aureum. It is diffcult to believe that any educat- 
ed person could find subject for commendation in 
the atrocities I have described, yet so depraved, or 
rather I should say so unenlightened, are the tastes 
of many, that a section of the public is prouder of 
all this misdirected zeal than of the many beautiful 
objects and effects that the garden still affords. S. 
W. F. in The Garden. 
Dr. Thomas Holmes of Brooklyn, N. Y., claims 
to have perfected an embalming process which 
he has been working on for several years. He states 
that he is able to turn the human body to stone by 
a process of petrifaction. He calls it the antizeptic 
gas process of embalming. 
