PARK AND CEMETERY 
7 
direction of art principles in an art which the highly 
gifted woman, Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer, pro- 
posed to make “the national art of America” — an art 
which was raised to a high standard by the exceeding- 
ly artistic, sensitive, poetic feeling of A. J. Downing, 
and brought to such perfection by the genius of F. L. 
Olmsted, the greatest living artist in landscape gar- 
dening, of whom all cultured America is proud ? 
Let us turn in time from such a false path, with its 
limited, formal borders of artificiality, which create 
a wrong impression of real art by their ostentatious, 
laborious readiness. Let the wealthy of Europe and 
America possess such country estates if they want to, 
but guard the treasures of the common people, the park 
systems, against too much of such a style. 
Most of the work of landscape gardening has hap- 
pily been, until recently, in the natural style, due to 
the great stimulus imparted by the examples of the 
two above named artists. Some writers and lovers of 
formal gardening try to quote in defense of this style : 
“It goes without saying, that the true natural land- 
scape garden debars all improvement by man mean- 
ing that a natural landscape is perfect as evolved by 
nature and should be left alone. Can such reasoning 
stand analysis? The term gardening at once excludes 
such a meaning. Landscape gardening, Downing 
says, is a union of natural expression and harmonious 
cultivation. The development of the beautiful is the 
end and aim of landscape gardening, as it is of all 
other of fine arts. The finest landscapes, such as 
painters love to perpetuate, are, in Europe, not the 
many formal gardens — let the photographers attend to 
that kind of art — but the seemingly pristine bits of 
scenery. But in densely populated Europe where are 
the untouched, natural landscapes? There is hardly 
a spot to be found where man has not been disturbing 
and working and arranging, in some way or the other, 
the scenery, even if unaware of it. But gardening 
permits such work with the object of improving, if 
possible, and presenting the choicest bits of landscape 
giving in its best form the natural style without show- 
ing the hand 1 of man any more than can possibly be 
avoided ; except in the superior beauty of specimens 
and groups, and the more perfect harmony in color 
of foliage and flowers of the native flora. We can 
hardly call a jumble of plans, collected from entirely 
different countries, a natural landscape, even if har- 
monious in form and color. 
Adolph Strauch says in the American Cyclopedia 
of Horticulture : The ideal landscape garden, like the 
ideal landscape painting, expresses or emphasizes some 
single thought or feeling. Its expression may be gay, 
bold, retired, quiet, florid; but if it is natural its ex- 
pression will conform to the place. It should be a 
picture, not a collection of interesting objects. J. J. 
Jarvis, in The Art Idea, speaking of Central Park, 
New York, says: An institution like this, combining 
art, science, and nature in harmonious unity, is a great 
free school for the people, of broader value than mere 
grammar schools ; for besides affording pleasing ideas 
and useful facts, it elevates and refines the popular 
mind by bringing it in intimate contact with the true 
and beautiful under circumstances conducive to hap- 
piness and physical well being. 
Sir Joshua Reynolds, in Discourses on Art, says : 
The beginning, the middle, and the end of everything 
that is valuable in taste is comprised in the knowledge 
of what is truly nature ; for whatever notions are not 
conformable to those of nature, or universal opinion, 
must be considered as more or less capricious. 
In Architectural Styles, Rosengarten says: If we 
wish for a landscape picture in accordance with our 
times, both the purpose and internal truth must be 
predominant, and at the same time everything that 
savors of pretense and unreality must be avoided : that 
is to say, all forms which represent something which 
they really are not, and express intentions which are 
not existent. 
Does not the idea of all these great artists and phil- 
osophers, applied to landscape gardening, mean that 
it is a fine art ? And that it is as such as little akin to 
formal gardening as to a pristine natural landscape ? 
Cornus Florida Flore-Rxibra. 
By James MacPherson. 
The handsome pink Dogwood shown, attracts so 
much attention and inquiry wherever seen that it 
seems advisable to place its history on record. 
The first tree seen by me was growing on the old 
Preston Place at Columbia, South Carolina. It was 
in the spring of 1876 (the Centennial year) that I saw 
a tree full of brilliant pink blossoms through the juni- 
pers (red cedars), with which the old garden was cov- 
ered, and I at once made for it and found it to be 
cornus florida with pink involucres. I collected all 
the seed I could, as it laid thick on the ground from 
the previous year’s crop, sowed some at Columbia, 
and sent some to the Meehans of Philadelphia, also 
two separate bundles of grafts, and specimens of the 
flowers. Probably Meehans didn’t realize the prize 
placed in their hands, or they may have been quite un- 
prepared with proper stocks for grafting, at any rate 
they subsequently informed me they didn’t get one of 
them. 
It was quite a great disappointment. So in 1880 I 
wrote my friend Trumpy of the Flushing Nurseries 
about it, and he promised to forward some stocks if 
I would supply him with the locality of the tree, which 
I subsequently did. In the meantime I wrote to Gen- 
