PARK AND CEMETERY 
and Landscape Gardening. 
VOL. XIII CHICAGO, APRIL, 1903 No. 2 
ParKs and Public Grounds. 
*By O. C. Simonds. 
In addition to parks, my subject would undoubt- 
edly include the public streets, squares and play- 
grounds, the grounds about public buildings, includ- 
ing churches and school yards, and it might also in- 
clude that portion of private grounds seen from the 
public streets. Intelligent consideration of these 
grounds must undoubtedly be based on a knowledge 
of landscape gardening, and it might be well at the 
outset to refer briefly to the sources of such knowl- 
edge. A. J. Downing, who wrote a book on land- 
scape gardening, edited the Horticulturist and was 
the author of “Rural Essays,’ is considered the father 
of landscape gardening in America, and his writings 
should be read by all who are interested in this subject. 
From Downing’s time to the present many books have 
been written that would be of interest to those who 
wish to beautify grounds. One of the best of these 
is, undoubtedly, “Art Out of Doors,” by Mrs. Schuv- 
ler Van Renssalaer, but perhaps the most valuable 
writings since those of Downing are from the pen of 
the late Charles Eliot. I wish to quote from the lat- 
ter as follows : 
“It sometimes seems as if beauty in the surround- 
ings of life were not appreciated, nor even desired, 
here in our America. The man who goes so far as to 
paint his house and to ‘fix up’ his place is reviled as a 
‘dude’ in many parts of our country. A certain brave 
scprn of beauty seems to characterize most of the 
people of our new West. 
“On the other hand we see, when we come to study 
the matter, that if the experience of the past counts 
for anything, there is a power in beauty which works 
for joy and for good as nothing else in this naughty 
world does or can. And when we come to see this 
clearly, we are at once compelled to abandon our in- 
difference and to substitute therefor the eager desire 
of old Plato, ‘that our youth might dwell in a land 
of health amid fair sights and sounds.’ Alas, that 
‘fair sights’ do not spring up spontaneously around 
our modern lives as they seem to have done in the 
Old World. In the long settled corners of Europe, 
men’s fields, lanes, roads, houses, churches, and even 
whole villages and towns seem to combine with nature 
to produce scenery of a more lovable type than nature 
working alone can offer us. With us the contrary 
*A paper read at the last annual meeting of the Illinois 
Horticultural Society. 
is too often the fact. Our buildings,, fences, high- 
ways, and railroads, not to speak of our towns, are 
often scars which mar the face of nature without pos- 
sessing any compensating beauty of their own. It is 
evident that beauty in the surroundings of life is not 
to be had in this modern day without taking thought, 
and exercising vigilance. And our thought and our 
vigilance must be rightly directed, or it will defeat 
our purpose. Many a man, becoming suddenly con- 
scious of a desire for beauty, has attempted to attain 
his heart’s wish bv forbidden and impossible ways. 
Thus country roadsides have been ‘slicked up’ until 
all beauty has been ‘slicked’ out of them.” 
I hope the time will come when no one can say with 
justice that a “brave scorn of beauty seems to charac- 
terize the people of our new West.” 
Personally, I do not claim to have any knowledge 
of the next world, but for years we have been told 
about its golden streets and its beauty has been “lauded 
to the skies” and has been generally approved even by 
those who seem to care nothing about beauty in this 
world. Undoubtedly all would concede that the same 
power that made heaven made the earth, and it would 
seem natural to suppose that if one was beautiful, the 
other must be, and an appreciation of beauty here 
would serve as a preparation for the hereafter, even 
if it did not add to our present happiness. I believe, 
however, that it is true that nothing gives us so much 
pleasure as our ability to admire things that are beau- 
tiful. This ability is, to a certain extent, born with 
us, but it is also true that it can be cultivated. A short 
story will illustrate this : A lady in California asked 
a small boy, who had been in the habit of bringing her 
eggs, if he noticed the beautiful sunset of the even- 
ing before. “No,” he said, “I didn’l have time for 
that.” “But what do you have to do?” asked the lady. 
“Feed the chickens.” “Well, couldn’t you look up 
and see the sunset when you are feeding the chick- 
ens?” He thought not, but agreed, as a special favor 
to her, to watch it the next night. The next evening 
she happened to go past where he lived just as he 
was feeding the chickens. He was standing with his 
mouth open gazing at the western sky, and the follow- 
ing day he assured her that he had never seen any- 
thing so beautiful in his life. We all learn to appre- 
ciate some beautiful things as this boy learned to see the 
sunset. A tree or a shrub which may have been noth- 
ing to us up to a certain time may, after that time, 
