PARK AND CEMETERY 
75 
BEDS OF CACTI, SOMEKTON HIDLS CEMETERY, PHILADELPHIA. 
CEMETERY EMBELLISHMENT, 
BEDS OF SUCCULENTS. 
“Park and Cemetery’’ has frequently called at- 
tention to the decorative effect of Cacti. 
Agaves and other succulents in the summer 
gardens of the North, or as permanent features in the 
more highly favored climates of the Pacific coast. 
The illustration shows two such beds at the Somer- 
ton Hills Cemetery, Philadelphia, planted by Mr. A. 
Blanc, the well-known Cacti specialist. These beds 
were each fifty feet long and contained a large num- 
ber of valuable plants, many of the Cereus and Agaves 
being of large size, while most of the Cacti tribes 
were abundantly represented in the smaller speci- 
mens used as a covering for the ground. Over one 
hundred species and varieties were used, and dis- 
posed in a naturalistic manner. Sometimes, as at 
Fairmont Park and elsewhere, selected species are 
used to produce mosaic pattern beds, and where judg- 
ment is used in coloring these are wonderfuly fine 
and effective. 
Many of the kinds, such as the various Cotyledons 
(Echeveria), Sedums, Sempervivums, and even the 
Agaves and Cacti, may be wintered at comparatively 
small cost of fuel, and without great attention, for 
they may be kept dormant and much drier during 
their period under glass than most decorative plants, 
and we are pleased to see cemeteries beginning to 
use them. They often harmonize admirably with 
sculpture. 
GARDENERS. 
I fail to understand exactly what your correspondent (yis. 
47 and 48) complains of. Is it that private gardeners object 
to the designs of so-called landscape architects, or their 
general ignorance of the material needed for embellishment, 
or their self-assumed title? 
A life-time spent in close touch with gardeners in many 
parts of the world assures me that the man who fails to at 
once recognize merit in his fellows is himself sure to be 
deficient both in perception and ability. He is a garden 
laborer, not a gardener. 
But I could lay my hands on a score or more of men in 
these United States who can immediately discriminate be- 
tween fine writing or other paper work by architects or en- 
gineers, and the ability to prophetically peer into a finished 
landscape creation, say thirty years ahead. 
There is nothing more capable of demonstration than the 
fact that many of the most pretentious plans, involving ex- 
perience, architecture ^nd groundwork, have failed com- 
pletely to materialize into anything but mediocrity, from 
which the unceasing care in development by the best land- 
scape gardeners can scarcely ever redeem them. 
But few such men as these latter practice for a public who 
would require (seemingly) two or three generations to dis- 
cover them. They prefer permanent positions. 
There is no doubt but they in common with most gar- 
deners would suspect any man who arrogated to himself a 
“landscape” title, and showed himself deficient in a knowl- 
edge of landscape material and its arrangement. 
J. McP. 
