246 
PARK AND CEMETERY. 
is a park and in it a broad undulating sloping 
meadow covered with dry walkable turf. It is a 
delight. A mass planting stands on a liillock over- 
looking the meadow and many charming vistas are 
to be seen frgm the knoll. Imagine a house to grow 
up in the background of this shrubbery. What a 
splendid spot to live in! Were such an habitation 
for every household, what beautiful American homes I 
Can this unquestionably beautiful scenery be 
transplanted to ordinary residences? There are two 
ways of attempting it. The first is to treat several 
adjoining house-lots together, putting a whole sec- 
tion under one scheme ; the second is to treat each 
property separately. Regarding these methods, let 
us remember how well the English love to own land 
and that land ownership is beginning truly to be 
sought by Americans. Therefore, any scheme 
which wholly ignores boundary lines in property is 
not likely to wear well, so that a l)etter way is- to 
combine the two methods ; that is, treat each lot by 
itself and in relation to the neighborhood it is in. 
Does this, then, allow us to transplant nature? Part- 
ly. As animal beauty depends largely upon the 
health of the animal, so landscape beauty has its 
conditions of life. Willingness to live where placed 
is a necessity to beauty. Therefore, to transplant 
natural landscape, the secret of success is to make 
such surroundings that the natural landscape is con- 
tented with the new location. 
It has been suggested that the present style of 
shrubbery is merely a fad, that people will drift back 
to the use of a few shrubs, a lawn, and trees. I have 
not heard any one call the house lawn a fad, and yet, 
when I think of the park meadow and how we 
transplant it and cut it up as a cook would trim pie- 
crust, I fail to see there the beauty of the meadow. 
Mud lives where we wish good turf. We are over- 
forcing nature when we ask for sod in very shady 
places and often so in narrow strips along our city 
sidewalks. Hardened to that, we pass it by, but cry 
“Down with the shrubbery fad.” Think, study, and 
learn the varied beauty of the many distinct varie- 
ties of shrubs — their leaves, their stems, and their 
blossoms. Shrubbery is not over used — unless this 
is an age dull to nature, dull and growing duller. It 
is the abuse of shrubbery that is a fad if anything is. 
There are many principles which define a good 
lay-out of grounds from a poor one. Certain land- 
scape architects have formulated what seemed to 
each a foundation for work. “Capability Brown,” I 
think it was, who said that the house should come 
■out of the lawn. A later landscape architect said 
that the house should come out of the shrubbery. 
Both of the above, I take to be but special cases of 
a more general principle. The ground around the 
liouse should be treated for stability with the house. 
By stability, I refer to the stable equilibrium men- 
tioned in treatises upon physics. Anything which 
makes the architecture of the house in general or in 
detail to stand out more firmly, that thing adds to 
the stability of the whole. Stability might be termed 
wearableness and it has to do both with the useful 
and the artistic. The house should come out of 
grounds stable to that particular house and the uses 
1 equired of these grounds. If the house come out 
of shrubbery, let the planting be broad enough and 
designed to set off the firmness of the building. We 
-\mericans overestimate a lawn and we fear and 
tremble lest we lose an inch of it. Many places 
would be saved from artistic ruin if the shrubberv 
encroached just a little more upon the lawn. Once 
•more, the house may come out of the lawn or again 
partly out of shrubbery and partly out of lawn, or 
even out of gravel spaces, rockeries, hillsides, and 
so forth. The grounds between some houses and 
the street might be entirely covered with shrubs and 
other grounds might consist -of simple lawns nearlv 
bare. 
In the layout of residence grounds, many things 
need to be considered in designing an effective 
scheme. There enter: The character and fitness of 
the grade lines ; the expanse and detail of the shrub- 
bery ; the inviting quality of the lawn portion ; the 
directness as well as the beauty of all paths, drives and 
so forth ; the introduction of flower gardens and 
other pastimes ; the problem of sunlight and shad- 
ows ; the amount of use the ground will get, and 
the degree of companionability suggested. Grounds 
used and loved will make for America a varied and 
an effective architecture in landscape, while unusual 
grounds will mean a succession and repetition of 
fads. J. Wesson Phelps. 
CREMATION BECOMING POPULAR. 
Many of your readers will no doubt remember the 
first regular attempt at a public crematory, built by a 
Mr. Le Moine (I think) at Washington, Pa., during 
1882-1883. It was a remarkable event for a body to 
l)e thus disposed of in this country in those years, and 
it is said that only twenty-five bodies were cremated 
at Washington, Pa., in all. 
In 1885 a crematory was built at Fresh Pond, L. I., 
New York, and it, too, was but little used for awhile, 
only eight bodies being cremated in the first year, 
rising to 76, however, in 1886, to 232 in 1893, and to 
654 in 1901. The total cremations at Fresh Pond 
since the opening are said to have been 4.727. Of this 
number there have been Germans, 2,338 ; Americans, 
1,709; English, 151; Swiss, 104; Austrians, 93: 
French, 73; Irish, 39; Hindoos, 4; Unclassified, 215. 
Of these, 2,696 were men, and 1,377 were women, 
21 1 boys and 170 girls, while the sex of 273 is un- 
accounted for in the newspaper account before me. 
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