361 
PARK AND CRME-TERY. 
ParKs and Landscape Gardening^. 
A paper read at the Boston meeting- of the American Park and Outdoor Art Association, by Bryan Lathrop, of Chicago. 
My first experience as a park commissioner -was a surprise 
and a shock. 
For about eight years Lincoln Park had been given over to 
the politicians, with the usual result — extravagance, mis- 
management, neglect and decay. The new board of com- 
missioners was pledged to the reformation of abuses and 
the restoration of the park. Our success depended upon 
securing a man eminently qualified to be Superintendent. He 
was to take the place once filled so ably by Mr. Pettigrew, 
who now has charge of the model park system of this country. 
We were deluged with letters recommending for Superin- 
tendent a very estimable gentleman, a retired quartermaster 
of the United States army, who had every qualification for 
the office except one : he knew nothing of the making and 
care of parks ; nothing of soils and fertilizers ; of artistic 
grading; of planting and pruning; of the maintenance of 
lawns; of the nature and habits of trees and shrubs, or the 
effect of time on their form and color in masses ; in short, 
he had no knowledge of even the rudimentary principles of 
Landscape Gardening. The letters of recommendation came 
from presidents of railways and of banks, and leading men 
of affairs and in tbe learned professions; and in all these 
letters there was not one word about landscape gardening or 
a suggestion that any knowledge of it is a requisite in the 
management of parks. 
It was this that surprised and shocked me. 
The writers of them are fairly representative of the country 
at large, since it is well known that few men of middle age in 
Chicago were born or brought up there. Let us consider 
for a moment what a park should be. 
The true function of a park is, to afford a refuge to the 
dwellers in cities where they may escape from the sights and 
sounds and associations of the city ; where the eye may 
feast on the beauties of nature, and where body and mind 
may relax and find repose. Therefore beware of the engineer, 
the architect and the sculptor, lest their work usurp undue 
prominence and interfere with the true function of the park. 
To erect in a park buildings, bridges or other structures 
which are not absolutely essential, or to make them more 
conspicuous than is unavoidable; to multiply statues; or 
to introduce unnecessary formal or architectural features, is 
to defeat the first object of the park, to bring ruthlessly before 
the mind the image of the city from which one has sought to 
escape ; it is a blunder, an impertinence, a crime. 
A park then should consist of natural objects, turf, water, 
trees and shrubs, arranged by the art and skill of man so as 
to afford the greatest possible pleasure and enjoyment to the 
people, with no artificial objects which are not essential to 
their comfort or convenience. 
To which of the arts does this work belong? Is it Land- 
scape Gardening? This brings me to a vital question. 
Is Landscape Gardening one of the fine arts, or is it only 
a by-product of the arts, unworthy of the life-long devotion 
of a serious mind? 
One is almost forced to believe that its professors are 
ashamed of it. Few of them even call themselves landscape 
gardeners any more, but “landscape architects,” and latterly 
I have found some classified simply as “architects.” The 
Oxford Dictionary defines an architect as “A master builder. 
A skilled professor of the art of building whose business it 
is to prepare the plans of edifices, and exercise a general 
superintendence over the course of their erection.” I would 
not quarrel about the name unless there is an idea behind it. 
I fear that the name is only one of many indications of a 
tendency to introduce into landscape gardening a formalism 
based on architectural lines and principles which, if not 
checked, will very soon debase and degrade it. 
Is Landscape Gardening one of the fine arts? 
It may seem presumption in a layman to express an opinion 
on this subject; but there is a grain of truth in the pro- 
verbial advantage of tbe looker-on at a game. 
Ever since I wandered as a lad through the parks and 
gardens of Europe I have had a love for landscape garden- 
ing and have been as closely in touch with it as a layman 
can be. 
I believe that Landscape Gardening is not only one of the 
Fine Arts, but that it is one of the greatest of them, and 
that it has possibilities of development of which the others 
are absolutely incapable. 
Landscape art — which includes landscape painting and 
landscape gardening — holds a unique and distinguished posi- 
tion. It is the only one of the arts of design which in the 
nineteenth century made any progress beyond the achieve- 
ments of the great artistic periods of history. All of the 
others have distinctly retrograded. Sculpture is now only 
the pale shadow of the age of Pericles. The heroic style of 
painting which deals with religious, historical and ideal sub- 
jects, has produced nothing within a hundred years which 
ranks with the work of the Italian Renaissance. 
Architecture as a creative art has ceased to exist. In the 
place of the mighty builders of the past we now have schools 
of architecture which formulate rules based on their work; 
i'.nd the best architects of our age are the most successful 
copyists. When an attempt is made to depart from the 
formulas of the schools we have such “architectural aberra- 
tions" as “L’Art Nouveau,” of Paris, or the “Secession 
Styl" of Vienna. 
Landscape painting, however, has made great strides in 
advance of Salvator Rosa, the best of the Italians, and of the 
Poussins and Claude Lorrain, the best of the old French 
schools. 
Landscape gardening has made equal progress in the past 
century and is even more in advance of earlier ages than the 
Barbizon school of landscape painting is in advance of the 
Renaissance. 
I believe that the explanation of this is not far to seek. A 
love of nature for her own sake is distinctly modern. Even 
the greatest of the Renaissance poets show less feeling than ' 
those of the Victorian age for the charms and loveliness of 
natural scenery. It is hardly more than a hundred years since 
painters first began to see nature as she is and to paint land- 
scapes truthfully and without artificial features. 
Until modern times landscape gardening was modelled 
exclusively on the old formal gardens of Italy. The terraces 
which were required on the steep sides taf the Italian hills 
were transplanted to the plains of Versailles and to the gentle 
slopes of England. 
You all know the famous old gardens of Italy and the con- 
tinent. You remember tbe balustrades; the paved terraces; 
the straight walks between clipped hedges and the straight 
avenues, ending in the inevitable bad statue or silly fountain ; 
tbe childish surprises of objects which suddenly cover you 
with spray. If, by chance, you come upon a charming bit of 
turf, with masses of flowering shrubs and trees not in lines 
and left to grow untrimmed, you are told — it may be in Italian 
or German or Spanish or French — that this is the “English 
Garden” ; and you say to yourself “God bless it.” There is a 
touch of nature in it. 
