362 
PARK AND CEMETERY 
Now, I ask you, are we to ignore the glorious progress of 
the nineteenth century and go back to this? 
Instead of striving to carry landscape gardening to perfec- 
tion along the natural lines on which it has made its greatest 
growth, are we deliberately to give up all that the world has 
gained and go back for our models to the dark ages of land- 
scape gardening when it was wholly artificial and unnatural, 
ages before it had grown to be a fine art? I cannot believe it. 
Hence I deprecate the tendency of to-day toward a stiff 
and unlovely formalism in landscape design. I protest against 
it because I believe that it will lead to the decadence of a 
most glorious art which it would reduce to the condition of 
modern Italian sculpture, mere technique without spirit, a 
body without a soul. 
If you think that I exaggerate I beg you to look over one 
of the most popular of recent books on landscape gardening, 
“Gardens Old and New." Turn to the illustration of “formal 
gardens” and of formal designs ; look at them with a thought 
in your minds of some lovely effects of planting done by 
nature or by some man who loved her, and tell yourselves 
honestly what you think of the new-old art. These designs 
were made with a foot-rule, a straight-edge and a pair of 
compasses, and might have been made by an architect, for in 
his legitimate profession he needs no other tools. 
We Americans are a fickle people and are much inclined 
to change our fashions, not only in dress, but in more serious 
tilings. It is this desire for a change for the sake of change 
which has prevented the normal development of architecture 
and stunted the growth of every style in its early youth ; but 
we are also quick to learn and to adopt any new thing which 
is good. 
The love of the beautiful has only recently begun to 
develop in this country and the taste of the people is in a 
formative state, and they are just beginning to realize that 
such an art as landscape gardening exists. 
The architects have done much to improve the taste of the 
dwellers in cities ; but only landscape gardening can reach 
the great mass of the nation and elevate their taste by teach- 
ing them to appreciate the charming things growing wild 
about them, and ultimately to appreciate everything that is 
beautiful in nature and art. 
A heavy responsibility rests on the leaders in landscape 
gardening. They can check the vagaries and inanities which 
are creeping into it and which, unchecked, will prove its ruin 
and will have a far reaching effect in giving the nation a false 
and perverted taste. They and they alone, can correct its 
decadent tendencies and maintain the standard which entitles 
it to rank among the fine arts and which will lead to its 
highest development. 
Michael Angelo gave up painting in oils and adopted frescoes 
and architecture because they gave a wider scope for his 
tremendous energies. 
I sometimes dream that another Michael Angelo will rise 
among us and that he will find in landscape gardening the 
widest scope for the exercise of a mighty creative genius. 
In this young pountry, with its exuberant energjq its in- 
creasing wealth and the development of good taste and a 
love of the beautiful, the opportunities which the future of 
landscape gardening has in store for a great artistic genius 
seem almost boundless. With vast wealth at his command, 
and, for materials, the earth, the sky, mountains, lakes, rivers, 
waterfalls, forests, and the flora of the whole earth, and with 
vistas bounded only by the limits of human sight, he can 
create pictures which will be to natural scenery what the 
Hermes at Olympia is to the natural man, not copies, but the 
assemblage of the perfections of nature, beside which the 
greatest works of other arts will seem as small as the oil 
paintings, despised by Michael Angelo, beside the dome of St. 
Peter’s. 
If Landscape gardening remains true to its mission, to 
delight the eye and heart of man by reproducing nature at her 
best, this I believe to be her destiny, and then architecture 
will be her willing handmaiden. 
FLOWER GARDEN, SCHOOL OF HORTICULTURE, HARTFORD, CONN. 
ScHool Gardens at ScHool of Horticulttire, Hartford, Conn. 
Read by H. D. Hemenway, Director of the School, before the Boston meeting of the American Park and Outdoor Art Association. 
The horticultural department of the Handicraft 
Schools of Hartford, last year undertook to provide 
rudimentary training for the younger pupils from the 
public schools. In the season of 1901 thirty-four boys 
were admitted, and to each was assigned a garden plot 
four feet wide and twenty-five feet long. The instruc- 
tion was given Saturday afternoons, the boys coming 
in two classes at 2 and 4 o’clock. 
The boys came from the eighth and ninth grades 
in Hartford public schools. The work was largely 
experimental, but was, nevertheless, sufficiently suc- 
cessful to make it evident that it. might be made ex- 
