Making Florida Home Grounds Attractive 
* 
Lantern Slide Talk Given Before the Florida Horticultural Society 
at Lakeland 
William A. Cook, Oneco 
It is now seventy years since the tragic 
and untimely death of the father and dean 
of landscape art in America, Andrew 
Jackson Downing. But the impress which 
he made by landscape works achieved, in 
voluminous writings, and, perhaps more 
than all else by the genuine inspiration of 
his life and personality, has had a pro¬ 
found influence on the thought and view¬ 
point of the American public toward the 
profession of landscape design. 
But as the ripples created by the drop¬ 
ping of a stone into a clear surface of wa¬ 
ter become less and less pronounced as 
their spread increases, so does the influ¬ 
ence of such men appear less and less 
marked as it approaches the outskirts of 
our vast civilization. Florida, with all 
her manifest advantages, we must confess 
(if we will be perfectly sincere about it) 
is just outgrowing that crude, awkward 
stage of pioneer life perhaps best likened 
to the half-grown boy just donning long 
trousers and smoking his first cigar! 
Those who have been responsible for 
the laying out of our towns and for as¬ 
sociated civic activities have been, in the 
main, woefully deficient in broad, con¬ 
structive vision. It what attempts that 
have been made toward the beautification 
of grounds, both public and private, there 
has too often been a lack of intelligent un¬ 
derstanding of even the basic principles 
of art and good taste. All too frequently 
those who would be most confused and 
“at sea” if required to paint a canvas or 
compose a piece of music, seem to imagine 
that no special talent or study is necessary 
to lay out attractive grounds. 
Do not misunderstand me—I do not 
mean to imply that the amateur gardener 
cannot achieve a fair measure of success 
and derive vast pleasure from the study of 
the art of landscaping, but he must make 
some study of the problems involved be¬ 
fore he can create what will in any sense 
be an intelligently and comprehensively 
attractive landscape picture! 
The slides that I am going to show this 
evening, have been especially selected to 
bring out, first some of the basic princi¬ 
ples I have mentioned, and secondly to 
show how it is possible to accomplish 
vastly more than we have done toward 
putting Florida on a par with California 
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