YOPlfc 
House&Garden 
V o 1 . IV NOVEMBER, 1903 No. 5 
AMERICAN GARDEN-CRAFT FROM AN 
ENGLISH POINT OF VIEW 
By EDWARD S. PRIOR, M. A. 
[No,te. —The gardens referred to in this article which have appeared in past numbers of House 
and Garden are “Faulkner Farm" Vol. I, Nos. 3 and 4—“The Briars” Vol. II, p. 438— 
Mr. Croly’s Vol. II, p. 198—Mr. Stanford White’s Vol. Ill, p. 198—“ Swarthmore Lodge” 
Vol. I, p. 1 —“Fairacres ” Vol. IV, p. 1—“Beaulieu” Vol. II, p. 616 — “ Biltmore ” 
Vol. I, No. 6—“ Bellefontaine ” Vol. II, pp. 1 and 64—Gardens of Nantucket Vol. II, p. 310 
— “Hampton” Vol. Ill, p. 41 — “Mount Vernon” Vol. II, p. 459. — Editor.] 
T HE laying out of the garden is clearly 
taken seriously in America : its order and 
shapeliness are matters of concern. Beauty 
is not left to haphazard, but is made the 
result of intelligent study by experts, and 
experts too who are not the mere hacks 
and quacks that English gardens tolerate. 
Any laying out that the English garden gets 
is usually at the hands of an unintelligent 
nurseryman or “ landscape gardener,”—as 
he professes himself,—whose ideas are lim¬ 
ited by laurel and rhododendron thickets, 
and clumsy grass-plots rounded and clipped 
and set with edging plants. The last deca¬ 
dence of this “ landscape gardening ” is a 
complete formlessness with every ugliness 
polished and rendered glaring by the neat¬ 
ness ot our gardening habit. 1 So it is per¬ 
haps fortunate that the large majority of 
English gardens have escaped the super¬ 
vision of the professional garden-maker, and 
have come anyhow as the result of half¬ 
hearted and isolated amateur experiment. 
But in either case most often the beauty of 
1 Our public gardens, whether under state or municipal control are 
hopelessly in the hands of the commercial “landscapist.” London 
can hardly show anything set out with knowledge of the garden effect 
proper to cities, such as on the continent of Europe comes as a matter 
of course into every public square. 
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