[45:567]PRIVATE You have been told that something would be read to you today on Landscape Architecture. But the subject to the consideration of which I wish to lead you is not one that is suggested to most of our people by this term: Still less is it suggested by the term Landscape Gardening. I can give it no name by which I can be sure that all of you would know it. I will ask you, then, to reflect that the names by which some trades and other divisions of labor are now known are not the same with those which they once bore and that the materials, implements and processes used in some of them are different from those formerly used. It thus appears that for the identification of a particular division of labor, you do not need to know by what name it happens, for the time, to be going, nor with what tools or by what processes it is operating. What you do need to know is the object of its operations.

If, in answer to a question about a man’s calling, you are told that he is a painter of miniature portraits, this answer distinguishes his calling from that of others; first, as that of a painter; second, from that of other painters as that of a portrait painter; lastly, from that of other portrait painters as that of a painter of portraits in miniature. Thus his division of labor is identified.

The distinguishing object of the calling now to be considered is that of furthering the enjoyment of Scenery.

[45:568a] Preparatory study and practice study have carried me into every state of our Union, and into intimate converse about innumerable distinct problems of Landscape work, under most varied conditions of soil, climate and society, and this with people differing widely among themselves in character, training and habits.

Of what I have gained through this experience that is of much practical professional advantage, that which is of most value is an increased ability to discriminate be [45:568b] tween Landscape motives and motives that are not landscape motives and that are liable to be in conflict with landscape motives. A confused mind, in this respect, I have found everywhere and always, and with men of all degrees and conditions, to be the chief obstacle to the successful prosecution of operations designed to further landscape purposes.

There is nothing that you can take from me that will be of as much value as a sense of the importance of being on guard against unconscious confusion of purpose between the enjoyment of scenery and the enjoyment of something else than scenery.

[990]

If you have read of operations of Landscape Architecture, or Landscape Gardening, or Natural Gardening or Picturesque Gardening, or Gardenesque Gardening, or of plain Gardening, of all which you may have read in standard works, you may determine which of all the operations that have been called, by any of these names, are works of the division that we are now to consider, by asking if the object to which the work is directed is really the promotion of charm of scenery.

When I use this word scenery please to understand it as it is commonly understood when used, here and now, in the common speech of common people. Remember that among these we often hear of “mountain scenery,” “sylvan scenery,” “coast scenery”; of the “scenery of a forest” in which the range of the vision is closely limited; of “riverside scenery”; even of “roadside scenery.” We hear of “secluded” and of “confined” scenery. But we do not hear of streetside scenery or of the scenery of a room or of a public square. If we ever hear of the scenery of a dinner table decorated with flowers and greenery, it is a forced and affected use of the word. It is not naturally used with regard to any field of vision in which all that is to be seen is clear and well-defined in outline; a field of vision which is chiefly occupied by blocks of buildings, for example. It is rarely used, if ever, except with regard to a field of vision in which there is not either considerable complexity of light and shadow near the eye, or obscurity of detail further away.

[45:578b] Charm of scenery may be promoted by various operations; for example, first, by building constructions by means of which elements of scenery may be made available that otherwise would not be; second, by removing or hiding deformities, incongruities and obstructions; third, by improving certain constituents of scenery through operations of planting, thinning plantations, draining and fertilizing the soil, and so on.

But there is no kind of operation to be used for this purpose that may not also be used for some other purpose, even a purpose inconsistent with, and antagonistic to, a purpose of promoting charm of scenery. Hence, I wish to fix your minds on the object, not, at present, on the methods of promoting charm of scenery.

That you may recognize how this general neglect of discrimination appears and operates, I shall presently give you a number of illustrations of it. As an example of one of its simpler and grosser forms, I will say now that it is a common thing, when the site for a building has been selected expressly because of the advantages found in it for the enjoyment of scenery, to have much work done with a purpose, not to bring out, strengthen, aggrandize and support the more valuable characteristic features of this scenery, but with a purpose to promote a kind of enjoyment for which the place offers no particular advantages, and which could have been better pursued in many other places at half the cost.

Something more simply unwise than this is often to be seen; more simply unwise, though not necessarily as unhappy in its results. I mean the [991]building of a house in a [45:579] place which has been selected because of the beauty of what may be seen from it in the distance, and then, as a part of the operations of intended improvement of the immediate locality, trees planted where they will in a few years destroy that advantage; the object of planting them being to secure an enjoyment of the beauty of the particular trees, which is as different a thing from beauty of scenery as beauty of a feather is different from beauty of a bird. You may often see lack of discrimination yet more unwise. You may see, for example, thousands of dollars spent in grading operations in order to obtain an improvement of scenery at a particular place and then certain trees planted where, after a few years’ growth, they will completely defeat this purpose. And these trees, not planted because it has been reckoned that their beauty would compensate for the wasting of scenery, but because these trees were thought to be rare and curious objects.

How generally people untrained in this respect are apt to fail of discrimination when devising means of promoting enjoyment in scenery, may be better seen if judged from the common want of precision with which such words and terms are commonly used as are needed to give communicable form to thought upon the subject.

John Claudius Loudon, whom you know as the author of a Cyclopedia of Architecture, in another work of his, written eighty years ago, with special reference to our subject, said: “Nothing creates so much confusion as the erroneous application of terms.” (Treatise of Forming Country Residencies; Vol. 2nd, p. 389)

[45:580a] Again, Payne Knight was another author, of the last century, of a treatise on “The Philosophy of Taste.” He, also, wrote a quantity of verse published in London under the title of “THE LANDSCAPE: A DIDACTIC POEM.” The last attracted more attention than is usually given to new poems of any species, or to didactic works even in avowed prose. In the second edition of it, soon called for, the author gave, as a reason for having slighted certain parts of his subject, “the difficulty of finding distinct terms to express distinct ideas.” As to this difficulty, Mr Knight observed that “common use” had “introduced a variety of literal and metaphorical meanings, [relative to landscape matters], so perplexing, that people were perpetually using words without attaching any precise meaning to them.”

But, while, as these citations show, there is nothing new in the observation, there is occasion for you to consider the rapid increase of the difficulty that has since occurred, and you must let me illustrate the manner in which this increase appears.

Serious and animated public discussion of our subject has, with us, for a generation past, been pointed for the most part, to places which have been spoken of as parks; to so-called park projects, park bills, park acts and the doings of park commissions and park committees. The highest, and nearly the only, authority as to the meaning of English words, in Mr. Knight’s time, was Dr. Johnson, who gave the word park but one short definition. In the [992]Century [45:580b] Dictionary completed last year the same word is allowed ten definitions, and I have heard it used in ways which would call for at least as many more.

If, in Mr. Knight’s time, a novelist wrote of his heroine that she walked from the terrace across the lawn, through the pleasure ground, into the garden, and thence upon the park, he could reasonably suppose that these words would convey ideas as distinct one from another as the words transept and apse; or drawing-room, library and kitchen. So, if he wrote of a parklike treatment of land, or of parklike turf or trees, especially if he did so under Mr. Knight’s title of “Landscape,” he could reasonably presume that, in the mind of an English reader, a vision would arise of undulating ground partly shaded by trees; these trees mainly of umbrageous forms, and so disposed, singly and in groups and bodies, as to leave unbroken glades of unevenly cropped turf and ferns and much breadth of light in relief of much breadth of shadow. Through one or more of the glades his mental eye would rove to a distance at which trees of different species would be so blending together that the individual forms and character of no one of them could be clearly distinguished. The background would thus be indistinct and mysterious. Scattered along the glades and among the nearer trees, he would see groups of grazing and ruminating animals. He would see no trace of scythes or mowers. He would see nothing that common people would habitually speak of as gardening. He would see only such conditions as the term garden, and gardening would, to the imagination of common people, be put out of question.

The characteristic scenery of ninety-nine in a hundred bodies of land known as parks being of this sort, there [45:581] could be little danger that when scenery was described as parklike, the reader would imagine anything of a widely different character. For the same reason there is little danger that confusion will result if the word park is applied as it often is in our Rocky Mountain region, to designate any body of land similar in its general topographical characteristics, to a park more strictly so called.

I will show the more licentious use of the word now common and the effect of such use by two or three recent experiences.

A liberally educated & traveled man, who can talk accurately and critically of pictures and of books, and who has an eminent social position, was lately wishing to explain what he was disposed to have done with a pastured field in which he was at the time standing. The field had an undulating surface; it was partly wooded, and where not so, it bore a number of young trees of spreading habit. The gentleman, intending to build a fine house upon it, had the idea that, in all its parts, this field should be arrayed consistently with the intended bravery of the proposed building. He spoke of various objects and features that might be introduced to this end, and showed plainly that he wanted the field to be given a less parklike character than it then had. But what he said was that he wanted it to be made “more parklike.” Thus he used a term, which in historical English speech and English literature, meant the exact [993]opposite of what he intended to express. A term which used in this old sense is a useful one, but which can be used as he used it only to the bewilderment and confusion of thought and purpose.

I have been called to aid in the development of projects for large public parks in twenty different cities of the United States and Canada. In nearly every case it has been made apparent to me that it was presumed by many of those interested that the end, that I should have chiefly in view and to which all others would be secondary, would be that common in the laying out of gardens, properly so called; private, house-gardens with distinctly defined limits, the interest and beauty of which lies chiefly in their flowers and other objects to be closely observed and commonly classed as ornamental objects. It has been exceptionally that the sole end which I recognize as the justification of a city in acquiring a space of ground sufficient for a park has had general public recognition for years after a plan looking to that end has been adopted and large outlays made for realizing it. This end is the refreshing effect upon townspeople of the enjoyment of landscape or pastoral scenery, to which enjoyment the presence of flowers or other objects of beauty is not an essential element. But it is not alone with the end of gardens that the end of parks is confused.

Ten minutes walk from where we stand, there was formerly a salt marsh. Because of conditions incidental to the settlement of a town population near it, the naturally [45:569a] agreeable scenery of this marsh and its borders was lost and it came to be, in large part, a filthy slough and an eyesore. The Sewer Department of the city decided that it was necessary to form in the locality a basin in which water could be occasionally stored for an hour or two while the tide was too high for its continuous outflow. It was determined that an attempt should be made to reconcile means for abating the nuisance of the slough and for forming the required basin, with a scheme of landscape fitting, as far as practicable, the natural and the necessary artificial conditions of the locality, and years ago, operations were set about to that end. The place is to be bounded by streets at a higher elevation than that of the marsh, and the slopes between the edge of these streets and the marsh have, for seemliness, trees planted upon them and clothed with verdure.

The official name of this place is “The Fens,” and no better short descriptive name could be applied to it (“Fen; low land covered wholly or partially with water, but producing sedge, coarse grasses, or other aquatic plants.”) Since the inception of the work, those responsible for it have not called it a park; have not thought of it as a park. It might more intelligibly and less inexactly be called a slop-bowl than a park. Yet, nine times out of ten, when there is occasion to refer to it in the ordinary conversation of educated Bostonians, it is called “the Back Bay Park.” It follows that it is often commented upon and discussed as if it had or ought to have the traditional character of a park. It is described by this term in newspapers and in debates of the city council. Probably half of you here present know it by no other name. [45:569b] I have [994]

lately read a laudatory newspaper comment upon it in which it is in one place described as a beautiful park, and in another as a beautiful garden, neither of which terms apply to it descriptively any more than the name jail applies to the public library, or the name museum to the new Court House. Its character is the opposite of that which the word park-like is useful to indicate.

I assume that you agree with me that it is not desirable that buildings of wholly different character, serving different purposes, should have but one name and be alike praised and found fault with, as if there was but one standard of propriety of design for all, and I further assume that a similar course or a strong tendency to a similar course with respect to public grounds is equally to be regretted and combatted. Let me mention, then, another case.

A few years ago, ten minutes walk from where we are, in an opposite direction from The Fens, there was a sign reading “Park Square Garden.” There was nothing in sight that the most illiterate of Mr. Knight’s readers would have recognized, either as a park, a square or a garden. There was something miscalled a square; something miscalled a park, and something else misnamed a garden; the last being otherwise known as a “saloon,” or a “sample-room.” In the English of our fathers such a place was a dramshop.

In a Brooklyn newspaper I have seen a public way gravely designated [995] “Sacket Street Parkway Boulevard.” In a Chicago journal, I have read of the “Drexel Avenue Parkway Boulevard.” Avenue. Parkway. Boulevard. Could each of these three designations have been used to represent a distinct idea? If this process goes on can it end short of a new town of Babel? A few days ago, in the outskirts of another city, I walked through what used to be called a lane; a steep, winding, narrow lane, not a rod wide at some points; rarely used by a wheeled vehicle; but the city government had named it [45:570a] Blank Avenue. In many of our cities, you may find one public way called a street, and another parallel to and near it, of the same width, the same length, and in all respects of similar character, called an avenue. Here in Boston, it is not unusual to hear the designation avenue applied to a crooked private approach to a cottage, and even to a footpath broken by stairs. If this is right why are Commonwealth Avenue and Huntington Avenue so called?

I was once walking over a body of land officially called a park & which had nearly a natural park-like quality of scenery, when, coming to a nursery of trees that had been bought to be planted upon it, I found a man who informed me that he was its “landscape gardener.” Having introduced myself as one often given the name of landscape gardener, he did not wish me to suppose that the stock I saw in the nursery was of his choosing. “There is nothing here,” he said, “that I should think of planting in a park.” “And what would you plant?” I asked. “Oh! choice park-like stuff, of course,” he answered; “such as Ginkgoes, Sophoras, Striped-leaved Acers, Cut-leaved Betulas and Variegated Negundos. These here are nothing but common native trees.” Then he went on to speak of several plants recently brought from far countries, which, with reference to out-of-door planting, are yet with us of the most dubiously experimental interest. The observations which he made on these, with his comments on the nursery stock, showed that his definition of the word park would be a museum, or free popular show ofvegetable bric-a-brac. And a like understanding of the word often appears in carefully edited journals. It has appeared in an important public document addressed to the citizens of Boston.

[45:570b] The word landscape has been so much publicly abused that few people now attach any distinct idea to it. Fewer use it consistently.

What, think you, can be the effect of familiarity with advertisements in which stoves of a certain form are called “Landscape Stoves,” or a certain pattern of house furniture “The Landscape Pattern”? I have seen both advertised. Consider what confusion of thought is manifested by such practices. Consider to what bewilderment of mind they are tending. I have been told of a man who called himself a landscape gardener who, having several times used the word as a verb, saying “I shall landscape this, or I shall landscape that,” was asked to explain the meaning of this term. He replied, “To landscape a piece of ground is to make it wavy; to landscape a path is to make it crooked.”

Again, as to the effect of this neglect of discrimination, it occurred, a few years ago, that a competitive examination was made of candidates for the position of landscape gardener for a large public ground. Nearly every one [996]of twenty was floored by the question: “What is the difference between the landscape treatment and the decorative treatment of ground?” One wrote: “It would be my aim to do all in my power to make a specialty in decorating with bedding plants and all other varieties of bright foliage, trees, shrubs, etc.” Of landscape, he had nothing to say and in an oral examination it became evident that the word had no meaning to him unless it was that of superior. A landscape gardener meant, he appeared to suppose, a gardener of a superior grade, or of a style for the time, more fashionable. Another answered the question: “Landscape beauty is to lay out nice walks and nice flower beds. Decorative beauty is to decorate with plants.” Both these worthy men offered certificates of competency as “landscape gardeners.” The answers of others, more intelligent, showed that they considered the difference between landscape gardening and other gardening to be chiefly one of scale, the word landscape [45:571a] being understood to imply spaciousness.

I have read, in one of the most respectable of our daily journals, an editorial reference to an exhibition of ingenuity in the “pictorial” use of bedding plants within an iron railing about a monument, as a creditable display of “landscape” art. Be assured that the term might with quite equal fitness be applied to the work of a confectioner, or of a milliner. Consider what confusion of thought must underlie and must be promoted by such practices.

Suppose that a man should tell you that he was building a large and costly house. He had not yet employed an architect. It would be time enough to engage an architect when the building work should be out of the way. I declare that, with regard to the purpose of producing charm of landscape which is the same thing as charm of scenery, I have had many corresponding experiences.

The long string of illustrations I have been giving you of Mr. Knight’s difficulty, as it now exists in a greatly more aggravated way than it did when he was living, might be made many times larger. I have wished, in extending it as far as I have, to prepare you for the assertion I now make; namely, that all other causes of waste and extravagance, and all other causes of poor results and lasting dissatisfaction, not simply in works of scenery, but of pleasure ground work of all sorts, are of less consequence than those that are due to the vagueness, feebleness, and indetermination and consequent vacillation of purpose, with which such works are commonly prosecuted. Were it necessary I could give you many more striking and melancholy illustrations of this fact. It is my deliberate opinion that, but for the [45:571b] cause thus stated, as it has existed in the minds of those by whom I have been employed in my professional capacity, an amount several million dollars less than has been spent upon the construction and maintenance of the public grounds that have been formed more or less under my counsel would have made them very much more valuable than they are. There has been similar wastefulness in most of the private grounds with which I have had to do. Again and again, enjoyment of scenery has been almost completely spoiled after large outlay has been made to secure it, by [997]the crowding in of childish features of extraneous decoration wholly foreign to and destructive of the character of the scenery. It is as if a man having built a stately house of stone should paste it over with assorted samples of beautiful and costly paper hangings.

There are many ways in which radically different purposes are constantly pursued on grounds public and private, in such way that operations directed by regard for one, are counteractive and wasteful of operations pursued with regard for others. Of all these, that, the propensity to pursue which is most deeply fixed and the hardest to escape from, is the confusing of purposes distinctively of gardening with purposes of scenery or landscape. And the chief aim of all that I have further to say today will be to help you to make yourselves independent of this propensity in any thought that you may hereafter have occasion to give to operations for the promotion either of enjoyment of garden beauty, or enjoyment of beauty of scenery.

The most wasteful confusion of purpose that is thus prevalent is the confusion of a purpose to produce the charm of a garden with a purpose to produce landscape charm on the same ground and by use of the same materials. What I am next to read will have been written with a wish to buttress you against yielding to the popular fashion in this respect.

[45:573a] I here use the word garden in its oldest and yet its commonest sense; the sense in which it is still most used by common people, here and in England. What that sense is, and what ideas, if one wishes to use words aidfully to accurate thought, it is best to attach to the word garden, I shall hope to make clear to you, by a slight sketch of the history of pleasure gardening; my main object being to help you to see the difference between a purpose of promoting garden enjoyment and a purpose of promoting landscape enjoyment.

Professor Whitney shows that in different European languages the word garden occurs in more than twenty forms. See a list in the Century Dictionary. In German, for instance, it is garten; in French, jardin; in Portuguese, giardine; in Anglo Saxon, it was geard; in old German, gart; in old English, garth; all obviously branches from a common root. From the same root, it is supposed by etymologists that other words have branched, such as, in Scotch, gerd, meaning a hoop; in old English, gard, also a hoop; in Icelandic, girda, meaning to surround with a fence; in Swedish, gördel, a waist belt; in our own tongue, garth, girth, girding and girdle. You see that all of this latter series convey the idea of separation and confinement, or separation and the converse of confinement, exclusion.

[45:573b] How can it have happened that the root idea of the word garden is also the root idea of girth and girdle? For an answer to this question, we may look in imagination to a pre-historic period.

It is evident from various unintended records that the manner of life of our progenitors once varied but little from that of various brutes now inhabiting forest wilds. They passed their days mostly in two occupations; first, in seeking to make other creatures their prey; second, in seeking to avoid [998]becoming the prey of other creatures. Even when one was stealthily searching for his own food, he was liable to be pounced upon from behind; to be dropped upon from leafy canopies above, or to be venomously stung by vermin in the herbage beneath him.

That men might have a place in which to give themselves up to needed rest with security against sudden seizure by night-prowling enemies, some adopted the expedient of lake-dwellings; others that of barricading caves. Yet others made lairs in glades of the forest, clearing a space of ground of vegetation so that no deadly crawling or squirming creature could be hidden in it, and then surrounding this space with a barrier over which a ravenous beast, sneaking up within leaping distance of it, could not spring. Such a barrier was, probably, at first, a loose pile of boulders and of trunks of fallen trees. After a time, it came to be a row of sharpened stakes, forming what is now called a stockade. Yet later, scaffolds covered with leafy boughs were invented with a view to a safe noon-day’s rest under their shade within the stockade, these being [45:574a] in effect, what we, here in New England, call summer-houses; then, after more centuries, roofs of thatch were devised, giving a sleeping place protected from rain; lastly, food-bearing plants were set a growing within the enclosure.

Beyond this point, we have no need to speculate. From the Hebrew and other ancient writings, we know that a time came when homesteads, such as we have been imagining of an earlier period, had become common, at least in South-western Asia. They were usually quadrangular in form, with barriers of masonry, or of thorny thickets made strong and dense by stubbing. One end of such an enclosure was often entirely occupied by roofed structures, and the feature of the summer-house, formed of latticework overgrown with vines, was retained. Nearly all the rest of the homestead was divided into apartments of rectilinear outline, in which trees and plants were cultivated. Water was brought in by ditches for the irrigation of these apartments. If the natural surface of the ground was far from level, it was thrown into terraces for greater convenience of irrigation and tillage.

Rich people had water introduced by underground conduits and displayed in basins and fountains. They sometimes had fine design and dextrous handicraft applied to the decoration of the basins; as also to the walls and staircases of the terraces and to the outer walls and the base, piers, floor and roof of the summerhouse. Most of the plants cultivated were considered choice because of a character found in their foliage, [45:574b] flowers or fruit, such as was unusual in the plants of the surrounding country. The garden proper came gradually to be more than anything else a collection or treasury of such plants. Walks were made between the planted apartments by following which whatever was most notable in each plant, were it choiceness of odor, foliage, bloom or fruit, would be best brought under particular notice.

Fix this thought, then, in your minds, that for ages past, it has been the custom of a large part of the human race to have, as a division of its [999]homesteads, a confined space of ground, in the seclusion of which plants were grown distinct from those giving character to the scenery outside. That it has been the custom, also, to make an orderly disposition of such plants, so that the more valued qualities of the different kinds of them might be enjoyed distinctly. To the forming and keeping of this division of the homestead, the word gardening, or some variant of it, has been applied in the mother tongue of the mother tongues of all civilized peoples; in the mother tongues of billions of men. Fix this thought in your mind, and this also that in all this time and among all these peoples the word gardening was never associated with the idea of enjoyment of landscape.

When writing just now about the gardens of South-western Asia, I had in mind an account given me of them by an educated Persian, who said, also, that such gardens were still common in his country. He added that, for the use to which they were put, nothing better could be devised. When I asked what that use was, he explained that when men go from their houses, it is usually for some purpose requiring activity, exertion, and probably more or less of conflict or competition; and if you have read how the simplest transactions of common trade are [45:575a] carried on in the bazars, you know what these terms signify. When they return to their homes, he continued, it is for retirement and relief from such occupations. “In Persia,” he added, “we have much warm weather and we do not like when we go home to have to be all the time in the house. We retreat to our garden because it is the only place, out of the house, to which we can retire with confidence that our peace will not be disturbed.” “Then,” I said, “the wall is an important part of the garden?” “Surely,” he answered, “a garden is no longer a garden when it is open. A garden is an inherent part of one’s home as much as, in the West, a parlor or a chamber is.”

You will better understand this account, and better understand what the ancient oriental garden was; the garden of King Solomon, for example, if you consider that now, as then, it is an indecency for the face of a woman to be exposed to the gaze of men not of her household. As a rule, the only place in which she can take the open air without being hooded, is within the walls of a garden. But her garden would have been prepared less with a purpose to facilitate enjoyment of landscape than our bedchambers often are.

You know the present significance of the word seraglio. It is an interesting circumstance that a space of ground enclosed by a stake fence is now called, by some Italian farmers, a seraglio, indicating, as it does, that this word meant originally a place of domestic rest and security, made by a row of stakes set around it.

Mr. Loudon says, in his Cyclopedia of Gardening, that the Persian fashion of gardens was taken up by the Greeks. From [45:575b] the Greeks, it was adopted by the Romans. From Rome, it spread to all the Roman provinces, and at length to England.

In Johnson’s History of Gardens in England, it is said that Domesday Book shows that in that country, at the time of the Norman invasion, there [1000]was a garden attached to every house, from the King’s palace to the laborer’s cottage. Walpole, in his Anecdotes of Painting, says that English gardens in the time of Elizabeth, when the English colonies were forming which afterwards became the United States, were copies of those of Pliny. Not literally, of course, for of the plants of Pliny’s garden, few would survive an English winter. He meant that they were copies in the sense that a brick house may be a copy of a stone house.

Sixty years ago, I had a familiar knowledge of ten gardens, all corporate parts of homesteads of kinfolk and neighbors of my parents in New England or New York. All were quadrangular in form, and all but one were enclosed by what were called pickets, being a conventionalized form of the fence of sharpened stakes, originally used for enclosing the earlier Asiatic garden or seraglio. The pickets were, in some cases, given what were thought to be ornamental forms and were made conspicuous by white paint. The one exception had a brick wall, also painted white and surmounted by black wrought iron pickets. The division between the garden and all outside of it was thus intentionally made notable.

Near the center, as a rule, there was a latticed summer- [45:576a] house on which grew vines shading seats. Straight walks ran through each garden and these were crossed by other straight walks. Between the walks, there were beds, rectangular in outline, and their formality in some cases emphasized by edgings of box, shells or brick, or of tile made expressly for the purpose. Each garden contained a selection of plants so disposed with relation to the walks that their flowers could be closely observed and brought to the nose by those passing. In each there were also borders occupied with small fruit-bearing plants, and others with aromatic herbs.

The difference between these gardens and gardens such as people moderately well-to-do in southwestern Asia chose to have several thousand years ago is no greater than can be accounted for by differences of climate, except in the one particular that in New England the garden fence was slighter. Even in this, no difference in principle was manifest in respect to making the garden enjoyable. The common New England garden had a conspicuously defined boundary and was meant to be a pleasant place of resort because of objects presented to view within it, not at all because of anything to be seen in looking over or beyond it; not at all because it promoted enjoyment of scenery or landscape. The word garden has, even yet, been little used in America, except in application to enclosures of this class. Such is our mother tongue meaning of it and the use of the word in this sense, is not dropping out of popular speech.

I have since seen gardens in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Louisiana; and others in Mexico and Central America, varying from those of New England mainly as they approached more near [45:576b] ly the original oriental type. Everywhere they have been called gardens. All, whether formed by the descendants of Englishmen, Dutchmen, Germans, Frenchmen or Spaniards, [1001]were confined places, the means of confinement being conspicuous, and all were laid out with an evident desire to display ornamental planting.

You will see, I trust, the improbability that what I have shown to be from the beginning of History, essential and common in that part of the homesteads of men called the garden, is not adapted to minister to some constant craving, deeply planted in the human constitution. If you ask me if that craving cannot be administered to as well under arrangements radically different from those of the gardens of old, I must answer at once that I do not think it can.

As to the artificiality and formality for so many thousand years characteristic of gardens, only very lately has anyone regarded a liking for it as evidence of an uncultivated taste. On the contrary, the men who are generally recognized to have set the highest standards of taste in certain most important respects; the great masters of creative art, the Cathedral builders, have regarded the quality of artificiality in gardens as a quality required by good taste. Lanciani, referring to periods when ancient Roman Art was at its best in matters of taste, says that all pleasure grounds “were laid out with the motive of giving them and their contents all convenient distinction from places beautiful by nature.” He might have [45:577a] added “with all conveniently marked and conspicuous display of the motive of separating their contents from that which was natural.”

But now consideration must be given to another interesting circumstance of the history of our race. I mean that which is commonly, perhaps not accurately, called the “change of taste” occurring in late centuries among notable portions of the more civilized peoples of Europe.

Concerning this circumstance, a writer (in The Nation, No. 1024; page 134) some years ago, made the following observation:

“It is difficult to recognize fully in spite of the now frequent comments on the fact, that, till within the last century, orderedness, whether in Art or Nature, possessed the strongest charm for cultivated minds, so that not only was architecture judged by a very different standard from ours, but what we now call fine scenery was to travelers in general, and especially to English travelers, ‘frightful,’ and merely ‘frightful.’” Goethe, Evelyn, Horace Walpole, M. de Brosses and Lady Mary Wortley Montague are quoted in support of the statement.

At the period when the most venerated monuments of Christian Art were built, Mr. Ruskin says, in Modern Painters, “it was impossible for an artist to conceive Paradise but as surrounded by a moat”; that is as distinctly separated from all about it that went to make up scenery; and Macauley’s statement of the idea held, by cultured men of that period, of the Garden of Eden, is quoted as follows:- [45:577b] “We have an exact square, enclosed by the rivers Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates, each with a convenient bridge in the center; rectangular beds of flowers; a long canal neatly bricked and railed-in.”

Again, Mr. Ruskin says:-

“All that was rugged, rough, dark, wild, unterminated, they [the [1002]leaders of taste of the Middle Ages] rejected at once as the domain of ‘savage men and monstrous giants’; all that they admired was tender, bright, balanced, enclosed, symmetrical. * * * * * To the one imperative end of intelligibility, every minor resemblance to nature was sacrificed. * * * * Further, it was necessary * * * that all dim and doubtful lines should be rejected. * * * All this was for its end, absolutely right, admirable and delightful.”

Observe that these sentences define the established principle of design in gardening, namely, to make a place beautiful “with all convenient distinction from the beauty of nature.”

Notwithstanding the general insensibility of the men of old to the charm of scenery, scenery of a certain character, as we know from various passages of the poets, had always been a source of pleasure to some. At last, Milton, in Paradise Lost, appears as one who had been carried wholly beyond the old idea of Eden, as a garden, charming because of the exclusion of natural scenery; Eden being in his description of it a fertile and well-watered countryside with a beautiful spontaneous [45:578a] vegetation informally disposed; without distinct lines; without defined limits; vision extending to a background of mountains with dim and mysterious details; in short, a place beautiful in the way of scenery.

Charm of scenery came shortly after the time of Milton to be more and more descanted upon. Representations of scenery came to be more and more valued among works of art. The question was occasionally asked, “Why should we not seek to have something of the charm of scenery in connection with our country homes? Why should we not seek to have it actually as well as in paintings?” The only answer that I remember in my reading to have seen was that it would be too difficult to reconcile the necessary conditions of such scenery with the requirements of convenience.

Within a few years after Milton’s death, a disposition to break away from “orderedness” is seen in several occurrences. The construction of a channel connecting, in the form of a meandering body of water, a number of small natural ponds, was one of them. Planting bushes in masses and not in regular rows, was another. Both these things were done in grounds of the royal palace of Kensington.

In France, it is stated by André in his L’Art des Jardins, one went further in laying out winding walks and so sloping and planting their borders as to produce effects of wild scenery. [45:583] As far as appears from André’s account, the enjoyment sought was that of sylvan seclusion, not that of perspectives extending to details, dim and unintelligible because of distance.

In came William Kent who, being employed to paint the ceiling of a country house, and being struck with the scenery of the park near by, in which there were many old trees naturally disposed with openings among them to considerable distances, proposed, and was allowed by the owner, to take down the wall enclosing the pleasure grounds about the house and lay open and improve outlooks from the house into the park. It may be guessed that this was [1003]not all that he did for the promotion of enjoyment in scenery in the place. It is probable that he felled certain trees with the object of gaining broader and more distant perspective effects; that he felled others in order to secure more harmonious compositions; that he laid out roads winding among the trees, by following which varied and contrasting sylvan scenery was to be enjoyed, and that he set young trees and bushes a growing where it was desirable to increase obscurity, gain mystery or produce variety. I have found no record of his work in detail. Loudon, in his Treatise on Country Residencies, simply says that Kent “ventured to extend operations to the scenery.” (Observe that Loudon, in this sentence, recognizes what is seen in a garden to be an anticlimax of what is seen in Scenery.)

Among the leading men of taste of the period, the result soon came to be regarded with unbounded admiration. Horace Walpole proclaimed it a work of genius. Gray, the author of “Elegy in a Country Church Yard,” declared it “the first [45:584] proof ever given by the English race of original talent in matters of pleasure.” Later, Sir Archibald Alison, Lord Kames and Payne Knight, all authors of standard works, and recognized authorities on Taste; Sir Walter Scott; the poets Shenstone and Mason, and many other gifted men, some in grave treatises, some in essays and more fugitive writings, all commented on the works of Kent and others of the same class which followed, in terms which showed plainly that they regarded them as designed with a purpose wholly different from any purpose of gardens; with a purpose opposed to, and irreconcilable with the purpose of gardens as this word had till that time been exclusively used.

The enthusiasm excited by Kent’s work among cultivated men in England passed to those of the continent and learned works appeared in France and in Germany recognizing that a new Art of Design had been born into the Sisterhood of Song, Architecture, Drama, Painting and Sculpture—a new art differing essentially, as an art, from what had before been known as Gardening.

You will have noticed that Mr. Ruskin, in the words last quoted from him, expresses the opinion that the garden (the garden—of the ancients) was, for its end, “absolutely right, admirable and delightful.”

You may not be able to fully adopt this conclusion unless you can clear your minds of images of gardens before Kent which have been established by descriptions in which certain grotesque features have been given such prominence as to leave you but comparatively dim and confused ideas of everything else [45:585] characteristic of them.

All that need now be said of such features is that they have never been essential elements of gardens; that whenever the fashion of making much of them has been long carried to extremes, they have been the subject of unsparing ridicule from masters of taste; as, for example, by Juvenal in his day, and again, sixteen hundred years after Juvenal, by Addison in his day; neither of these writers objecting to the artificiality of character of all gardens of his time.

Relieving your minds of this prejudice, you can, I believe, come to [1004]no other conclusion than that the wisdom of man has as yet contrived nothing better adapted to certain special purposes than the enclosed, confined and obviously artificial garden.

Of these special purposes, I will name five, leaving some others which, as architects, you are not likely to overlook, unmentioned.

The garden, as it has come to us, in all essentials, from the earliest periods of history, is well adapted; first, for the disposition of plants under conditions favorable to their successful cultivation, with economy, out-of-doors; second, to the placing of plants in growing condition favorable to observation of their distinctive beauty and the distinctive beauty of their products, more especially of their flowers, and this consistently with the convenience and comfort of observers coming to them from within a building with which the garden is associated as an out-of-door apartment of a dwelling [45:586] place or homestead; third, to the placing of plants in such a manner that the distinctive qualities of each may be displayed advantageously for the gratification of curiosity, or for a studious scrutiny of them; fourth, to the placing of plants out of doors in such a manner that the pleasingness of conditions of order, neatness, trimness, balance and symmetry may be enjoyed in all that is to be seen in close association with them, notwithstanding the tendency experienced nearly everywhere else out of doors, of the action of the elements to produce opposite conditions; fifth, to the use of plants for producing decorative compositions, similar in motive to mosaics of variously tinted stones or to shawl or carpet patterns, such as are to be seen displayed in our Boston Public Garden.

I have found no reason for supposing that Kent had any one of these purposes in view, nor that he was supposed to have any one of them by any of those men, eminent in taste, to whom I have referred as regarding his achievements as the introduction of a new art. Indeed, I have found no evidence that either Kent or any one of those who, in his, or in the succeeding generation, advanced the cultivation of a taste in matters of scenery, had had any special interest, knowledge or skill in pursuits of gardening or of horticulture in any form. “It is allowed on all sides,” says Loudon, “that Addison and Pope prepared for the new art the firm basis of philosophical principles.” Neither Addison nor Pope had been schooled in [45:587] gardening; both hated it as developed in the most sumptuous, those being also the most grotesque, gardens of their day. It is not evident that Kent himself had so much as dabbled in horticulture, or been a frequenter of any of the many gardens that were near him and celebrated during his early life. In pursuing his education as a painter, architect and sculptor, he passed by the most sumptuous gardening of the Continent and stopped only when he reached Rome, where there had been much less recent enterprise in gardening than in England. When he returned from Italy, he first sought and earned reputation, not as a gardener, but as a painter, and it was when employed in painting the ceiling of a country house that his first work of improving scenery was schemed. The only work of his hand that has come down to our time unmutilated is neither one of Gardening, Painting nor [1005]Building. It is a work of sculpture. You will ask if it was sculpture of foliage and flowers, such as Mr. Ruskin would have wrought had he turned his hand to marble. Nothing of the kind. It was a bust of Shakespeare. Where, then, are we to suppose that Kent had obtained the schooling, or where the inspiration, that enabled him to step at once to a higher rank in the estimation of all cultivated men of the period than any gardener of his time? Who had been his masters? Plainly, no gardeners, but poets and painters; among them Milton and Shakespeare; Dante and Petrarch, Claude, Raphael and Salvator. The manner in which Kent’s ambition included Architecture, Painting and the improvement of scenery suggests that possibly he derived inspiration from none of these more than [45:588] from Michael Angelo, who was likewise an Architect, a Painter and a Sculptor, and of whom Emerson says he was “the brother and friend of all who acknowledge the beauty that beams in universal nature.”

Before turning from this point, it may be worthwhile to note that Gilpin, who from his secluded manse in the New Forest, laid out, in a long series of charming books, the most admirable course of study of the promotion of enjoyment in scenery, had been educated as a landscape painter; that Sir Uvedale Price, whom Scott (in Quentin Durward) names as “the best qualified judge” of the time in matters of country seat design, and who was the keenest of all writers on the subject, was a virtuoso; possessed a valuable private gallery of paintings and was a friend and correspondent of Reynolds and of Gainsboro, the greatest painters of their time; and that Repton, the most scholarly of all the followers of Kent, was an accomplished artist with the pencil before he took to the cultivation of scenery. I recall not one apostle of the art of improving and displaying scenery who had been brought up a gardener. It is true that the celebrated Brown, upon whom his friends claimed that the mantle of Kent fell, had been first trained a gardener, but the opinion of most capable men seems to be represented by G Mason, who says that Brown was “an egregious mannerist and that his plantations were void of genius, taste or propriety.”

If we regard Kent rather as a reformer of gardening than [45:589] as the introducer of another art than that of Gardening, we shall be apt to suppose that he was stimulated to his work by the fact that when he entered upon it the art of Gardening was in a depressed state and had fallen mainly into the hands of ignorant practitioners and neglected by the learned and cultivated. Writings may be quoted that seem in a general way to sustain such an opinion, but I believe them to be deceptive. Never before had there been as much intelligent interest in Botany and in garden horticulture; never before had the designers of works of gardening been men of as much general information and intelligence, or of as high social standing. At most of the seats of learning and culture, Harlem, Utrecht, Jena, Berlin, Paris, Oxford, botanic or specimen gardens had been established in the previous century and were now in flourishing condition, having recently received interesting additions from the rapid extension of commerce with newly discovered countries beyond the sea. Great scholars were taking more active interest in them than great scholars are [1006]now taking in similar institutions, or had ever before taken in them. Linnaeus had already published the first of his monumental series of works and, coming from Holland, had been received with honors at Oxford. Boerhaave had just accomplished a great enlargement of the University Garden of Leyden and had issued a list of over 6,000 species and varieties of plants that he had growing in it. Evelyn’s great national work in connection with the Sylva had been completed about [45:590] eighty years and its results were seen at nearly every noble seat, in the park oaks out of which a little later were culled timber for the fleets of Nelson. Le Notre, regarded by Loudon as the most distinguished gardener the world has ever known, had lived a little later than Evelyn and the more imposing features of his works, being formed of first-class trees that he had planted as saplings, his designs in planting them were just fully realized. They had been described by travelers as “enchanting,” as “the sum of everything that had been done in gardening,” and as giving “a foretaste of Paradise.” The Gardens of Hampton Court had just been made by the Court gardeners under royal direction. Some captivating fields of gardening were worked more elaborately than they have been at any time since. The tulip mania, during the run of which more than ten thousand distinct varieties of this plant were to be seen in a single garden, and one bulb sold at the price of 4,000 bushels of wheat, had collapsed, but even in our day, the beauty of flowers of certain kinds is nowhere more carefully cherished than it was in Kent’s time. Indeed, his work began at the very period to which Bosc referred when writing, years afterwards, that one no longer heard of a florist depriving himself of food in order to increase the number and variety of his anemones, or passing entire days in admiring the colors of a ranunculus, the grandeur of a hyacinth, or trembling lest the breath of an over-curious admirer should hurt the bloom of an auricula.

[45:591] These circumstances, you will see, strongly sustain the presumption that Kent was not aiming to reform, or to improve upon, the methods by which the purposes of gardening proper, had been pursued, but that he had purposes in view, not only different from them, but inconsistent with them; purposes, the attainment of which required the abolition of that which my Persian friend would have said makes a garden a garden; purposes which Mr. Ruskin says the artists of the Middle Ages considered indispensable to a pleasant scene, “intelligibility” and “terminability.”

It may be fairly inferred, I submit to you, that the charm of scenery which Kent was aiming to make more marked and more available, is chiefly dependent upon precisely the opposite qualities—those of non-intelligibility and non-finality, that is to say, mystery and infinity.

The object of most that I have thus far said to you has been to lead you to cultivate a habit, in all such thought as you may have occasion to give to the topic of this discourse, of discriminating clearly between the purpose of gardening and the purpose of promoting pleasure in scenery.

I said in the beginning that people differ widely in the ideas they [1007]attach to the term Landscape Architecture. It is evident that some suppose it to mean a form of treating pleasure grounds on the principle of the old gardening as defined by Lanciani; that of making all reasonable distinction between them and places beautiful by nature. This notion probably grows from an impression which some of you are not unlikely to [45:592] share, that the word architecture can rightly be applied, if to any other than works of building, only to works of a formal character allied in motive of design to works of building. Such would, for example, be gardens divided into apartments by means of foliage clipped into the forms of walls of masonry, or into the shape of cornices, pilasters and battlements, or other features resembling those common in sculptured stone. I differ with these and that you may know upon what grounds I will mention that in Richardson’s Dictionary, twelve quotations are given from as many capable authors of standing using the word, in only four of which there is any reference intended to building, or the motives of building. The word is even sometimes applied to the cause of various human experiences. Thus Shakespeare wrote, “Chief architect and plotter of these woes,” while the historian, Grote, (following Plutarch) applied the word to the argument or plot of a poem. To refer to the Almighty as the architect of the natural world is a practice sanctioned by Milton and many learned divines.

Nor can it be said that such uses of the word are archaic or of a purely literary character. It is not an uncommon thing for newspapers nowadays to speak of a man as the architect of his own fortunes. To abandon such use of the word would be a waste of the resources of our language.

Thus you will see that the simplest and most comprehensive definition of an architect is one who forms with design.

It follows from all that has been said, that when we rightly use the word landscape in connection with a word implying formation or reformation with design, we have in mind a process affecting the comprehensive visual character of a space of land. And when you find a man who, because of natural sensibilities and aptitudes, developed by suitable courses of study and training, is qualified to apply inventive talent or the faculty of design, to the purpose of giving men greater enjoyment of scenery than they could otherwise have consistently with convenience within a given space, the term Landscape Architect is one precisely adapted to designate what is essential in the nature of his work.

To better fix an accurate understanding of the term in your minds, I will refer to several public works which supply illustrations of methods of developing the purpose of Landscape Architecture, choosing these works not because they are particularly pleasing; some of them, in their present condition, being quite otherwise, but because they are close at hand here in Boston, and you may easily examine them.

The general purpose of Landscape Architecture may be worked out in several ways; for example:-

First, by overcoming disagreeable and dangerous circumstances that would interfere with landscape enjoyment, as by draining and filling up with [1008]

wholesome earth or water, filthy and pestiferous depressions. This is what the Park Commission [45:595] ers of Boston and Brookline are doing over yonder in the lower valley of Muddy River. The Park Commissioners of the neighboring towns of Lynn and of Milton have a similar duty before them.

Second, by making roads, walks, bridges, shelters, terraces, seats or other conveniences by which access to the enjoyment of scenery is facilitated. The pier now building at South Boston is an example, inasmuch as great value of refreshing scenery will be offered from the head of it that is yet unavailable to the great mass of the people for whose use the pier is building. The intended Parkway system, of which the part, a mile or more in length, nearest to where we are, is now under construction, and for the continuation of which, land is being acquired, is another; its leading object being to make the pleasant rural scenery of Jamaica Pond, the Arboretum, Franklin Park and Dorchester Bay more agreeably accessible to people living at a distance from these localities.

Third, by removing buildings, trees and other objects where they are obstructive to an enjoyment of scenery, or the presence of which disturbs, or dilutes the more valuable elements of character in scenery. Much has been done and is doing on the site of Franklin Park with this purpose.

Fourth, by strengthening or refining or bringing blendingly into composition, various elements of scenery which before were ineffective and could only be seen detached or uncombined, of work for which purpose an unusually large example may be seen, also, in Franklin Park.

Fifth, by adding to, or modifying existing elements of scenery, as by changing a flattish but gullied and washed out, boulder-strewed, pimpled hummocky, dented surface to one of simpler and more [45:596] sweeping undulations, with a view to a broader, simpler, quieter and more pleasing distribution of light and shade. This, again, on Franklin Park.

[1009]

Sixth, by making soil deeper, more permeable, friable and fertile, with a view to its supporting richer and more enduring masses of foliage and breadths of verdure. Operations of this class you may see in progress in all the works of the Boston and Brookline Commissions.

These are all town or suburban operations. To see what landscape works of a character not at all town-like may be, imagine a pioneer cabin in the wilds of Maine or of Michigan, and a mile away from it a range of low hills, wooded, mostly with deciduous trees which have grown together aloft so as to form what would be a long, graceful, sweeping sky line to the view toward them from the cabin, were it not for breaks caused by the spires of a few aged and dilapidated hemlocks. Suppose that you search out and fell these hemlocks, thus relieving the skyline of its jaggedness. Suppose, next, that between the cabin and the hill there is a valley through which flows a broad trout stream, on the further bank of which stand other hemlocks in picturesque groups. Suppose that these and the pools in which they will be reflected are hidden from the cabin by a shaw of young aspen poplars on the intermediate flat. Suppose that you grub out these poplars and make a green pasture of the flat, thus bringing pleasingly into view beyond it, the trout stream and the dark, brooding [1010]hemlocks on its banks. Would such operations as these be examples of Landscape work? I answer, perfect examples. There are none better on this Continent or any other. Nor is there a [45:597] better primary school for all other classes of landscape work than might be found in the wise practice of such operations.

Suppose, again, that there stands near a sequestered farmhouse an acre or two of half-grown wood of indigenous forest trees. They are engaged, as trees in a natural wood, East of the Mississippi, always are, in an evident struggle, one with another, for light, air, food and drink. The result of this struggle, if not interfered with, will be that many will be pressed to an untimely death and that all left living will have acquired a feeble, gaunt and starveling character. Suppose that a man gradually, in the course of six years, cuts down two-thirds of them, leaving those that have suffered least and that are the most promising. This also, namely, the killing of trees, if done with good study, would be landscape work, nor in any other way is so much to be done for the improvement of scenery in our Atlantic States as by a wisely discriminating destruction of trees. In the long run the planting of trees is of less importance, Nature taking that business in hand of her own accord and, in many places, greatly overdoing it.

Suppose, once more, that in the scheme of a railroad, we will say in the Rocky Mountains, or the Mexican Cordilleras, its course and grades at certain points; the position of some of its cuttings and tunnels, its stations and dining houses, its hill-side terraces and its bridges, should be determined with a modest and refined regard to the motive of giving passengers upon the road the greatest practicable landscape enjoyment; would that be an affair of Landscape work? Of grander Landscape work, I must answer, than our civilization has yet attained to.