The Native Landscape Reader

“An American Garden” (1899)

165 From The Outlook, October 7, 1899, 327–33. J. hoRace McfaRLaNd an american Garden (1899) What else is a garden in America? Yet there are in our broad land not many real American gardens. Few realize that the trend of rural decoration and lawn adornment in our country has been, for the most part, distinctly imitative of European forms. It was natural that our forefathers, when they began, as Bacon puts it, to “garden wisely,” should look for models to their old homes across the Atlantic. In England and on the Continent the adornment of public and private grounds summed up generally as gardening is the growth of centuries of living beyond the struggle for mere existence. It has its distinctive and ripened character, and its materials are quite naturally those of the Eastern hemisphere. True, American plants were introduced in Europe long before the Revolutionary War, and such gentle souls as John Bartram sent to the home lands many members of the distinctively American flora in the last century; but the home gardening sought mainly to introduce the plant life of the older countries . Thus there were brought in and cultivated many familiar plants which are hardly now recognized as foreigners—the geraniums, heliotropes, tulips, fuchsias, of the flower garden, the Norway maples, lindens, and European ashes of the parks. This growing gardening art became more and more formal, and some quaint old examples of that extreme cultivated barbarism called “Italian gardening,” with its clipped and sheared yews and box-trees, yet survive among us. The free, open, hearty plant life of America was practically unknown to us a century ago, in a decorative sense. The pioneers saw little beauty in the wild tangle of the woodlands they had to cut off for home sites, and the rich flora of the meadows and marshes must be subdued to make pastures. The pets of the housewife in her dooryard, when she came to have time for flowers, were exotic strangers , tenderly nourished, and she exchanged with her neighbors “slips” of the rarer foreign treasures. But our European cousins have helped to show us the glory of our own woods 166 natuRal PaRks and GaRdEns and hills, and discovered for us the gems of our meadows and roadsides. Many an estate in England exhibits as its chief glory a planting of American laurel and rhododendron ; and the ubiquitous American tourist learns with astonishment that the common bushes and weeds of his generous home land are esteemed as rarely beautiful abroad. Our greater landscape artists have begun to realize the possibilities of America ’s wealth of distinctive plant life. The Wooded Island at the World’s Fair and the great Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina have furnished notable object-lessons. It is a smaller but most interesting example that I ask the reader to visit with me. Dolobran, near Philadelphia, is the country home of Mr. Clement A. Griscom. Differing little, as approached by the Haverford road, from other well-kept suburban residences, its broad lawns and fine effects in massed foliage show merely the correct taste of the landscape architect. It is not until one passes the gateway of the chestnuts that the distinctively American garden is entered, and the free beauty of native woodland, marsh, and copse presents itself. What a change! Here is no tailor-made lawn! No geranium-beds or coleus borders of monotonously continuous coloring meet the eye; no “carpet gardening” of mosaic plants offends the taste. Just the natural beauty of American plants, located cunningly where they love to grow, unrestrained , untrimmed. True, the plants are cared for—fed, if need be, watered on occasion—but no attempt is made to guide them into preconceived forms. It was said of Thoreau—he who loved and lived with American flora and fauna far ahead of his generation—that he could hardly keep away from him the usually shy denizens of the forest about Walden Pond. In a measure, this seems to be the feeling of the plants in this American garden which Mr. Griscom’s liberality has created—the plants fairly outdo themselves in repayment of the love lavished upon them. See the richness of this great white boneset—it is actually the same herb of bitter memory to the youth of a passing generation, and it is a despised roadside weed elsewhere. Here its majestic spread of bloom in September excites our wonder and admiration. A sister eupatorium, the “Joe-pye-weed,” throws up its...