New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1899-12-03
THE DAY OF EVERGREENS.
THEIR GROWING USE AS ADJUNCTS TO
ARCHITECTURAL DECORATION.

81 can't tell you what change for the better
| can see-can't avoid seeing it, in fact-in the
appearance of New York" said an Englishman
not long arrived here. Eighteen years ago,
when | first landed here. the height Of worldly
ambition seemed to be to live in brOwnstone
house. And you could the effects Of that
strange and sombre taste in all the most
prosperous residence neighborhoods. L asked
my American friends at the time why on earth,
with such a sky over their heads they should
take such pains 20 simulate artificially the de-
pressing street effects of gloomy, grmy Lon
don Now | come back and find the place all
broken out i'm the sweetness and light of white
marble and other gay building materials"
1t is unreasonable that the maturer years
Of Manhattan INTELLECTUALLY speaking, are
brighter and gayer than her earlier. And within
the last two years this increasing taste for white
stone and white woodwork has led to another
development Of decoration, namely the in
creasing vogue OF dwarf eVerSreens. OF course,
The use If these shrubs is not by any means an
originally American idea, any one knows who
has looked attentively at Italian Renaissance
pictures But small box cypress, Juniper and
arbor vitae plants ranged i'm rows along balus-
trades or balconies are introduced for the sake
Of their fine decorative effect in this city to a
degree which promises to make it some day a
feature of American urban resi-
dences.
This. and not the Introduction of the taste for
Japanese dwarf trees is how a leading Fifth
ave. florist accounts FOR the present large de-
mand for these growing shrubs The pfsnom-
enon OF a change in architectural tastes leading
to a locally new development in horticulture is
interesting i'm itself. 1t is easy to
see how the white background of marble walls
or the white painted panengs and carvings Of
revived colonial vestibules seems almost to
demand the relief of masses Of foliage More
over. a good deal Of the revived" architecture
now 50 popula' is Of just that quantity formed
century order with which the for
mally clipped. conical yews and boxes seems
perfectly to harmonic
In the grounds Of many an old English coun-
try seat the visitor is sure to have his admiring
attention c.lled to the Dutch garden" Cir
may not be favorable to the popu-
larty Of Dutch gardens in England just now,
but i'm the days Of The Great Glorious and I'M
mortal Prince William of Orange" as his Ulster
admirers still love to call him, these displays OF
the gardeners and the clippers art. with their
rows of box trees clipped into severe cones and
cylinders. and here and there a triumph of
cruelty to vegetables In the way Of a shrub
forced TO simulate bird. were the height Of
fashion. The descendants of the New-York
Dutch may take some additional comfort in
the present prevailing fashion, or, at least, in
some Of its forms, by rejecting that 1t is de-
cdedly Holandsh. On many of the plants for
sale in Fifth-ave. are tags stamped with the
name of the nurseries at Boskoop, Holland, from
which the plants have been imported while
others come from Belgium, which, in the days
Of Peter Stuyvesant. was part of the United
To any one who has not given the subject