The morning journal-courier., 1908-02-06

largely due to their disgust at such ignorant, helpless and misplaced eff forts to satisfy an instructive desire of expressing orderly human control. In park work these efforts are most com monly perpetrated by gardeners or foremen who have neither the ability to conceive larger orderly relations nor the authority to create them, and so satisfy their craving by introducing q petty orderliness which they can conceive and execute without calling for greater authority.
 When this petty orderliness is ap- piled to the details of q general design of formal character, it may be effective or 1t may result in hardness and mo- notony, but when it is applied to the details of a general design which is in- formal, which undertakes not to ex- press the completeness and perfection of human control, but something quite different, the result is always self contradictory, inharmonious and de- plorable.
 If we now inquire into the motives which have more or less effectively controlled the choice and treatment of most of the larger city parks in this country, we shall find them yari-
 ously stated. but generally involving some reference to the "beauty of na- ture" or to natural scenery or to
 sylvan" or rural landscape" The term Nature" is so carelessly banded about and so widely variable in it's
 meaning according to its user and the
 context, that it helps us very little
 more than park" As ordinarily used in this connection it is vaguely oppos-
 ed to human artilice and human activ- l ity of any sort, although why man and ! the orderly product of his activities
 are any less part of nature than the ' bee and his heXagonal cells is difficult | to say But unfortunately for the
 sake of cleaness, natural" does not
 exclude human activities altogether.
 "Natu al scenery" with which we arc
 immediately concerned, is certainly
 not alone the scenery of the primaeval l forest, or the desert, or marsh. or lonely sea beach, where no man has
 set foot or left his marks behind him; indeed, very few people who express
 admiration for natural scenery" have
 ever looked upon a landscape ahso- lutely unaffected by man; the prim-
 aeval woods have been burnt in the
 past by man-madc fires. or felled by a man-swung axe; the ground has been
 trampled by mans feet and those ot
 his domestic animals or tiled by his
 blow, sown by him to grass or GOV.
 cred with new weeds and plants which
 he has distributed till nowhere is its
 appearance what it would have beer
 but for his interference. Even wherc
 he has abandoned the land to the oth.
 CT forces of nature again it can nev.
 CT be the same; he has upset the per,
 fectly adjusted balance and things car
 never be exactly what they would have
 been had his hand not been laid upor
 them.
 If natural means anything as ap
 piled 10 landscape. it refers to scene,
 in which mans changes in the ap
 pearance of things are not obtrusive
 A pastoral landscape. with its hero
 of COWS keeping the grass croppe,
 short, with its spreading trees splen
 didly developed because the adjacen land is cleared for pasturage, witt old fences and barn nesting in tn, edge of the woods-all this Is, or i not called. natural scenery, accordiny to the feelings of the observer. If h. accepts 1t all as a beautiful compost
 ton which has fortunately come abou through the joint activities of mal : and other natural forces working nor or less blindly together. he calls . naturar'; but if he feels impeled t ) separate some of mans part in tn } product from the rest of tho scene , he says, That whitewashed wall an ! the row of apple trees on the right an ' the patent medicine advertisement O l the barn roof are very artificial cle , ments, and interfere with the naturs . beauty of the scene" In essence thcr r is nothing more artificial about tn s painted roof than about the woode r barn which it covers or the pastur a which the man has made where one s stood forest and if the man fell { , and covered the advertisement on tn roof with a climbing vine, he woul Q have put more labor and artitice int | the objects composing the scene tha 9 before, but the observer would say Q had more natural beauty"
 h The farmer, let us say, pursues h r practical aim of getting the best li' . ing he can out of the land. by cuttin s cultivating, blowing. pasturing an q what not, while at the same time h - cows. sheep and chickens, and tf . crows and rabbits of the neighborhoo I and the wheat and grass and mule $ plants and burdock, and the oak tre' ,; and sassafras, and all the other livir n things. are trying each in its own wa IS to get living out of it too. and Il '- rains are washing it and the other il q rganic forces of nature are all Is work constantly. and there results, | IT us say, what we cal beautiful ma SC ural landscape. It might have turn r out not to be beautiful in large wa l. and it might not have looked 'na ly ural' in the usual arbitrary sense; 70 cause as likely as not the farm l- might have made it all into a Ii
 truck farm with all the beds of veg at tables in neat straight rows separat es by cold-frames and surrounded hy le yellow board fence leased to an a re vertising agency, all for the sake H. economy and profit. But suppose, we said before, that the circumStanC r. have led his efforts for economy a or profit and the efforts of the otl re agencies at work upon the land to E. joint result which is beautiful and ds which the marks of the farmers O. al doines do not obtrude themselves In being of a strikingly different cli ne from those of the other animals a es plants which have lived and work Id on the land-to the result in otl he words, of 2 beautiful. natural lar he scape. Now it would not have affe ills cd the result or single step in