Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1931-04-20
THIS AND THAT
BY CHARLES E. TRACEWELL.

A large Boxwood trimmed to resemble
chicken stares the inquisitive passerby
| in the face.
/ And the passerby with a fair for
! history is Immediately taken back at
! least 1000 years, to the days of the
Romans, who loved such things.
They perfected the topiary art.
| The natural had no standing at all
with the Roman topiarists, or land
scape gardeners. or painters.
The informality of Nature was
anathema to them. They worked in
! straight lines, and it was natural with
them to trim shrubs and evergreens and
bushes of all kinds to suit themselves.
All through the Middle Ages this
| type of gardening survived, coming at
J last into full flower in England in the
| eighteenth century.
BY the end of the first quarter Of the
| coming into disfavor, with the result
| that today 1t is seldom seen, except in
| Isolated instances.
X X x
| When one runs across a Boxwood
chicken, for instance, 1t is a specimen,
done for the fun of the thing.
Usually there is not more than one
or two to garden.
The chicken instanced Is of heroic
proportions, with its eye mace by the
sky behind. Thus spectators enjoy a
green hen with a bright blue eye.
A little Of this sort Of work will go
a long way, certainly.
1t bespeaks the paid gardener. rather
than the amateur who does his own
work for the love Of it.
1t Is interesting to note that the
Latin word topiarius means landscape
gardener. 1t comes from 'topia,' -
through the Greek topos place, and
| means the ancient Roman style of
mural decoration with heterogeneous
landscape scenes.
Its essence is Journalism and the I'M
| natural. and is thus essentially opposed
to the natural and the informal. While
| there will always be a dispute among
| gardeners as to the relative merits of
the formal and the informal, there can
be little doubt that each has its place
| and that the inner nature of each home
owner will have, TO decide.
One will notice the same thing in
the arrangement Of mems desks in Of
| noes One worker will like his desk to
look just $3.50, as the expression has it.
he arrangeS everything squarely, with
all lines OF books, papers, ETC., parallel
He adopts the balanced treatment, as
1t were, and nothing offends his eye
quite so much as the desk of a mate
VINO believes in an informal, or what
| might be termed a diagonal treatment.
The latter instinctively veers the ma
terials on his desk top until no two are
pointing the same way With him the
diagonal is better, because 1t is not so
stin, and gives a certain air of in
| Formally
The likes and diSlikes Of these two
Will never coincide what appears good
to one strikes the other as untidy or
tusSy. Much the same thing holds good
in the matter Of interior decoration.
Popular favor veerS between applause
Tor the formal and the informal,
At one time not so many years ago
every one wanted formal three-piece
overstutfed living room suite, and If you
visited a thousand homes you were
likely to find exactly the same sort of
furniture in every one of them.
During the past three or four years
vogue for the informal has arisen,
with the result that it is no longer con-
| sidered good taste to purchase living
room furniture in suites" Chairs and
sofa, etc, should not match, but rather
harmonic. 1t is now considered good