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Art Of Landscape Architecture
The really beautiful parks of Europe are those which have a character of their own derived from their own conditions of climate and scene.
The parks of Paulovsk near St. Petersburg, of Muskau in Silesia, of the villa Thuret on the cape of Antibes in the Mediterranean are none of them English, except as England was the mother of the natural as distinguished from the architectural in gardening. The Thuret park, if I may cite an illustration of my meaning, is a wonderland of crowded vegetation, of ways deep, shaded by rich and countless evergreens, of steep open slopes aglow with bright anemones. Between the high masses of eucalyptus and acacia are glimpses of the sea, and of the purple foothills and the gleaming snow peaks of the Maritime Alps. In the thickets are laurels, pittosporums, gardenias, etc., from the ends of the earth: but ilex, phillyrca, and oleander are natives of the country, and myrtle and pistacia are the common shrubs of the seashore, so that the foreigners are only additions to an original wealth of evergreens. The garden also has its palms of many species, with cycads, yuccas, aloes, and the like; but the agaves are common hedge plants of the country, and strange euphorbias grow everywhere about: moreover, the most monstrous of these creatures are given a space apart in the main garden, so that they may not disturb the quiet of the scene. M. Thuret saved the olives and the ilexes of the original hillside. He did not try to imitate the gardening of another and different country or climate but simply worked to enhance the beauty natural to the region of his choice. "At the other end of Europe all this is equally true of Paulovsk. Here at the edge of the wet and dismal plain on which St. Petersburg is built, is a stretch of upland almost featureless, but which thanks to a careful helping of nature is now the most interesting and beautiful bit of scenery the neighbourhood of the Tsar's capital can show. Here is no futile striving after the loveliness of England or any other foreign land; no attempting the beauty of a mountain country or a rocky country or a warm country, or any other country than just this country that lies around St. Petersburg; here also is no planting of incongruous specimens and no out-of-place flower bedding. The park of Muskau teaches the same lesson, and under conditions closely resembling those of our Middle States.
"The lawns or open stretches or glades of turf are just as carefully considered, it will be noticed, in the semitropical park and luxuriant vegetation of the Antibes as in England or Russia. The open spaces with bordering foliage, the pastoral, the picturesque, have the same justification and interest given them here as in England or America."'
