The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Art Of Landscape Architecture
Prof. Jackson had also the "most delicate artistic feeling and he loved beauty with so true an instinct that one can imagine the very flowers and shrubs which he affectionately tended returning his affection,"—thus testified an old friend at the time of his death.
The garden is a simple affair, just trees, shrubs, and flowers and grass, nothing rare or specially unusual, only a gathering of congenial plant friends, who have been looked after for nearly a century by people who loved them. The sight of this garden might easily recall, to those who have seen it, the one at New College, Oxford, of which Nathaniel Hawthorne says it has "lawns of the richest green and softest velvet grass, shadowed over by ancient trees which have lived a quiet life here for centuries, and have been nursed and tended with such care, and been so sheltered from rude winds, that certainly they must have been the happiest of all trees. Such a sweet, quiet, stately seclusion—so age long as this has been and I hope will continue to be—cannot exist anywhere else."
Long may these lovely old gardens continue to exist in their academic shades and cloistered homes.
Public Parks
THE problem of creating public parks while, in many respects, the same as that of estates or even of gardens, should always be carefully correlated with the rights and desires of the public. Historically, the public park is modern. A hundred years ago there were few public parks in the strict sense of the term, either in Europe or America. People were simply allowed to use Kings' and Princes' parks. Naturally, such parks had not been designed in the beginning for the use of the people, although they were of great size and magnificence like Versailles. The first man we can find who really seemed to comprehend and present intelligibly the idea of a public park in America was Andrew Jackson Downing, and no better expression has been given of appreciation of what he did for people's parks in both America and Europe than the eloquent words of William A. Stiles in the pages of The Garden and Forest.
"No one," he says, "who has looked into the history of public parks in American cities and the development of the public sentiment which brought them into being, will deny that the strongest impulse which the movement received at the outset came from Andrew Jackson Downing. Mr. Downing was born with a strong love of nature, and as his father was a nurseryman he was brought up in a calling that increased his interest in trees and planting. Reared almost in sight of many of the old places on the Hudson which had been planned and planted by Parmentier and others of that older school, he learned while still young that a landscape could be made impressive by the simplest and most natural treatment. "
