best but artisans. This is the popular belief. But in fact there is a fourth art which has a right to be rated with the others, which is as fine as the finest, and which demands as much of its professors in the way of creative power and executive skill as the most difficult. This is the art whose purpose it is to create beautiful compositions upon the surface of the ground.

The mere statement of its purpose is sufficient to establish its rank. It is the effort to produce organic beauty—to compose a beautiful whole with a number of related parts—which makes a man an artist; neither the production of a merely useful organism nor of a single beautiful detail suffices. A clearly told story or a single beautiful word is not a work of art—only a story told in beautifully connected words. A solidly and conveniently built house, if it is nothing more, is not a work of architecture, nor is an isolated stone, however lovely in shape and surface. A delightful tint, a graceful line, does not make a picture; and though the painter may reproduce ugly models he must put some kind of beauty into the reproduction if it is to be esteemed above any other manufactured article—if not beauty of form, then beauty of color or of meaning or at least of execution. Similarly, when a man disposes the surface of the soil with an eye to crops alone he is an agriculturist; when he grows plants for their beauty as isolated objects he is a horticulturist; but when he disposes ground and plants together to produce organic beauty of effect, he is an artist with the best.

Yet though all the fine arts are thus akin in general purpose they differ each from each in many ways. And in the radical differences which exist between the landscape-gardener’s and all the others we find some reasons why its affinity with them is so commonly ignored. One difference is that it uses the same materials as nature herself. In what is called “natural” gardening it uses them to produce effects which under fortunate conditions nature might produce without man’s aid. Then, the better the result, the less likely it is to be recognized as an artificial—artistic—result. The more perfectly the artist attains his aim, the more likely we are to forget that he has been at work. In “formal” gardening, on the other hand, nature’s materials are disposed and treated in frankly unnatural ways; and then—as a more or less intelligent love for natural beauty is very common to-day, and an intelligent eye for art is rare—the artist’s work is apt to be resented as an impertinence, denied its right to its name, called a mere contorting and disfiguring of his materials.

Again, the landscape-gardener’s art differs from all others in the unstable character of its productions. When surfaces are modeled and plants arranged, nature and the artist must work a long time together before the true result appears; and when once it has revealed itself, day to day attention will be forever needed to preserve it from the deforming effects of time. It is easy to see how often neglect or interference must work havoc with the best intentions, how often the passage of years must travesty or destroy the best results, how rare must be the cases in which a work of landscape art really does justice to its creator.

Still another thing which affects popular recognition of the art as such is our lack of clearly understood terms by which to speak of it and of those who practice it. “Gardens” once meant pleasure-grounds of every kind and “gardener” then had an adequately artistic sound. But as the significance of the one term has been gradually specialized, so the other has gradually come to denote a mere grower of plants. “Landscape gardener” was a title first used by the artists of the eighteenth century to mark the new tendency which they represented—the search for “natural” as opposed to “formal” beauty; and it seemed to them to need an apology as savoring, perhaps, of grandiloquence or conceit. But as taste declined in England it was assumed by men who had not the slightest right, judged either by their aims or by their results, to be considered artists; and to-day it is fallen into such disesteem that it is often replaced by “landscape architect.” This title has French usage to support it and is in many respects a good one. But its correlative—“landscape architecture”—is unsatisfactory; and so, on the other hand, is “landscape artist,” though “landscape art” is an excellent generic term. Perhaps the best we can do is to keep to “landscape gardener,” and try to remember that it ought always to mean an artist and an artist only.

M. G. van Rensselaer.

Floriculture in the United States.

A T the beginning of the present century, it is not probable that there were 100 florists in the United States, and their combined green-house structures could not have exceeded 50,000 square feet of glass. There are now more than 10,000 florists distributed through every State and Territory in the Union and estimating 5,000 square feet of glass to each, the total area would be 50,000,000 feet, or about 1,000 acres of green-houses. The value of the bare structures, with heating apparatus, at 60 cents per square foot would be $30,000,000, while the stock of plants grown in them would not be less than twice that sum. The present rate of growth in the business is about 25% per annum, which proves that it is keeping well abreast of our most flourishing industries.

The business, too, is conducted by a better class of men. No longer than thirty years ago it was rare to find any other than a foreigner engaged in commercial floriculture. These men had usually been private gardeners, who were mostly uneducated, and without business habits. But to-day, the men of this calling compare favorably in intelligence and business capacity with any mercantile class.

Floriculture has attained such importance that it has taken its place as a regular branch of study in some of our agricultural colleges. Of late years, too, scores of young men in all parts of the country have been apprenticing themselves to the large establishments near the cities, and already some of these have achieved a high standing; for the training so received by a lad from sixteen to twenty, better fits him for the business here than ten years of European experience, because much of what is learned there would prove worse than useless here. The English or German florist has here to contend with unfamiliar conditions of climate and a manner of doing business that is novel to him. Again he has been trained to more deliberate methods of working, and when I told the story a few years ago of a workman who had potted 10,000 cuttings in two inch pots in ten consecutive hours, it was stigmatized in nearly every horticultural magazine in Europe as a piece of American bragging. As a matter of fact this same workman two years later, potted 11,500 plants in ten hours, and since then several other workmen have potted plants at the rate of a thousand per hour all day long.

Old world conservatism is slow to adopt improvements. The practice of heating by low pressure steam will save in labor, coal and construction one-fifth of the expense by old methods, and nearly all the large green-house establishments in this country, whether private or commercial, have been for some years furnished with the best apparatus. But when visiting London, Edinburgh and Paris in 1885, I neither saw nor heard of a single case where steam had been used for green-house heating. The stress of competition here has developed enterprise, encouraged invention and driven us to rapid and prudent practice, so that while labor costs at least twice as much as it does in Europe, our prices both at wholesale and retail, are lower. And yet I am not aware that