Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 303, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 December 1917 — Home Town Helps [ARTICLE]

Home Town Helps

CANNOT IMPROVE ON NATURE Gardeners Are Inclined to Make SoCalled Improvements Which Ruin Beauty of Landscape. The poet Wordsworth wrote: “Laying out grounds, as it is called, may be considered as a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting; and its object, like that of all the liberal arts, is, or ought to be, to move the affections under the control of good sense. If this be so when we are merely putting together words or colors, how much more ought the feeling to prevail when we are in the midst of the realities of things; of the beauty and harmony, of the joy of happiness of human creatures; of men and children, Of birds and beasts, of hills and streams, and trees and flowers, with the changes of night and day, evening and morning, summer and winter, and all their unwearied actions and energies.” All those about to garden in rural districts would do well to read the foregoing several times if extensive changes are contemplated, says the Los Angeles Times. All too many view the natural landscapes as something to be obliterated, overcome, or subdued; whereas, quite to the contrary, it generally needs assistance and accentuation to bring out still stronger its best natural features. Too much destruction is visited upon the fair face of nature when man commences his so-called improvements. Hills are cut down, canyons and hollows filled, trees and shrubs uprooted, areas burned over, all not only unnecessary but absolutely ruinous to natural beauty and constituting moral criminality that by rights should be punishable by laws aimed to protect primal beauty against the machinations of the vandal, man. Too often the beauty spoiler uproots a fine native tree or shrub to make room for a poorer one from Tehuantepec or Timbuctoo, ignorant, evidently, that he has made a very poor exchange and paid money for the fancied privilege of doing so. We need a campaign of education that he who now destroys will recognize that if he lived a thousand years and spent fortunes he - could never improve upon what nature has given us except by aiding and adding and never by destroying and reconstructing. Landscape gardening has rightly been called “the art that doth mend nature.”