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Planning Your Garden
Introductory
THE planning of a garden involves attention to many considerations connected with the character and position of the site and its surroundings, as well as to those questions in which both horticulture and good taste play important parts.
Each particular site presents a problem in itself, and the art of the garden maker must be exercised first in studying the factors, and then in permitting them to guide him to a good result. What these factors are will appear when I come to details. It is sufficient at the outset to state that they include such inherent conditions as soil, position, aspect, and environment.
Though garden making in a large measure is controlled by principles based upon art, purely artistic considerations can only serve the designer when they are subordinated to the practical needs of horticulture.
As in other branches of applied art utility claims first consideration, so in garden making the conditions which make for the welfare of the flowers, and the comfort and convenience of those who use the garden, must always receive attention.
This does not imply that successful flower culture is the be-all and end-all of gardening, for that would be to ignore the beauty of the garden picture. It is possible, as I shall show, to give due weight to the picturesque, without in the slightest measure discounting the value of the garden from a horticultural standpoint. On the other hand, only too frequently the mistake is made of supposing that well-filled beds and borders, abundant blossom, and neatly kept grass and walks are the sole desiderata of gardening. If that were so, it were better to grow one's flowers as the market gardener grows his cabbages — in rows. Mere profusion of bloom will not condone any ill-planned garden. The gardening enthusiast is too apt to permit his pride in the flowers to blind him to the value of a garden picture. He sees the individual but not the crowd. It were better he should adopt the standpoint of the landscape gardener, who thinks less of plants as plants than as elements in a composition, in the way of a painter of pictures.
The garden, however small, is amenable to treatment on truly artistic principles, and the first thing to recognize is that it must be homogeneous. It should appeal to the eye as a whole before it claims attention in detail. Everything in the garden must be interdependent, and the general picture must be distinguished by balance, unity of effect, and a studied harmony of line and mass.
