The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Art Of Landscape Architecture

Let any one try, on the other hand, to make a level meadow. He can with difficulty make a level cricket bowling streak, or a level tennis court—much less a large meadow a mile long like the one in Prospect Park.The eye will deceive one, and the place will never look level from every point of view. It will seem convex or concave and, worst of all, it will look as if an attempt had been made to produce a level territory and had failed. The sense of that kind of failure is always trying to any one who can understand the end which is sought.

Many people's sense of these niceties of landscape art is so obtuse and imperfect that they will at "one fell swoop" destroy these fine "nuances" of grading. This has indeed been done in Central Park through ignorant and, therefore, unintentional treatment of one of the most beautiful meadows near 59th Street, a meadow which has been spoken of as the most expensive piece of work of the same size in the area of the park; all spoiled by unintelligent grading. Of all undertakings of the landscape gardener, grading is the last to be left to the skill of the common day labourer. It would be just as sensible a proceeding to set the quarryman who hews and blasts out the stone from the hillside to carve a copy of some great statue. Yet the landscape gardener at his best can never hope to create work like nature when she is at her finest. He can only work in what he believes to be the same style, but never quite in the same style as she presents when she works in her best mood. He can enter into her spirit, but never quite reach her heart.

The illustration of Mr. Agar's estate is introduced to show how the shape of a lawn can be graded so as to give the impression of no change of surface whatever, just a retention of the natural character of the place by blending and moulding the contour lines of the ground.

The centre of the lawn to the north has been greatly depressed, and still further to the north it has been raised considerably and trees and shrubs planted to shut out an unattractive view.