The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Art Of Landscape Architecture
"Besides, there is no denying that more can be accomplished in one day by the removal of a few big trees, than by planting thousands of specimens in a hundred years, and that the loss of a couple of these is not to be regretted if their number is increased a hundred-fold to the eye by making so many others visible which had previously been quite obscured. This is so certain, that, although I have not been blessed with a surplus of ancient trees in my park, yet I have succeeded in apparently multiplying tenfold the number of them left standing. These are visible now from all points, by the removal of some eighty others. One is often struck by the fact in such cases that 'One cannot see the woods for the trees.' The great art in laying out a park consists in making use of comparatively few objects in such a way that a great variety of different pictures result, in which the recurrent elements are not recognized, or at least produce novel and surprising effects."
A tree: a live organism, a unit in the landscape scheme of the park, country place, or garden; a unit that may live six months or a hundred years, working out its own peculiar nature and office in the service of the general artistic life that should inform every scheme of landscape gardening. It is a living, individual member of the whole conception, differing entirely from the blocks of wood or stone in the architectural design of a building. It is not only a life, but innumerable lives within its life to the very core of its being. It is for this reason that a tree or a flower may readily take on apparently something of the personality of a human being. The birch becomes the dainty, delicate, airy, graceful lady of the woods, the oak a monarch among his subjects.
Where is the line that can be taken to mark the separation of the life of the plant from that of man and define its essential difference? At what point of development does personality come into being in the plant and in the animal and for that matter in man? Do they not break through boundary lines and overlap? Does not something of a personality, a spirit or soul, appear in the widely differing forms of all three of them?
A Diagram Showing Arrangement of Trees and Shrubs.
