The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Art Of Landscape Architecture
What is the picturesque? A question not easily answered; yet this is certain, that any attempt that may be made to find an answer for it must bring us in contact with the very elements which already have been named; and which are assembled in the idea of patriarchal repose.
"The picturesque is not simply beauty in nature— it is not luxuriance; it is not amplitude and vastness; it is not copiousness; it is not the fruit of man's interference: but rather it is the consequence of an indolent acquiescence on his part in things as they are or as they have become; the picturesque belongs to the foreground always, or to the stage next beyond the foreground—never does it take its range beyond the horizon. The picturesque claims as its own the cherished and delicious ideas of deep seclusion, of lengthened, undisturbed continuance, and of the absence, afar off, of those industrial energies which mark their presence by renovations, by removals, and by a better order of things, and by signs of busy industry and of thriftincss and order.
"Within the sacred precincts of the picturesque, the trees must be such as have outlived the winters of centuries, and been green through the scorching heats of unrecorded sultry summers: they stoop and yet hold up giant gnarled branches, leafy at the extreme sprays; and their twistings are such that they look supernatural, seen against an autumnal evening sky. The fences that skirt the homestead of the picturesque must have done their office through the occupance of three or four generations. The dwellings of man must declare themselves such as have sheltered the hoary quietude of sires long ago gone to their graves. Inasmuch as the picturesque abjures change it rejects improvement, it abhors the square, the perpendicular, the horizontal, and it likes rather all forms that now are other than at first they were, and that lean this way and that way and that threaten to fall; but so did the same building threaten a fall a century ago! In a word, the picturesque is the Conservation of Landscape Beauty. It is where the picturesque holds undisputed sway that we shall find—or shall expect to find—secure and placid longevity—domestic sanctity and reverence; together with a piety that holds more communion with the past than with the busy and philanthropic present. Give me only the picturesque, and I shall be well content never to gaze on tropical luxuriance, or upon Alpine sublimities, nor shall ever wish to travel the broad walks that surround palaces: shall never be taxed for my admiration of those things which wealth and pride have superadded to nature."
