The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Art Of Landscape Architecture
This scheme divides itself naturally into simple parts, contrasting and in a sense contradicting each other but capable of working out into beautiful pictures. Open spaces of grass and bordering plantations with paths and roads running through them are the two divisions the relations of which should be always kept in mind, whether the object be to design a park or a garden, which after all arc fundamentally the same, only variations and combinations of the divisions already indicated. It is a question of the rhythm of low and high, of broad or narrow masses of vegetation, and the overflow of one arrangement into the other. For instance, single trees and small masses of shrubs may be used effectively out in the open lawn beyond the bordering shrubbery, or, on the other hand, the grass spaces may penetrate with good effect far into the shrubbery.
Then, moreover, these types of division may be applied to a group of small designs and a number of them combined into the main design, which, subject to the same law and presenting the same variety of types, constitutes the treatment of the estate, gardens, lawns, and everything within its bounds.
Approaching the house from the park and coming to the pleasure ground through plantations more or less indeterminate in height and breadth, we reach a sort of middle ground. This is the pleasure ground, and after that comes the garden, as it were, a part of the house.
"The word pleasure ground is difficult to translate accurately into German, and I therefore consider it better to retain the English expression; it means a terrain, abutting on the house territory and decorated and fenced in, of far larger dimensions than gardens usually are, something that establishes a gradation between the park and the true garden, which should appear to be really a part of the house."
Thomas Whately says in Observations on Modern Gardening:
"If regularity is not entitled to a preference in the environs or approach to a house, it would be difficult to support its pretensions to a place in any more distant parts of a park or a garden. Formal slopes of ground are ugly, right or circular lines bounding water do not indeed change the nature of the element; it still retains some of its agreeable properties; but the shape given to it is disgusting. Regularity in plantations is less offensive; we are habituated, as has been already observed, to straight lines of trees, in cultivated nature; a double row meeting at the top, and forming a complete arched vista, has peculiar effect; other regular figures have a degree of beauty, and to alter or disguise such a disposition, without destroying a number of fine trees, which cannot well be spared, may sometimes be difficult; but it hardly ever ought to be chosen in the arrangement of a young plantation. "
