The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Art Of Landscape Architecture
The shade upon the earth is black as night. High, high above your head, and on every side down to the ground, the thicket is hemmed in and choked up by the interlacing boughs that droop with the weight of roses, and load the slow air with their damask breath.
"The rose trees which I saw were all of the kind we call damask—they grow to an immense height and size. There are no other flowers. Here and there are patches of ground made clear from the cover and these are either carelessly planted with some common and useful vegetable, or left free to the wayward ways of nature, and bear rank weeds moist looking and cool to your eyes, and refreshing the sense with their earthy and bitter fragrance. There is a lane opened through the thicket, so broad in some places that you can pass along side by side—in some so narrow (the shrubs are for ever encroaching) that you ought, if you can, to go on the first, and hold back the bough of the rose tree. And through this wilderness there tumbles a loud rushing stream, which is halted at last in the lowest corner of the garden and then tossed up in a fountain by the side of a simple alcove. This is all. Never for an instant will the people of Damascus attempt to separate the idea of bliss from these wild gardens and rushing waters".
At the same time Prince Pucklcr would probably remark on the trim artificiality and formalism of Versailles, and of even the Bois de Boulogne, which many years afterwards Napoleon III asked him to treat professionally.
Forget it if we will, and despise it as we may, in spite of our seeking after the striking and unusual, there is in the minds of most of us an instinctive love of the natural and simple. Often as we go about our duties and pleasures, there are bits of simple natural scenery which, if we think a moment, we will find most agreeable. These sensations are not necessarily the result of special knowledge. We like these scenes because the mind is constituted to like them. Doubtless, moreover, this appreciation of such scenes has always been consciously or unconsciously felt by intelligent beings whether they are wild or cultivated, provided they are not merely imitative, that is provided they are developed on natural lines.
"An imitation of nature, however successful," says Calvert Vaux, "is not art; and the purpose to imitate nature, or to produce an effect which shall seem to be natural, and therefore interesting, is not sufficient for success in the art of lawn planting, which depends on a happy combination of many circumstances that nature, unassisted, is not likely to bring about."
