The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Art Of Landscape Architecture
"Moreover Nero turned the ruins of his country to his private advantage and built a house the ornaments of which were not miracles of gems and gold, now used in vulgar luxuries, but lawns and lakes, and after the manner of a desert, here groves and there open spaces and prospects; the masters and centurions being Severus and Celer, whose genius and boldness could attempt by Art what Nature had denied and deceive with princely force".
It is also time that we in these modern days learn that we have not been the first to develop a genuine and sound instinct in landscape gardening. The Chinese had it highly developed in their own peculiar style 2600 B.C., and of the Japanese the same may be said, although their ideas arc different and not so old, and in a way not so original, having been derived from China and then transfused with the characteristic Japanese genius. They have that quality that persistently reminds one in a remote and miniature way of the bestpark designs of all countries.
The Hanging Gardens of Nebuchadnezzar are another instance of this ancient love of nature. They have been identified by explorers and found to be of such great size, as shown by their foundations, that they might readily support a replica of the natural hill or mountain which the monarch is said to have had fashioned at the whim of a homesick favourite who he had brought from Iran. Also in the garden at Damascus to-day we find a type of landscape gardening full of natural grace and charm built on good artistic lines of their kind, and which, in accordance with the unchangeable habit of the East, doubtless differs little from that of the Garden of Eden.
The primitive ideas of the savage also have a certain element of natural charm and evince fundamental conceptions of a sort of landscape gardening. John La Farge, than whom no one had a keener instinct for good art, noted this during his visit to the Fiji Islands.
All through the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman times, however, an iron-bound, rigid theory of design seems to have dominated landscape gardening. Nero and Pliny could and did locate their villas in romantic spots, but the villas themselves were designed with grounds about them artificial and stiff, though there were in some instances trees and shrubs and lawns at a little distance so arranged as to be not entirely devoid of the charm of free nature.
"His Golden House, in a park stretching from the Palatine to the heights of the Esquiline, was on a scale of more than oriental magnificence."
