The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Art Of Landscape Architecture
Her respect, however, for the thoroughly American quality of the place, its simplicity and quaint natural beauty is great, and no foreign fashion is allowed to mar its inherent, native charm; just a plain old-fashioned house near the road, of no special style at all, not even Colonial. On the steep sidehill from where the house stands a narrow path wanders about in somewhat uncertain fashion, just to suit itself and the flower garden of roses and old-fashioned perennials with some of the herbs in a bed by themselves that one sees so often in Italy. The path winds down to a deep hollow where a cool spring reposes in the shadow of many trees. Passing through this woods the path leads to a small knoll crowned by a little group of forest trees, oaks, and sassafras. This is called the Bosca of the place where in Italian fashion the family gather to meals in pleasant weather. The homely vegetables and on the house the Virginia creepers and grape vines keep the spirit of the place unfalteringly American. No Italian gardens and pergolas mar the essentially American beauty of the scene. Just the little grove, the Bosca, with its rude table and benches and quaint oven in the open made of a few stones, and the herb garden, scarcely anything else Italian, and yet you feel that the owner loves Italy, and remembers Italy, but yet loves America still more with its brave simplicity and its absolutely natural charm.
This makes only one more instance of the supreme value of the application of good landscape-gardening ideas to "the genius of the place" in all countries and times, provided the personality of the owner and his other idiosyncrasies receive due consideration. In this way, one may achieve, at lesser or greater expense, a home the result of many aspirations born of diverse experiences. One may have an English or American or French home bearing evidence of the effects of a strong personality, and yet it may have a touch, by no means overpowering, of a more alien, and possibly more desirable style, whether it be Italian, or Japanese, or clearly semi-tropical in effect. The landscape gardening thus becomes basic and universal in its essential quality, and is at the same time full of personality and human feeling.
Size And Extend Of An Estate
It should appear from what has been already said that a beautiful piece of landscape gardening may be of many sizes from the village yard to the estate of thousands of acres.Many considerations, however, need weighing in each case, although the general laws of arrangement hold true throughout. These laws consist in the estab-lishment of certain types of treatment, each a unit, all varied continually, lapping over, contrasting with and contradicting each other; built on the lines of nature yet really not nature, but nevertheless faithful to her spirit.
