The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Art Of Landscape Architecture

The advantage of studying such a scene is that you ave before you a perfectly good model for landscapegardening work designed to any scale even the smallest. It is simply a grand example of the way nature, in her best mood, designs her scenery. The view also illustrates how by replacing the water of the river by grass you could obtain the meadow effect, with trees and shrubs jutting out into the sea of green, and thus create the pastoral scene which as well as the water effect may prove to be the eye of the landscape.

Enclosure

THE question of fences is not altogether one of landscape art, for protection of this kind becomes a necessity in most countries; however, it has its advantages from the artistic standpoint; outside of and beyond all the practical advantages of an enclosure its landscape effect has value. It individualizes a place, it sets a boundary, it marks the confines of a home or a possession, if it does nothing more. It indicates that the frame of the picture is here, and the enclosure warns one and all that here they must stop, and go no farther except as the proprietor may allow them the freedom of his domain for picnics, cross-cut paths, and various other privileges. Landscape art should seek to plant out and shut out in great part the boundary walls or fences and allow only occasional glimpses to prove that they exist and are performing their proper function.

There is a tendency at the present time to favour the open lawn scheme where a dozen houses or more show no boundary line between them except the surveyor's monuments. These places are generally comparatively small, and throwing them all together into one lawn is thought to make a better display of whatever beauty they may possess, or that may be added to them by planting trees and shrubs and flowers. But it will be found on studying the situation in the light of the laws of landscape design that a number of these buildings, included together and owned by persons of diverse interests and tastes, will not lend themselves successfully to one landscape scheme.