The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Art Of Landscape Architecture
The variety of human interests create contrasts and contradictions that will not come into harmony with each other on account of the "personal equation," the difference of make-up of the owners. Theoretically it is a beautiful idea and seems practicable, but to obtain a really artistic effect in this way, no, it is not likely to be done.
People may fancy they have lawns with many houses and owners, in one great enclosure, that is satisfactory, but the probability is that they do not know a well-designed lawn when they see it, and think they have something which they have not.
The intimate way of treating the small home will really commend itself to everyone who is not led away by the influence of a caprice or fashion. It gives the surest way of securing the most comfort and pleasure for the dweller under his own vine and fig tree. With wire fence covered with vines entirely, or a rough wall of stone, quarry stone, uncut, with the interstices devoid of cement and filled with rich earth and rock plants, stonecrop, prickly pear, and other rock plants, the home becomes one's very own. Flowers cluster around the baseof the wall, or honeysuckle fence, and shrubs partially screen it, and the lawn within becomes a park in miniature, its design obedient to park laws. Everything would naturally be in proportion, trees and shrubs of moderate and even dwarf growth finding place on the smallest lawn. There is likely on the small place to be danger of overcrowding, for there should be a breadth of grass plot or lawn sufficient to make the place look larger rather than smaller than it really is. The sense of comparative breadth can always be maintained in the smallest place.
It should hardly need repeating that a boundary enclosure of this kind should have along its borders shrubs and trees so arranged as to not only carry out the general law of design, but to reveal at intervals brief glimpses over the boundary to pleasing objects beyond.
A fence is* generally an unattractive part of the landscape. It is artificial, no matter how it is designed, whether of iron, wood, or stone. Wire fastened to iron posts makes a cheap fence that will last at least twenty years in many cases, but it is ugly. Cover it with honeysuckles and it is beautiful. There can be little objection to any fence, if covered with vines or other vegetation, especially if trees and shrubs lend the support of their protecting and screening foliage. The fence then becomes quite as attractive as any other part of the place, especially as it need not shut out, and indeed never should entirely shut out, important views of spaces exterior and beyond.
A small place especially if enclosed as it should beought to have nothing spectacular about it, no showy plants, trees or shrubs or flowers, set out solely for display.
