The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Art Of Landscape Architecture
" From eight to fourteen feet of thickness of wall forms, in each window recess, a complete closet, with the most beautiful varied view over the river, wildly foaming below, and farther on flowing through the park in soft windings till lost in the dim distance."
Note how the location of this castle fits in, adapts itself to the surrounding scenery and dominates and seems to own it all. It also shows how important the site of the building and how the most careful study should be given to its placing.
It may be truly said that the landscape can be just as well fitted to the building by a proper display of landscape-gardening ability as the building fitted to the landscape by the architect. Each one is needed to help the other; for in actual experience it is often found that a change of fifty feet will greatly improve the appearance of the house as well as that of the landscape as seen from the house.
In order to further realize the significance of what has been said in this chapter on the important subject of the location of buildings one instinctively remembers Haddon Hall. Take it altogether, Haddon Hall has come to be recognized by many of the best judges as the finest, although by no means the largest or most expensive, country seat in England. Most people instinctively prefer it to Versailles or the Italian villas, but it may be said that is a matter of taste, though good taste should naturally have a basis on acknowledged precedents of good art. In this respect Haddon has a great advantage in its setting. This all will concede is most admirable. It rests pleasantly on the gentle slope of a sidehill. On one side is a simple and broad terrace backed by the most wonderful beeches, which, standing in just the position they occupy, enhance the beauty and dignity of the house tenfold. Passing down the steps of the terrace one sees wide simple stretches of soft pastoral English landscape which is certainly the most beautiful in the world. The trees and grass spaces seem to love each other and the house rests quietly in the midst of them like a rare jewel.
Grass Spaces
WHAT the gold backgrounds of the old masters, which set out the sweet, lovable faces of madonnas and saints in so ideal a manner, are to religious pictures, green luxuriant grass spaces are to a landscape. They are, as it were, the canvas of nature painting, the playground where the sun disports an element of brightness which sets out the whole landscape."
By grass spaces, something more is meant than is usually understood by the term lawn.
