The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Art Of Landscape Architecture
Water
EVEN if fresh and clear water (whether stream or lake) is not so indispensable to landscape as a rich vegetation, it greatly increases its charm. Eye and ear are equally delighted, for who does not hearken with delight to the sweet murmur of the brook, the distant plashing of the mill wheels, the prattling of the pearly spring— who has not been enchanted in quiet hours by the perfect calm of the slumbering lake in which the giants of the forest are dreamily mirrored, or the aspect of foaming waves, chased by the storm, where the sea-gulls merrily rock? But it is very difficult for the artist to conquer nature here, or to impose on her what she herself has not created on the spot. "Therefore, I would advise rather to leave undone altogether a faulty imitation. A region without water can yet present many beauties, but a stinking swamp infects everyone; the first is only a negative fault, the second a positive, and with the exception of the owner himself nobody will take a cesspool of this kind for a lake, or a stagnant ditch overgrown with duckweed for a stream. But if one can by any means guide a running stream into the domain of one's own property, if the terrain gives any prospect of it, one should do one's utmost, and forego neither expense nor pains to acquire such a great advantage, for nothing offers such an endless variety to the beholder as the element of water.
"But in order to give the water, artificially obtained, whatever form it may take, a natural, unforced appearance, much trouble is necessary. In the whole art of landscape gardening, perhaps nothing is more difficult to accomplish."
Several of the rules which I have given for laying out the roads and for the outlines of the plantations can be readiy applied to the shape of the water effects. As in the former case one can, according to the requirements of the terrain and the obstacles that occur, bring in sometimes long and sometimes short, abrupt bends, making, for preference, rounded corners rather than semicircles, sometimes even quite sharp turns where the water is visibly diverted. Both banks of a stream or brook should follow fairly parallel lines, yet with various nuances, which must be decided not according to one's fancy, but by the laws determined by its course. Two rules hold good almost universally:
"The side towards which the stream turns should have a lower shore than the opposite, because the higher one diverts it.
"Where the current of the water suddenly becomes swift and yet needs to be turned aside lest it break bounds if left free, a sharp bend should be constructed rather than a round one and a steeper shore should signify the conflict. But never follow what our gardeners call 'noble lines.' "
