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

Landscape Gardening

The Art And The Artist

"If now we ask when and where we need the Fine Art of Gardening, must not the answer be, whenever and wherever we touch the surface of the ground and the plants it bears with the wish to produce an organized result that shall please the eye? The name we usually apply to it must not mislead us into thinking that this art is needed only for the creation of broad 'landscape' effects. It is needed wherever we do more than grow plants for the money we may save or gain by them. It does not matter whether we have in mind a great park or a small city square, a large estate or a modest dooryard, we must go about our work in an artistic spirit if we want a good result. Two trees and six shrubs, a scrap of lawn and a dozen flowering plants, may form either a beautiful little picture or a huddled disarray of forms and colors."
Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer.

Landscape gardening is eminently a fine art. The enumeration of painting, sculpture and architecture as the line arts is seriously deficient, and yet it has a wide currency. That is a fine art which attempts to create organized beauty—to unite several dissimilar parts in one harmonious whole. In this respect landscape art stands on a level with the other fine arts. In some other respects it even surpasses them.
This art is also known as landscape architecture. Indeed landscape architecture is the term habitually used by professional workers in America, though one sometimes hears of ''landscape engineering-" and "landscape design." All these designations suffer from being too ponderous, and none of them is free from other objections. There has been some controversy as to which one should be certified and used, but the argument has been highly unprofitable. The ordinary student will find it best to regard all these names as synonymous.

In former times the simple word "gardening" was in general use in England to designate this art, especially that style of gardening practice known as the natural, or English, method.