The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Landscape Gardening
Character - Propriety
Although that delicacy of organization, usually called taste, is a natural gift, which can no more be acquired than hearing can be by a deaf man, yet, in most persons, this sensibility to the beautiful may he cultivated and ripened into good taste by the study and comparison of beautiful productions in nature and art.
Andrew Jackson Downing.
Character is the most elusive quality of all those with which we deal. Almost all writers on gardening have talked more or less of character, assuming it as a quality, but never approaching a definition or an explanation. Thomas heatley did, in fact, long ago introduce a chapter "Of Character" into his remark ably clear analytical outline; but the chapter treated of subjects quite different from those discussed here. If 1 may venture on the dangerous experiment of a definition, T will say that I intend to suggest by the term character those more delicate distinctions in the general method of treatment, such as may mark one composition from another, even of the same general style. We understand clearly what is meant by character in a man or woman, and J should like to transfer this notion undisturbed to use in the descriptions of gardens. It is a common saying that the face of such and such an acquaintance is pretty but it lacks character. It is perfectly conceivable that a garden might be faultless in the unity and the harmony of its appointments, with everything beautiful and appropriate withal, and yet lack character.
In different words, we might say that character is the personal impress of the designer. Thus we would never expect a poem of pure and lofty character to flow from a wicked heart. We would not expect a painting of great power to originate in a dull, unsensitive mind. No more can we hope to see vigor and dignity displayed in a garden designed by a weak and puerile author. In this close and proper connection of the character of the garden with the character of its designer we may perhaps more clearly understand its present signification.
Misapprehension may easily arise in the use of this term, due to the fact that the same quality in literature is called style. Thus we expect the style of H. L. Mencken to be his own and to be distinctly and always different from the style of John Burroughs. Unfortunately this word "style" is already appropriated in landscape gardening to another meaning; but the personal quality which makes style in literature shows its results equally in the realm of gardening. Let us recognize it, welcome it and call it character.
Certain terms are commonly associated in criticism of gardens, such as simplicity, dignity, boldness. These I take to represent different types of character.
