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

Landscape Gardening

I think this is the use commonly made by those who apply them to art compositions, even though those who use them thus have never stopped to generalize under any common term the qualities expressed. These terms, simplicity, dignity, and boldness, are sufficiently suggestive of certain characters. This list is not in-tended to be complete, for, theoretically at least, there may be an indefinite variety of character. The term complexity is added to the list only because it seems to be implied in simplicity. Perhaps elaborateness would be preferred to complexity as a term for a more careful classification.

Between the terms propriety and appropriateness it is hard to choose the better. The latter is the more explicit in its suggestions, but the former has the advantage of brevity and of good associations, which I think ought to be operative in our criticisms of taste in gardening. For as we inquire whether this or that social appointment is marked by strict propriety, so ought we to criticize the items of the gardener's work. It must be said that such criticism is sorely needed, and that many gardeners of some reputation seem never to have reflected that such a test as propriety can be applied to their work. Our American cemeteries arc often striking exemplifications of this statement. In them one continually meets objects of such childish conception, such incongruous effect or such gaudy color, as to jar on nerves of any appreciative person. Much has been said and written on the subject of cemetery ornamentation, and we may assume that we are on the way to inculcate a better taste in this respect.

Although every tenet of gardening art is habitually violated in our cemeteries, the most common and disagreeable violations are doubtless instances of disregard for propriety. The matters introduced are not appropriate to the place.

But this is only a single class of improprieties, and is mentioned chiefly for illustration. Propriety is a universal test. Every object and group of objects must submit to it. Thus we would often consider an aviary, or a zoological collection, or a suite of dog kennels inadmissible in a garden because they were inappropriate to the surroundings, even though they might be in themselves beautiful and interesting.

I wish to speak here again of a particular class of improprieties to which 1 have already alluded, namely, the prominent display of monstrous or deformed horticultural specimens. Deformity and monstrosity have a strange fascination to uncultured minds; and there is no more unequivocal testimony to a general poverty of cultivated taste in gardening than the constantly recurring sight of such disfigurements in the gardens of people whose houses are furnished inside with scrupulous taste and propriety. It is surpassingly strange that the city resident, who has room between his house and the street for only a single specimen, will choose for that position the one plant which offers the most blemishes, as though AEsop were better to look upon than Apollo.