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

Landscape Gardening

The commonest vagary of this sort is the little weeping tree, in which the writhing agonies of one monstrous variety are grafted on the top of some straight, courageous stock for better exhibition. As one passes along a residence street in almost any town seeking something in the gardens to admire, how often must he decide that this and that plant was used because it was a freak rather than because it was beautiful or appropriate. It seems to the present scribe that propriety is the one thing to be chiefly studied by that large and needy class of Americans who have houses of their own
with small grounds attached.

Finish

Both richness and polish will, to a certain extent, be the result of keeping. . . . Extreme thinness of plants in beds skirting a lawn, an inferior order of plants in the neighborhood of the house or by the sides of the grass glades, and the use of commonplace or uncongenial ornaments, are inconsistent with richness.
Edward Kemp.

No one will have read so far as this chapter without having observed the outline which the text attempts to follow. As indicated in that outline, it has been conceived that there are six distinct artistic qualities, in which any ornamental planting may be good or bad. These are unity, variety, motive, character, propriety and finish. These are all in some degree essential; but it will strike the reader at once that they are not all equally important. Those things which are here included under the unsatisfactory term "finish," are not of such paramount and continual necessity as those discussed vinder unity, for instance. And yet one may understand, without puzzling, that any sort of an art composition may answer all the requirements thus far set forth, and yet fail to yield a due satisfaction because it lacks a painstaking finish. Besides, one may note this defect in the concrete only too easily among pictures, books or landscapes.

In gardening, finish means several things, some of which we may designate here. In the first place, it requires good specimens. All the plants employed must be good of their kind; the minor groups must be good; and the masses must be good. The individual plants must be excellent in proportion to their conspicuousness.

If a single specimen of some rare and striking species stands in a prominent place, it cannot be permitted to wear a decrepit, unthrifty, untidy appearance. But besides this, it should have positive excellence to its credit. It should be a plant worth seeing, not merely as a botanical curiosity, but an example of nature's best work.