The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Landscape Gardening
Good care is required to keep trees thrifty, to keep plants growing vigorously and luxuriantly. Cultivation and manure arc needed. Pruning must be done. Crowded clumps must be thinned out. Sheared trees must be kept sheared, and mowed lawns must be kept mowed. The walks and drives must be kept graded and surfaced and free from weeds. Buildings must be kept painted, and fences put together and standing straight. And dozens of similar matters demand constant attention, or directly the finish of the composition is marred and its whole effectiveness diminished.
Perhaps cleanliness is only a matter of good care; but it sometimes happens that a gardener becomes so absorbed in taking good care of his shrubs and flower beds that he forgets the general cleanliness of his grounds. In public parks the lawns and walks rapidly become littered with papers and rubbish of all sorts, and this may quickly reach such a point as to interfere seriously with the satisfaction of the park users. In the farm yard, where good attempts at ornamental gardening are often made, a proper regard for cleanliness would suggest that a wheelbarrow should not be left standing in front of the house unused for a week, and that chicken coops, dog kennels, grindstones and other agricultural paraphernalia should be put behind the main dwelling house, or at least kept off the lawn. On any grounds more or less litter is bound to accumulate, and this may readily amount to enough to spoil the best studied effects of unity, variety, character and propriety.
This matter is of greater practical concern than the uninstructed person will readily imagine. In the management of city parks, for example, finish is more important, practically, than primary design. In park work this is called maintenance, and maintenance is what costs money. Consider for a moment that the ordinary city spends something like $500 an acre a year—often more—for the maintenance of its parks. Here we have a measure of what cleanliness and good order are worth to the average citizen in his own housekeeping. For good maintenance is merely good housekeeping, and good housekeeping means just what we here designate as finish.
Yet after the landscape gardener has clone everything within his power, has gathered the last item of horticultural excellence, and has disposed of it with the artist's happiest effect, he is still dependent, in a very great measure, on the favor of the unmanageable elements for the results.
