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

Landscape Gardening

No one will see a delicately penciled sky line or a softly harmonized background through a blinding dust storm; and a bed of finest roses is apt to look very sorry and drabbled in the midst of a cold rain. Differences in sunshine, light and atmosphere make very surprising differences in the effect of landscape views; and as far as possible, all this should be taken into account by the gardener when he makes his plan.

And besides the modifying influence which light and atmosphere exercise on landscape views, they are themselves often a very important part of the picture. Who cares to look at anything else on a day when an early, feathery snow fills the buoyant atmosphere with a delightful, softening, luminous, hush-compelling haze? And sometimes there are clouds and a sunset as beautiful as the woods or as sublime as the ocean. These do not belong to the gardener, but they may fit into his picture, and enhance the pleasure which it gives; and shall he not appropriate whatever of them he can?

Everyone knows that the landscape painter spends his chiefest pains to give accurate representations and stirring suggestions of light and atmosphere; but the landscape gardener has the real commodities in un-measured, ever-shifting variety. Let him make all possible use of them, and if the elements are commonly unpropitious, as they are in some countries, he may have his proper doubts about the practicability of undertaking any gardening plans at all. Fortunately almost every country, whatever its shortcomings, has some good qualities of climate which may be studied and turned to advantage.

The Natural Style

In the English landscape garden one sees and feels everywhere the spirit of nature, only softened and refined by art. In the French or Italian garden one sees and feels only the effect of art, slightly assisted by nature.

We ought now to consider more carefully what is implied in the leading styles of landscape gardening.

The natural style is unquestionably the favorite in England and America. This means not alone that the landscape gardeners of these countries practice it in preference to other styles, but also that the laity, composed of people who only feel and do not think, have a profound bias toward the natural style. To be sure, these people admire pattern beds in the parks, and they put into their own dooryards the most distastefully unnatural objects conceivable; but this is due to their ignorance of the value of unity and their pure inability to grasp the real motive of a harmonious composition. In general they have a much greater, though unthinking, attachment to noble trees, natural shrubberies, green lawns and cool shadows, or to a pleasant combination of all these elements.