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

Landscape Gardening

This would still be the most convenient word if we could dissociate it from the growing of cabbages and parsnips; but that seems impossible with us now.

The chief objections to the longer titles are that they are too long and have too large a sound. By their very look and sonorousness they seem to suggest princely and magnificent undertakings of parks, villas and hunting grounds, and to overshoot entirely those small domestic concerns around which the most of our life and interest center. This is the difficulty we would overcome if we could get back our older and plainer word, "gardening." But landscape gardening does, nevertheless, bring itself to the consideration of these lowlier problems; and it is for the sake of such smaller cares that we need most to study its principles. All persons ought to endeavor to understand the methods and aims of landscape art, as they endeavor to master the alphabet of literature. Good taste in gardening will yield its possessor as much pleasure as good taste in architecture, poetry or music. And just as one may cultivate good taste in literature without designing to become a professional writer, so one may properly educate his taste for landscape gardening with no expectation of becoming a landscape gardener.

Gardening art offers this advantage to its lovers: that they can everywhere enjoy it, and that with comparatively small expense they can patronize it on their own account. The poor washerwoman who has hardly time to look at the statue of George Washington in the city park, and scarce money enough to buy a chromo, is quite able to grow geraniums in her windows and to have a pretty bed of marigolds and phloxes in the yard. The opportunities to cultivate a taste for thissort of landscape art lie all about us, while to only a few comes the freedom of art galleries and exhibitions.

"Landscape gardener," "landscape architect," "landscape artist," "gardener," have their obvious relation to the terms already considered. Whatever he may be called, the practitioner of the art is an artist. He may be a good artist, or a poor one. He would face the same possibility if he were a painter.