The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Landscape Gardening
Bad fences are worthy of separate mention. And the first thing to be said is that practically all fences are bad, considered merely as items in a garden composition in the natural style. Yet there are wonderful degrees of badness among fences. Good, well kept horticultural hedges of privets, roses, spiraeas, dier-villas, arbor vitses, and other plants suitable for the special purposes in view, are at least bearable, and arc sometimes distinctly satisfactory. A hedge may be continuous and yet irregular, broadening in one place, bending in another, and further along merging into a larger group of trees and shrubs.
In this way it may serve the purposes of a fence without marring the naturalness sought. But what shall we say of the picket and great board fences which once embraced so many otherwise decent private and public plots ? What shall we say to this frenzy of iron work which stands between us and the grounds we would so gladly admire? Plainly naturalness is lost,—utterly and irrecoverably lost. These fences serve a purpose. They answer to a want keen and urgent in the ordinary home-owner's heart; that is, to the desire for seclusion and privacy and the unmolested and unobserved enjoyment of the owner's home surroundings. This seclusion is worth striving for in the garden plan; but if naturalness is desired, some other expedient ought to be worked out compatible alike with naturalness and seclusion. It has sometimes been thought worth while to sink the fences in deep ditches, the banks of which were given special treatment to conceal the whole; but this means will not commend itself to many operators; neither is it adapted to many cases.
Pure while is not a color common in nature, and the dazzling reflection from extended white surfaces reveals an artificiality which is glaring in a double sense. Thus while white paint and whitewash have many practical uses, and in appropriate surroundings please the eye, they should be shunned where a strict adherence to the natural style is desired.
There are many unnatural methods of plant training in vogue; and it goes without saying that they are inconsistent with the natural style. Yet we constantly find them intermingled with purely natural objects, to the obvious detriment of both. The junipers, boxes, arbor vitaes and similar plants trimmed into smooth cones, vases, globes and more complex combinations, illustrate this method. Weeping tops grafted on straight, upright trunks belong to the same class. Others might be mentioned, some good and some bad in themselves, but all agreeing in the certainty with which they spoil the unity of any place in which informal treatment is essayed.
