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

Landscape Gardening

These things belong in the horticultural museum, along with other oddities and monstrosities. It is not possible to speak of gardening as a fine art until these things are thoroughly forsaken and forgotten.

The Pitoresque Style

But regularity can never attain to a great share of beauty and to none of the species called picturesque; a denomination in general expressive of excellence, but which, by being too indiscriminately applied, may be sometimes productive of errors.
Thomas Wheatley.

Nay, farther, we do not scruple to assert that roughness forms the most essential point of difference between the beautiful and the picturesque.
William Gilfin.

L'irregularite est 1' essence du pittoresque.
Edouard Andre.

This chapter is introduced for two purposes: First to treat of a quality in landscape composition which, if carried out to a considerable extent, produces a style really different from either of those already treated; and, second, to represent any number of additional styles of landscape gardening beyond the two g'enerally recognized. There arc no common, well defined and well known styles except the natural and the architectural; but there is no essential reason why there should not be. It may even be regarded as desirable that other styles should be introduced and practiced. At present it comes best within the range of our study to call attention to the peculiar quality of picturesque-ness ; and to suggest that it may, in some situations, be emphasized over a considerable space. In such a case the picturesque is essentially a distinct style. In point of fact it is not very different in general effect from the Japanese style of landscape gardening. But as the true Japanese style is too recondite for our western understanding it will be better for us here to speak merely of the picturesque, a term formerly more common in English garden art than at present.

There are many plant forms which are picturesque in themselves, and which may best illustrate the nature of this quality to anyone not clearly understanding what it is. Such forms are those of the gingko tree, Table Mountain pine, Weeping Norway spruce, Weeping larch, Wier's Cut Leaved maple, the leafless Kentucky coffee tree, and many others. A distinction of a sort used to be made by Andrew Jackson Downing and his comrades by saying that a tree which developed luxuriously and normally was beautiful, while a tree suffering from age and adversity, lightning-struck and wind-blown, was picturesque.