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

Landscape Gardening

The necessity for insisting upon this point is greater because the obsession of our age is science—some thing quite different from art. Thousands of good and urgent men have been sleeplessly trying to reduce every human activity and emotion to science. Not a few have striven to place gardening upon a scientific basis. Now this may do very well for the commercial production of onions, or even of hothouse roses; but the making of beautiful landscapes is not science, but art, and if we are to understand it at all we must keep these too ideas separate.

We have already tried to distinguish between the landscape artist and the layman who has a trained and sympathetic understanding of the artist's work. The layman possessed of good artistic taste and a proper horticultural knowledge can doubtless produce many beautiful and satisfactory things in his own yard; and such lay artists are sorely needed. But for real creative work of any magnitude the born and trained artist is required. Genius like that of Raphael, or Turner, is more a matter of natural endowment than of education. Genius like that of Frederick Law Olmsted is of the same order. In the following" pages the prime attempt is for the cultivation of the taste of the layman. There are many things which he ought to understand, and to that end a systematic classification of principles and a somewhat didactic treatment of details may be excused.

The order and relative importance of the several principles may be understood most easily by a study of the accompanying analytical outline. It is conceived that unity, variety, motive, character, propriety and finish are the fundamental characteristics of any landscape,—that these qualities are ultimate and coordinate, though by no means equally important. Each work of landscape art is to be tested separately for each of these qualities. The following pages explain in order how these tests are to be variously satisfied.