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

Landscape Gardening

A broken and uneven surface is especially adapted to the production of picturesque effects. Indeed, it is not improper, though not strictly correct for all cases, to designate the peculiar beauties of mountain scenery as picturesqueness. Mountain scenery is not commonly architectural in style; neither does it have the smooth and flowing outlines of the English ideal garden. Should a landscape gardener some time find himself with a piece of mountain ground to work upon. he would hardly be excusable should he attempt any other treatment than the picturesque effects visually found in such places.
Even in smaller areas, for example on rocky sloping banks, gardening of the picturesque type may well be undertaken. Here is the true opportunity for the rockery. Here is where rock-loving plants may be grown in perfection—sometimes heat-loving species, in other places water-loving species;—but in any case the characteristic style of the gardening will be picturesque rather than "natural," and it certainly will not be architectural.
Dark color masses and monotones have often a weird and picturesque suggestion for the sympathetic mind. This is even the case when expressed in the formal outlines of the architectural style, but it is more strikingly true when the dark monotones appear in masses of black spruces, or similarly dark foliaged plants. The deep, dark shadows of mountain sides add noticeably to the effectiveness of the scene, and to the quality here considered.
A much broken sky line is not always desirable in other styles of gardening, particularly in the natural. It is, indeed, one of the first points of instruction usually given in attempts to teach the natural style, that the sky line should be broken; but this expedient for variety may well have its limits in most naturalistic compositions. In a development of the picturesque it has practically no limit, and the more the sky line may be serried and cut the more emphatic will be the resulting effect.

The scattering specimens of starved and deformed pines which one sees at some places on rugged hill or mountain sides have a charming picturesqueness in themselves which fits well into their surrroundings. Solid groups of symmetrically developed trees in such situations would be out of key with the general local effect. The scattering individuals have a great pictorial advantage, and such trees are best displayed in middle distances. A single tree is always a middle-ground subject. If it be too close to the observer its composite beauty is unseen; if it be too far, its individuality is blurred. All this is of especial weight in a specimen exhibited for its individual eccentricities. Tt has even been the practice in some instances to plant dead and blasted trees in pleasure grounds for the picturesqueness of their effect, but the good taste of such a step is very questionable.