The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Landscape Gardening
To give the water best effect the space between it and the observer should be obstructed the least possible. Usually it will lie in grass. It will be only moderately undulating. A perfectly flat surface and broken ground are equally to be avoided.
The view should then be set off at the sides by large trees, if possible. Nothing else answers quite so well. If they can be arranged so as to be seen in a long and varied perspective, they will be the more satisfactory. It is impossible to give an exact prescription for the treatment of all such cases, for a good result depends on the tasteful management of delicate details; and yet, in the greater number of these very common water views, the landscape gardener has choice of only a limited number of devices, the principal considerations of which have here been pointed out.
The small pond, comprehended entirely within the grounds under treatment, offers quite another series of problems. If it is large enough to give some pictorial effect, there will naturally be arranged a series of glimpses and completer views from various advantageous points, mostly near its banks. These will, however, be chiefly glimpses, and are to be treated accordingly,—not with the same dignity and seriousness which are given to larger views of larger lakes, though in general the plan of treatment will be a sort of miniature of that already described.
Besides this, the small pond offers wonderful opportunities for planting. Sedges, cat-tails, lotuses, water lilies, alders and many other plants are especially suit able to the banks and shallow water of ponds. Very fine effects can be arranged with them. The outline of a pond may be tastefully broken, so that what would otherwise look like a mere cup in the ground becomes a necessary and integral part of the whole ccnnposition. The grass should come down to the water in places. In other parts a fringe of overhanging alders may form the outline. Still further along the sedges and cattails may jut far out into the still water. It is hard to spoil such a picture.
If some of the trees along the pond shore are situated so as to cast their reflections upon the water, their effect will be more than doubled. Everyone knows what a pleasing touch such reflections give to a picture.
But the trees must not be of the unquiet sort, like some of the willows, always shivering and shimmering in the breeze, for the pond must be still and the images on its surface must be still.
