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

Landscape Gardening

quietness and peacefulness of such a picture which attract us, and we are very sensitive of even the slightest interference. And yet some of the statelier willows, especially the heavier weeping willows, make excellent pond borders. Ash trees and sycamores, with thorns, and viburnums, and many more such things, enter helpfully into such effects.

The small rivulet does not seem to enjoy the favor which its merits would justify. It cannot become a part of the same sedate and serious pictures which depend so much on large sheets of water; but it has an equal degree of efficiency in its own way. When the landscape approaches that character which Andre calls "gay," nothing can be more appropriate than the glancing, glimmering", vanishing, changing glimpses of running water in a small brook. Such a brook should be wooded, and among the trees should be loose tangles of vines, shrubbery, brambles and brakes. Rocky impediments in the bed of the brook, if the character of the ground will justify them, give little, tinkling" cascades where the sunlight flashes. Here and there a calmer pool may grow some rushes or lily pads. And every turn gives a change of view, and every change of view a new delight.

A good brook offers, indeed, a multitude of opportunities for delightful landscape gardening. It is unfortunate that such opportunities are sometimes wholly neglected.

The City Or Suburban Lot

Baldness and nakedness round the house is part of a mistaken system. A palace, or even an elegant villa, in a grass field, appears to me incongruous; yet I have seldom had sufficient influence to correct this common error.
Humphrey Repton.
The fact is, the easiest way to spoil a good lawn is to put a flower bed on it; and the most effective way to, show off flowers to least advantage is to plant them in a bed in the greensward. L. H. Bailey.
In the planting of city and suburban residence grounds there seems to be the largest field for improvement in this country. One sees in such places more exhibitions of bad taste than anywhere else, to be sure; but such things indicate the willingness and the energy to do something, and taste often improves as work goes on. Those people who own their grounds in the towns and suburban districts are the truest home lovers in the nation; and as a class they have the means, the desire and the taste,—often uneducated in this particular line,—for home improvement. Still there is quite too little done in the way of gardening or of any tasteful amelioration of the grounds.