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

Landscape Gardening

If, now, we inquire how the best artistic effect is to be realized in the development of municipal parks, we have opened a difficult and important question. Under the usual democratic method of management, an artistic success is in the highest degree improbable. We have already familiarized ourselves, in a previous chapter, with the primacy of the demand for unity in landscape composition. We have seen how necessary it is that one mind, free from all extraneous influences, shall create one coherent plan which shall ever after be strictly followed. And yet the ordinary way is to do these things by legislation! Even after a park is fully established in some fair degree of completeness it must still suffer alterations with each change in the board of aldermen.

All this is not meant as an argument against democratic city overnment, but to point out clearly the tremendous difficulty of securing good landscape gardening in public parks, and to show how imperative it is that every means be taken to secure continuity and stability of park anagement. There is, of course, no argument to be brought against the demands of "practical politics;" but in those cases, not unknown, where common sense still has a hearing, there is yet hope for an intelligent treatment of this important question. There are places in this country where park superintendents have a fairly satisfactory tenure of office, and where they are allowed to manage, more or less, the development of park plans. There is an increasing tendency to employ competent landscape gardeners in the formation of parks, and other cheering signs combine to color our hope for a steady improvement of park management along with the improvement of public taste.

When we consider the purposes of a public park as set forth above, we will see at once why the natural method of gardening best subserves them, and why they arc the better fulfilled the more natural and pronouncedly rural the treatment is.

Quietness, restfulness, simplicity, are the most desirable qualities. And this emphasizes the inappropriateness of pattern bedding, of loud color designs, and of all the tricks, intricacies, extravagancies and artificialities which eat up the gardener's time and the city's money, and which, by so much, render the park unfit for its best service. It is said, with considerable truth, by gardeners and others, that the public demand the bright colors and the artificial patterns.