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

Landscape Gardening

Color unity is much discussed in gardening circles. One lady wants a blue garden; another thinks pink would better match her new dress from Paris. The point is that color schemes and color harmonies all tend toward unity. It is better to have all blue flowers in a garden than to have a mess of everything; and it is much better to have soft yellow day-lilies harmonizing with pale blue larkspurs than to have pink roses making faces at the magenta blossoms of Anthony Waterer spirea.

Unity of form is quite as important in landscape-architecture as color unity—perhaps more so. Elm trees and spruce trees, for example, have nothing in common with respect to form, and they do not harmonize when planted together. These similarities and unlikenesses should be thoughtfully observed and care taken to secure unity of forms in planting.
In architectural forms unity is even more obviously necessary. A group of farm buildings may all look-alike and produce together a pleasing effect; or they may all be of different design, giving only a disheartening disharmony. On a college campus, for another example, it is plain that the effect is much better if all buildings have unity of form and architectural style. Twenty different buildings of twenty different kinds make an ugly campus, no matter if each particular building is a gem of its kind.

Finally it may be noted that the last term in unityis monotony. Yet whereas monotony usually has a bad reputation, in actual practice it is often salutary and pleasing. A small garden full of nothing but Festiva Maxina peony is a grand sight. And what can be more beautiful than a piece of woods of pure white pines? A hedge is a thousand times handsomer if made all of arbor vitae than though arbor vitae were mixed with privet, hemlock, buckthorn, spruce, caragana, acanthopanax and twenty other species, all of them good hedge plants when used alone.

So the landscape architect sometimes welcomes monotony. In certain situations it is a sure refuge— a very proper expedient. But whether motive unity, or style unity, or color harmony, or final and complete monotony, unity is our prime requirement. Without unity there can be no landscape gardening.