The Planting of Shrubbery. 



509 



This leads lue to say that if a landscape is a picture, it must 

 have a canvas. This canvas is the greensward. Upon this, the 

 artist paints with tree and bush and flower the same as the 

 painter does upon his canvas with brush and pigments. The 

 opportunity for artistic composition and structure is nowhere so 

 great as in the landscape garden, because no other art has such a 

 limitless field for the expression of its emotions. It is not 

 strange, if this be true, that there have been few great landscape 

 gardeners, and that, falling short of art, the landscape gardener 

 too often works in the sphei-e of the artisan. There can be no 



155.— The three guardsmen. 



rules for landscape gardening, any more than there can be for 

 painting or sculpture. The operator may be taught how to hold 

 the brush or strike the chisel or plant the tree, but he remains 

 an operator; the art is intellectual and emotional and will not 

 confine itself in precepts. 



The making of a good and spacious lawn, then, is the very first 

 practical consideration in a landscape garden. This provided, 

 the gardener conceives what is the dominant and central feature 

 in the place, and then throws the entire premises into subordi- 

 nation with this feature. In home grounds this central feature 



