NOTES ON LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



NOTES ON LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



BY THOS. MEEHAN, PHILADELPHIA. 



Dear Sir — Landscape gardening is a source of the highest pleasure to those who pa- 

 tronise it. Those who hold pleasure to be the result of mere accident, do landscape gar- 

 dening a great injustice. Pleasure is the result of laws as fixed as those which produce 

 heat and light, rest or motion. So, the more clearly the true principles of landscape gar- 

 dening are understood, the more perfectly are we enabled to know how they can be appli- 

 ed to the production of the highest degree of pleasure the art can afford. 



Extensive gardens are being formed everywhere. The fund of pleasure their origina- 

 tors are laying up for themselves, M^ill be great. That fund would be infinitesimaly 

 greater, if more definite ideas of the sources of pleasure in gardening existed. 



It has become very general for those who originate new gardens, to be their own land- 

 scape gardeners. Were every one born an artist, any one might justly deem himself capa- 

 ble of laying out his own place in a manner capable of aflbrding ultimately the highest 

 pleasure; but it is not so. There are innumerable instances of gardens among the newer 

 places, which afford no pleasure to any one, and which the proprietors themselves, feel to 

 be a dead weight upon their enjoyments, and their purses, from no other cause than ig- 

 norance of the vcrj- alphabet of landscape gardening, in those who originally projected 

 them. For a time the}^ were interesting from their novelty, till, like the novelty of child- 

 ren's toys, they no longer pleased, and were eventually cast aside for other novelties, and 

 became an incumbrance. In excuse or toleration of such misfortunes, it is often said that 

 every man derives most pleasure from " doing what he likes with his own." Any man 

 might feel some pleasure in deciding to cut with his own hand, a " Greek Slave" in ablock 

 of marble, — but I guess that a more real, a more lasting, and more substantial pleasure, 

 ■would ensue from the employment of the life-giving chisel of a high artist like Hiram 

 Powers, on the senseless block. 



I am ashamed to make the comparison. It is ridiculous. Applied to landscape garden- 

 ing it is more so. It is the work of a higher order of genius, to create a pleasing landscape 

 in its generalities, and in its details, than to form a piece of sculpture of ordinary merit. 

 Genius does not rule so proudly in poetry or music, drawing or painting, as she does in 

 the art of landscape gardening. All other arts are content to imitate or represent nature 

 — but landscape gardening has often to employ in her efforts, the aid of all other arts, and 

 often to create even the very materials out of which she produces her happiest results. 

 Could any produce an equal to the beautiful landscape paintings of Claude Lorraine.'' 

 If this be difficult, how much more difficult the aim of the landscape gardener, who has 

 to produce in nature the superiors of the picture? It is difficult to arrange the scenes in 

 a landscape painting, so as to give expression, character, and harmony, to each with the 

 other, — but it is more difficult to arrange these in nature. In a picture, scenes, rarely cor- 

 responding — yet beautiful in their corrsepondence, can be brought and conjoined together 

 with a fascinating effect. The imagination often, indeed, supplies the place of realities. 

 The landscape gardener has a more difficult task. He, too, must bring together, harmoni- 

 ously and expressively, scenes too beautiful to be often seen in one whole, naturally. His 

 imagination, too, must play, but far more cautiously, than that of the painter — because he 

 has a higher and sterner tribunal to decide the value of his work, than the painter has 

 Nature deputizes to man her right to sit in judgment on the result of the painter's gen 

 on that of the landscape gardener she sits herself. ^Mankind have sympathies, give 



