THE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK 



he makes his appeal to the senses and presents a completed work 

 which reveals its unity, its balance, its fitness and a restrained 

 sense of intricacy under varying conditions of distance, of light 

 and atmosphere. 



Are there more diverse, more subtle, and more worth while ma- 

 terials at the disposal of any other artist? Where is greater 

 opportunity for self-expression and for service? The finer in- 

 stincts of man can only be developed and utilized in a physical 

 environment which acts and reacts upon our senses in a way to 

 compel us to socially harmonious actions. The landscape archi- 

 tect, in collaboration with his brother artists, the painter, the 

 sculptor, the architect, has the power to make such an environment, 

 and we must labor industriously and incessantly so that he may be 

 equipped to the utmost to utilize that power for the greatest good 

 of the country. The call, therefore, is not for the engineer or 

 the horticulturist only, but primarily for the artist with sufficient 

 knowledge of engineering and horticulture to be able efficiently to 

 execute his compositions. 



What then is composition ? It is the arrangement of the ele- 

 ments of design into an ordered whole. Our elements of design, 

 as we have already seen, are the modeling of ground surfaces, the 

 planting materials, architectural ornaments and sculpture, the sky- 

 line and the atmosphere. 



The pleasure in the composition of a landscape depends on our 

 appreciation of the ordered relations which exist among its parts. 

 And this order consists of some similarity of physical characteris- 

 tics among the parts or some harmonious space relations among 

 them; that is, the separate objects in the composition must be 

 harmonious in color, shape and texture and related to one another 

 by repetition, sequence and balance. 



The first and most evident result of this order is unity of de- 

 sign. And strongly contributing to this sense of unity and indis- 

 pensable to human enjoyment is the segregation from its surround- 

 ings of the composition which one wishes to emphasize. The 

 attention of the observer must not be dispersed but concentrated 

 within the 20 degrees of vision given to our eye, so that in the same 

 way in which the painter segregates his picture by means of a 



