S rrLES OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN ^ 



designate a style accurately, we must name also its period and perhaps 

 its definite location : we must say, for instance, the style of the Floren- 

 tine Renaissance gardens. Equally definite with the name of the period 

 and country — seventeenth century French style, for instance — is the 

 name of the designer or his client, as Le Notre or Louis XIV. The style 

 of Le Notre was also called the Grand style, that is, it was designated 

 by its esthetic effect upon the beholder. Another style, esthetically 

 almost its antithesis, also bears the name of an esthetic effect, the 

 Romantic landscape style. As is natural, since the esthetic effect 

 varies with the beholder, these names are of themselves less exact, and 

 they come to have a definite signification only as custom sanctions their 

 use in relation to certain recognizably characterized groups of designs. 



Several styles of landscape design diflFerent enough to bear different Categories 

 specific names may yet be similar enough in some respects to be put in °J ^^y " 

 the same category in discussion. From the point of view of esthetic 

 effect upon the observer, styles have been grouped into the two divergent 

 categories, Classic and Romantic. Any style might be considered as 

 Classic which was characterized fundamentally by repose, restraint, 

 refinement, formality, although the name is more specifically applied, 

 as it is in architecture, to the work of ancient Greece and Rome, which 

 was marked by these characteristics. The word often connotes also an 

 accepted standard, since the styles of Greece and Rome were so long 

 thus regarded, but this is plainly not an essential meaning of the word. 

 In contradistinction to Classic is the word Romantic,* as applied to 

 those styles which excite the sentiments and fancy by variety and con- 

 trast and make a direct and studied appeal to the emotions, through 

 the human associations aroused. 



From the point of view of the form and space relation of the objects 

 in the design, styles have been divided into the two categories which 

 have been the innocent cause of so much discussion and misapprehen- 

 sion : formal and informal. The reason that these terms have occupied 

 so important a place in the discussion of styles in landscape design is 

 that they are the names of modes of organization so general that almost 

 all other styles may be included under the one or the other. We hear 

 so much about them, not because they are such valuable categories, but 

 * Cf. the two kinds of effects, discussed in Chapter VI, p. 77. 



