STTLES OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



53 



style. The modern German formal landscape work seems to show, to 

 the non-German, the weakness as well as the strength of its conception 

 of design. In the smaller private places where the needs and the life 

 of the owner can be definitely known, the adaptation of the different 

 parts of the scheme each to its use, the arrangement of these parts for 

 economic efficiency, is usually excellent, and where the designer has 

 been blessed by nature with a sensitiveness to beauty of form, the 

 proportions and arrangements of these parts are often consistent and 

 beautiful. But especially in parks where the form of the design has 

 been made to depend on its obvious and economic functions, with no 

 consideration for the lightness of touch that comes from a certain way- 

 wardness, the result seems, esthetically, uninspired. 



In decoration, particularly in the choice of statuary and similar 

 features, indeed in all that part of landscape design where the choice of 

 form is a matter of esthetic sensitiveness rather than economic adapta- 

 tion, the modern German feeling that a German must be different from 

 other men in his nature and In his needs has found an Interesting 

 expression. In the landscape work of the past, the modern designer 

 has an infinity of examples of forms adapted by artists to the various 

 needs of man, esthetic and economic, the results of centuries of experi- 

 ment and refinement. When, as has been the case In some of the 

 modern German work, a designer attempts to meet these same needs — 

 for in effect they are the same throughout all time — by some conscious 

 Independent Invention of his own, his work is likely to seem, as much of 

 this German decorative work seems to most non-Germans — and to 

 some of the Germans themselves — grotesque or childish or at best 

 crude. 



In another respect the Prussian cast of mind has impressed Itself 

 recognizably upon this new design. In private estates, in parks large 

 and small, in other public designs, and recently in cemeteries, the Prus- 

 sian impatience of anything indefinite and not to be accurately codified 

 has produced a leaning to formality of design to the exclusion of other 

 possible solutions of some of the problems. This formality has been 

 the more insisted on In the smaller private places, because it lends Itself 

 to the typical German care and method of up-keep, and because, in the 

 usual rectangular lot, such an arrangement is the least wasteful of land, 



