54 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



and because the national habit of sitting outdoors and eating and 

 drinking in a leisurely way makes of the grounds about a house a number 

 of outdoor rooms actually much used, for which use the rectangular 

 forms are the more convenient. And there is a very just feeling among 

 German designers, helped doubtless by this use of the grounds, that the 

 house and its surroundings are all part of one architectural scheme and 

 should be so treated for esthetic as well as economic reasons. (See 

 Drawing VIII, opposite.) The considerable amount of garden archi- 

 tecture and garden furniture required — shelters and arbors, seats 

 and tables — makes more necessary and more easy the architectural 

 treatment of the ground. The national habit of congregating of an 

 evening in some quiet and orderly concert-garden or beer-garden has 

 produced a multitude of these places, the design of which, for practical 

 reasons, is almost invariably formal. All these considerations have 

 probably had their effect on the design of the German park. Those 

 parks which serve the purpose of playgrounds are, in fitness to their use, 

 formal ; but some of the much larger parks, which in this country would 

 be treated naturalistically, still are affairs of open level turf or gravel 

 and straight lines of equi-spaced trees, usually without any attempt to 

 make this formality tell for grandeur as in the French formal style, but 

 being rather an economic fitting of each area to its use and up-keep, 

 and an arrangement of all the available area of ground so that nothing 

 may be wasted. The fact that the topography of these formal parks is 

 often flat has evidently also been a contributing cause to this formality. 

 As in the case of another self-conscious expression, the Romantic 

 landscape style, this German formalism has been accompanied by prop- 

 agandist literature, of which Leberecht Migge in his recent book 

 Gartenkultur des XX. Jahrhunderts (1913),* is an advanced exemplar. 

 What is to be the future of the Gartenkultur and Gartefitypen which he 

 so earnestly recommends for Germany, and apparently also for the 

 rest of the world, will depend, however, on their fitness in use, on their 

 adaptability to the actual needs of men. 

 The Japanese Arising many centuries earlier than the landscape school of Western 



Styles Europe and under a quite different civilization, the styles of Japanese 



landscape design nevertheless have something in common with the 



* See References. 



