66 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



Sand Dunes 



The Sequoia 

 Grove 



Still and silent in intense cold, offering to man so little that he can 

 either use or destroy that it will probably retain its present character 

 for many centuries to come. 



Sand dunes are much the same the world over, for the natural 

 conditions which bring them about are simple, and often repeated. 

 On the Atlantic coast of the United States there are many places 

 where the following conditions may be found. There may be an 

 outer steep beach, exposed to the full force of the east wind and the 

 Atlantic surf, and inland a stretch of pine barrens, or perhaps a sand 

 flat running off into the shoal water of a bay behind the barrier 

 sand-spit, where the shore-birds come in, in the fall. Behind the outer 

 beach, beyond the reach of the tide, is a country of toppling sand-hills, 

 gently sloping on the side facing the east wind, sharply scarped to the 

 west, perhaps tufted with beach grass but often quite bare, and for- 

 ever shifting, creeping as the dry sand drifts before the on-shore wind. 

 The long roots of the beach grass, almost the only vegetation, will 

 hold a sand-hillock for years, but if once the grass is dislodged and the 

 sand is exposed to the full sweep of the wind, a hillock may disappear 

 in a night and leave a hollow where it has been. In such a hollow 

 among the dunes, strewn with wisps of dry seaweed, perhaps with the 

 ribs of some long-buried wreck protruding from the sand, you may be 

 glad to take shelter even on a summer day. But even then you hear 

 the constant hiss of the wind through the beach grass, the whisper of 

 the sand pouring over the leeward face of the nearby dune, the un- 

 escapable undertone of the surf. And every form which the incon- 

 stant sand assumes is the evident expression of the wind that made it. 



Many a landscape, not strongly characterized by any form of the 

 ground, takes a notable character from the vegetation which grows 

 upon it. Such a character will of course be found repeated, if at all, 

 where similar soil and climate conditions make similar vegetation 

 possible. 



When your pack-train first comes out of the manzanita and deer- 

 brush as you enter a Sequoia grove in the California Sierras, and you 

 see close at hand the trunks of the "Big Trees" (see Plate 7), you 

 are not so much overpowered by their size as perhaps you had expected 

 to be. It is only when you see a man on horseback beside them, or 



