LANDSCAPE CHARACTERS Jl 



But the humbler and less striking characters will be those to which he 

 will usually go for models and for materials in his designs, since these 

 will be the forms most commonly h'ing near the homes of the city- 

 bred people for whom he works. His work will be on a small scale 

 relatively to the great free landscape ; the character which he will 

 endeavor to produce will be of a less striking sort, and it will there- 

 fore be doubly necessary for him to make the expression of this char- 

 acter as complete, as unified, and as distinct as possible. He must be 

 sensitive to feel what character is latent in the more or less inchoate 

 scene on which he is called to work ; he must know what of the ele- 

 ments now present are masking this character, and should be removed ; 

 he must know what can be added to perfect it without confusing it. 

 But his duty as an artist is not accomplished -even when he has achieved 

 this success : he is bound also by other laws. He must so arrange his 

 natural materials that, while they express the natural character of the 

 landscape, they also produce harmonies of form, of color, of texture, 

 harmonies of repetition and sequence and balance.* His designs 

 must be, as far as is humanly possible, both interpretations of natural 

 character and effective pictorial compositions. (See Plate 21.) 



Where the landscape architect is dealing with designs of any con- 

 siderable size, like parks, or large private estates, he cannot treat the 

 area as one visual unit. Within his total area he must seize upon 

 smaller unities ; and therefore he will endeavor to develop each impor- 

 tant view as a pictorial composition, and at the same time he will en- 

 hance and differentiate the individual landscape character of each 

 separate and subordinate unit of his whole design. He will make a 

 pine wood in one place, an oak wood in another; here he will steepen 

 his brook to make a cataract, there restrain it to make a pool. He 

 will cut out a group of trees in one place which interrupts the openness 

 of his valley floor, and he will plant trees in another place to segregate 

 a little woodland pool from the rest of the landscape. To increase the 

 apparent height of a rocky ledge, he will remove debris from its base, 

 and perhaps destroy some large and coarse-leaved plants and replace 

 them with small rock-loving ferns appropriate to the situation and 

 enhancing the naturalness, the scale, and the beauty of the ledge; 



* Cf. Chapter VII, p. 89. 



