142 LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



The fact that every stream is constantly changing in volume and 

 in position as it carves its banks, so that it exerts different forces at 

 different times, makes it extremely hard, with a natural brook, to say 

 just what forces produced the arrangement of materials which we find 

 in a given place ; and therefore about the only safe guide in imitating 

 such arrangements of material is, as in all interpretations of nature, a 

 close familiarity with actual examples, which will give a man an al- 

 most instinctive feeling for reasonable arrangements, though he may 

 not be able to say according to just what assumption as to interaction 

 of natural forces he is proceeding. 

 Waterfalls Where a stream comes down a sharp decline or vertical drop in its 



bed in the form of a cascade or waterfall, it becomes at once an im- 

 portant object in the landscape. The vertical display of the sheet of 

 water makes it very conspicuous. The obvious manifestation of 

 force and the noise and sparkle of the water make great appeal to the 

 attention, and the natural enframement of the fall due to its own cut- 

 ting back into its bed makes it almost certainly the center of the com- 

 position in which it is found. (See in order Plates 14, 13, 12, and 27.) 

 It is surprising how small a stream of water will make an effective fall. 

 Some of the well-known and really striking cascades of the Alps and of 

 the White Mountains are formed during most of the year from a stream 

 of water of less than a square foot in cross-section, and a considerable 

 artificial cascade in a small-scale rock garden may be made from the 

 flow from a one-inch pipe. If the volume of water is at all large, it 

 will have a singular effect of unity and completeness if the fall be a 

 single clean leap of the whole body of the stream from the upper ledge 

 to the pool at its foot ; but a small stream may often make a more ef- 

 fective fall if it descends in a thin sheet from rock to rock with a great 

 splashing and glistening of foam and spray. Where the supply of water 

 is very small, the effect of the fall will depend very much on the shape 

 of the rocks or ledges over which the water flows. If these are rounded 

 so that the water clings to them, the fall will be not at all conspicuous ; 

 if, however, they form a series of overhanging lips so that the water falls 

 free in each case, the cascade will be apparently of much greater mag- 

 nitude. 



Just as you can, elsewhere along a stream, add to its apparent im- 



