Parterres 



i8o LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



may simply give to the ground surface a pleasing texture and a sufficient 

 cover like that of a lawn or a hayfield, or this texture of low-growing 

 plants maj^ call attention to itself by presenting a pattern in the design. 

 This pattern may be on the one hand perhaps like the irregular flecking 

 and mottling of the surface of an Alpine meadow by the groups of 

 different plants which grow there, each in the situation where the dis- 

 tribution of its seed or its necessities of soil, sun, and water have placed 

 it, or on the other hand the pattern may be such as a designer produces 

 on the flat surface of a formal parterre, a formally-composed arrange- 

 ment of areas and lines, related in all its characteristics to the rest of 

 a formal scheme, and serving much the same esthetic purpose as does 

 the pattern of a Persian rug in the total composition of a room. 

 Carpet Bed- Plainly it is purely a question of scale whether dispositions of 



pIwJ!!!!! foliage of this kind shall appear to be a texture, or a pattern on the 



surface of the ground, or an arrangement of individual objects resting 

 on the ground. (Compare Plate 29 with Tailpiece on p. 23.) A 

 parterre covered with carpet bedding will tell merely as a decorated 

 surface so long as the projection of the decorating plants above that 

 surface is not noticeable in comparison to its whole extent ; and certain 

 points in the design may be accented by objects of a greater vertical 

 dimension without necessarily destroying the essential flatness of the 

 whole area. The fact that the decorative areas in carpet bedding can 

 all be seen at once, and are not, as is often the case with the decorative 

 beds in a flower garden, partially concealed one behind another from 

 many points of view, puts a special emphasis on shape relation in plan 

 in designs of this kind. Given a reasonably flat piece of ground, a 

 large area can be treated in this way without any other features than 

 the beds, and a very striking result can be produced. This kind of work, 

 being a thing which is renewed and often changed from year to year, has 

 fallen particularly into the province of the gardener rather than into that 

 of the professional designer. These causes among others have combined 

 to produce in Europe and in this country a great deal of strikingly bad 

 design of this sort. There is nothing esthetically impossible about the 

 method itself, and the ugliness of the many examples with which we are 

 familiar can almost always be directly traced to the violation of some of 

 the simple principles of composition which we have already discussed. 



