PLANTING DESIGN i8£ 



The formal design of the carpet bedding must be inclosed and en- 

 framed by a sufficiently powerful formal boundary, and there must be 

 some size, scale, and character relation of the whole bedding design to 

 its inclosure. The neglect of this consideration has produced many 

 formal carpet bedding designs informally inclosed or uninclosed, and 

 very many small formal flower beds floating unrelated and unsupported 

 in a composition otherwise entirely informal or naturalistic. In car- 

 pet beds it must particularly be remembered that in marking out one 

 group of shapes upon the ground, the intervening areas are also inevitably 

 given shapes, and either these secondary shapes must also be beautiful, 

 or the primary shapes must attract attention so strongly that the others 

 remain unnoticed to practically all observers. Much of the ugliness of 

 shape of the carpet bedding which we see is due to the inherent ugH- 

 ness of the designed shapes, but part of it is due also to the fact that the 

 shapes which strike the eye of the observer are not those which were 

 primarily in the mind of the man who laid out the bed. 



There must be a scale relation between the size and spacing of the 

 individual plants which fill a given area of carpet bedding and the size 

 of the area itself. A satisfactory effect may be produced by decorating a 

 certain area with obviously separated dots, and an effective contrast is 

 possible between such an area and one so thickly planted as to tell as a 

 uniform wash of color, but there ought to be no doubt in the mind of the 

 observer as to which of these effects the designer intended. There 

 should, too, be no doubt as to whether the design is the decoration of 

 a flat surface or a grouping of individual objects. A carpet bedding 

 design may be accented by certain vases or clipped trees or flower beds 

 of a considerable vertical dimension, as we have said, so long as these 

 are in scale with the whole design, but if too many such objects are 

 introduced, the whole composition becomes ambiguous and confused. 



It is not easy to use too bright color in carpet bedding designs. They 

 lie commonly in the full light of the sun and are thereby to some extent 

 harmonized ; they are usually the decoration of large open spaces which 

 are in public ownership or at any rate enjoyed by large numbers of 

 people, most of whom have no very refined sense of color. A definite 

 and powerful color scheme, then, is usually desirable. Pure colors, 

 primary colors, are likely to be better than delicate combinations of 



