204 LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



tion with their surroundings. Whether the flight of steps shall appear 

 as an architectural object, dominant in its own small composition, or 

 whether the steps shall be as little obviously man-made as possible 

 consistently with their use as steps, will be a question decided by the 

 degree of approximation to natural effect which the designer considers 

 to be necessary in a particular case. 



Where the steps must be, for their proper use, obviously man-made 

 masonry, they would best be good masonry. It is a mistake, in a 

 structure which is plainly a flight of steps, for the sake of an unat- 

 tainable "naturalness" to make the risers and treads of different sizes 

 on different steps and to make the surface of the steps dangerously 

 rough. Good, practical steps may still be well related to a natural 

 landscape by their color, by their texture, by pleasant harmony of 

 form, and by being enframed and decorated by foliage. (See Plate 34.) 

 Walls and Besides their obvious economic uses, walls and fences are in a sense 



Fences one indispensable esthetic element in formal landscape design, as 



boundary plantations are in informal and naturalistic landscape.* 

 They segregate unit from unit ; they mark the articulation of the scheme 

 into separate functional areas, without which there can be no efi"ective 

 design. 



The height of a free-standing wall or a fence will be determined 

 first by the amount of interruption to the view which it is designed 

 to create. If it is desired that the view shall be in effect confined to 

 the area inclosed, then the wall or fence should be somewhat higher 

 than the eye.f It is worth noting that a formal screen only just as 

 high as the eye is likely to be an annoyance, since it neither conceals 

 nor reveals what is behind it. If the intention is to define an area, 

 but to allow the view to pass over outside areas as well, then a wall or 

 fence considerably lower than the eye may be the most desirable struc- 

 ture to use. Another esthetic consideration tending to determine the 

 height of a wall or fence is its proportion as an object in composition. 

 A very low wall is likely to look better than a very low fence, since the 

 thickness of the wall still gives it sufficient mass, whereas the low fence 

 is apt to look dwarfed and out of scale with the rest of the design. 

 A wall surrounding a very large area often must be tall merely as a 

 * Cf. Chapter IX, p. 167. t Ci. Chapter VII, p. 128. 



