30 The Landscape Gardening Book 



though possibly the least important; the life of the people — 

 their occupations, temperament, tastes and amusements — is 

 another; their economic condition is the third. 



Of these three the first is predetermined beyond man's inter- 

 ference; the second is variable; the third is practically fixed, 

 as far as a home site is concerned. If an owner's position changes 

 economically he moves into the place which that change fits 

 him for, whether it is up or down in the scale; and the new 

 tenant of the house he has left acquires it because his position, 

 economically, approximates the original position of its former 

 owner. 



In other words, a place worth $10,000, costing $500 a year to 

 maintain, will always be in the hands of owners of the same 

 average income, though it may change hands frequently. There- 

 fore we may say that its economic position is practically a fixed 

 one. 



Plainly then, whatever the amount to be invested in a garden 

 may be, it is a matter for consideration most carefully under the 

 second factor. This is the factor which stands for the changing, 

 shifting, human equation; herein the degree of cultivation, the 

 temperament and the taste of the builder will reveal themselves, 

 in the production, through living mediums, of something that 

 is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, truly artistic or falsely artificial. 



The two great schools of landscape architecture are familiar 

 enough; we have all shared, to a greater or less degree, in the 

 bitter warfare that has raged between them since the long-ago 

 days of Queen Anne — for it was in her reign that the reaction 

 against "formalism," which grew into an hysterical obsession, 

 first set in. It is doubtful if more belligerent partisans have 

 ever represented opposing factions than those who have ranged 

 themselves respectively on the side of "formal" and " informal" 



