236 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



Unity of Effect 

 of Whole 

 Garden 



A Garden 

 Recognizably 

 a Work of 

 Design 



signify merely a unit of landscape design. To most people the greatest 

 beauty of plants is their flowers. And it is natural that most of the 

 gardens in the world which are intended to be beautiful should be 

 wholly, or partly, flower gardens. But plants have other beauties, 

 and a garden is really none the less a garden for depending primarily 

 for its attraction on the color of leaves or of brilliant fruit, on the con- 

 trast of evergreen and deciduous foliage, on tree form, or on the beauty 

 of evergreens, turf, walks and walls, and water, and the beauty of their 

 arrangement. 



A garden, as we have said, should impress the beholder as one unit ; 

 if such a landscape design consists of several different segregated areas, 

 it is better to call it a series of gardens than to call it a garden. Of 

 course, a garden, or any other landscape unit, for that matter, can sel- 

 dom be seen all at once. The observer is normally inside of a garden, 

 and part of the garden is likely to be hidden, or at least out of the 

 observer's angle of vision. The test of the unity of the garden, there- 

 fore, will be not entirely the perfection of any one view, but the effect 

 on the observer of what he sees from several viewpoints, the final con- 

 ception which he takes away with him of the garden as one thing, 

 physically and esthetically. 



A garden should be, and should appear to be, the work of man. A 

 naturalistic area which looks as though it had come about purely by 

 the operations of nature, or an area which has really so come about, 

 would be called a garden only by a simile. Man's will may appear in 

 the design of the garden, however, in two quite different modes of 

 organization.* The garden may be, in the common and loose term, 

 formal ; that is, it may depend for its organization and its consequent 

 beauty on recognizable forms, in repetition, sequence, and balance, 

 in the simpler and more mathematical ways, particularly in symmetry. 

 (See Drawing III, opp. p. 36.) Or, on the other hand, without at all 

 attempting to make the garden look as though it were a work of nature 

 alone, man may strive to get beauty in repetition and sequence and bal- 

 ance without dealing in definite and geometrical forms. (See Plate 4-)f 



* Cf. Chapter IV, p. 34. 



f Compare the formal and informal gardens, given in Drawing XXX, opp. p. 260, 

 and Drawing XXXII, opp. p. 274, and also the main lawn in Drawing XXXI, opp. 



