LANDSCAPE PARKS 317 



grove or similar area ; but usually a seat in a park is better made incon- 

 spicuous. With lights and signs, however, this is not so much the case, 

 since, in a way, their use is to be conspicuous. Lights are not efficient 

 if they are much concealed among foliage. Sometimes the lights may 

 be attached by brackets to trees, or the light-standards may be rough 

 natural posts, but more commonly the light-standards must frankly 

 serve their own purposes. Under these circumstances the best arrange- 

 ment is to have the light supported by a well-designed simple staff of 

 iron or wood, placed where it illuminates the greatest area, and perhaps 

 marks the turn of a path or the edge of a road. It should still be possible, 

 however, to arrange these light-standards so that by day they are not 

 unpleasantly silhouetted against the skyline in an otherwise natu- 

 ralistic landscape, nor obtrusive in any important views. The signs 

 pointing out the way and perhaps calling attention to special features 

 of interest must be legible if they are to be useful. Moreover they 

 occur in connection with roads and paths and not elsewhere in the park, 

 so it is the more reasonable to make them frankly man-made objects. 

 It is sometimes possible to have a sign cut upon a bowlder or painted 

 on a rough board hung from a tree, and where everything else is in 

 scale with it, this amount of respect for the landscape character may be 

 desirable. Irregular boards with rustic lettering are seldom effective, 

 however, and it is usually best to have a simple straight standard bearing 

 a simply lettered sign, the whole painted inconspicuously green or brown 

 and the lettering white rather than black, for legibility. It might be 

 remarked that where the distances are at all considerable it is a great 

 comfort to the visiting sight-seer to be told not only the way to his 

 objective, but how far he must go. 



Sculpture in a landscape park, purely for its decorative effect, may 

 find a place in the formal arrangements of the promenade near the en- 

 trance, but it may also be used successfully in the landscape park itself, 

 especially where this is considerably humanized and makes no great 

 attempt actually to imitate wild nature. Again, the test of excellence 

 of the introduced object is its congruity with the general character of 

 the park. Its appearance and, in this case, its significance and 

 suggestion must be studied with this in mind.* 



*Cf. Chapter X, p. 211. 



