LANDSCAPE PARKS 319 



from gardens to suburbs. Such landscape beauty as remains will be in 

 private hands, almost necessarily closed to public use ; and the more nat- 

 ural beauty of the far outlying country can be enjoyed by only the few 

 who can afford to travel long distances to reach it by train or automobile. 



Reservation of outlying land for public use, then, serves these 

 important purposes among others : it keeps open a freer and less 

 humanized kind of landscape beauty for those who need it and who are 

 willing to go farther out than the landscape park to find it, a kind of 

 beauty which otherwise, if it were preserved at all, would be in private 

 hands and closed to the public ; and it assures the preservation of such 

 beauty, which would be almost necessarily diminished, altered, or 

 utterly destroyed under the pressure of growing intensity of use and 

 rising land values. When properly done with due regard to main 

 lines of traffic and the adaptability of different areas to different 

 economic purposes, it helps to stabilize land values, to fix the character 

 of neighborhoods, and generally to direct the future growth of the 

 community in the way that it should go. 



It is possible, and it should be considered with every city, that the 

 present reservation may at some future time be the city-surrounded 

 landscape park, and that another reservation may be needed still 

 farther afield ; but since each concentric ring of growth of a city means 

 a greater and greater added area proportionally to the added radius, 

 such a change in reservations lying some miles beyond the present out- 

 skirts of the town is probably very far in the future. It is fortunate 

 that the very characters of landscape which render it best suited for 

 use as landscape reservation, and perhaps subsequently as a landscape 

 park, are likely to be those which render it least suited for the ordinary 

 economic development. Uneven, rocky, and broken ground, ground 

 heavily wooded, country with many streams and ponds, may count 

 all these as assets if it is to be used for recreation, but they are all causes 

 of expense if the land is to be intensively developed for residential, 

 commercial, or industrial purposes. It is therefore usually possible 

 in a broad way to determine where the main lines of traffic shall lie 

 and what the uses of the different regions shall be * and to set aside the 

 recreation areas in accordance with such a general scheme with con- 



* Regional planning and zoning. 



