1 86 LANDSCAPE-GARDENING 



people are going to live ? About their homes they 

 will have a little irrigated patch perhaps, but the 

 landscape must be a natural one in all the regions 

 beyond. In many parts of the country they will 

 not even have irrigation about their homes, as they 

 practice dry-farming, which is the process of getting 

 one crop in two years or two crops in three years by 

 such methods of tillage as will save all the rainfall 

 and make use of the moister parts of the year 

 for getting their crops started. From the point 

 of view of the old landscape-gardening these areas 

 seem to be hopeless ; yet, numbers of persons must 

 live in these regions and there ought to be some way 

 whereby the artist can develop for them a new type 

 of satisfaction. All our artistic conceptions of land- 

 scape-gardening seem to be drawn from humid coun- 

 tries, as, indeed, our common agriculture is so drawn ; 

 but more than half of the land surface of the earth 

 receives a rainfall of less than twenty inches and has 

 a set of problems of its own. I often wonder what 

 would be the character of our landscape art if it had 

 been developed first in a semi-arid country." 



What can a landscape-gardener do for a treeless 

 region ? While he can sometimes improve appear- 

 ances by grading or by using rocks in an artistic way, 



