8 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE 



at Asheville, N. C., the mere enumeration of which serves 

 to show some of the diversity of the work, and even the most 

 casual observer can see in them some of the reasons why this 

 sort of work is not properly to be called landscape gardening. 

 A gardener, as commonly understood, is one who cultivates 

 a garden. He may, and of course should, know a great deal 

 about botany and horticulture, but when you come to asso- 

 ciate the word garden with landscape there is implied simply 

 that we have a gardener who cares for a garden having a 

 naturalistic or landscape character; the absolutely essential 

 factor of creative design disappears. Expensive mistakes 

 have often resulted from employing on landscape work a 

 person who was simply a common gardener and ignorant of 

 the principles of this sort of design. Art commissioners 

 would not think of employing a man to design a monumental 

 public library or city hall simply because he was a good stone- 

 mason. 



Landscape architecture is then, as Charles Eliot, one of 

 Mr. Olmsted's gifted disciples, has well said, "the art of 

 arranging land for use and the accompanying landscape for 

 enjoyment." Landscape gardening is, it seems to me, a 

 term conveying in itself confused ideas, but used, if at all 

 properly, simply to cover that part of the landscape archi- 

 tect's work which has to do with the development of formal 

 or natural beauty by the simple process of removing or setting 

 out and caring for plants. This is quite secondary to the 

 matter of designing a general scheme for the development 

 of land for any given purpose. 



Certainly the elder Olmsted's maintenance of his title 

 and his great works and those of his disciples since under this 

 title, coupled with the fact that the only society of men pro- 

 fessionally concerned primarily in such work containing most 

 of the better trained practitioners calls itself the American 

 Society of Landscape Architects is sufficient rejoinder to the 

 statement that the leaders in the art have not decided what 

 to call it. 



It is no accidental matter but a fact that both architec- 

 ture and landscape architecture are bigger than gardening 

 and may in justice demand larger compensation. Neither 

 does the fact that it may be fitting in the design of the imme- 

 diate surroundings of important buildings to utilize an ar- 

 chitectural or formal style of landscape work rob the term 

 "landscape architecture" of its true significance as a correct 



