PART II: CALIFORNIA CULTURAL SUGGESTIONS. 



CHAPTER V. 

 LAYING OUT THE GARDEN. 



The art of garden design has puzzled and charmed mankind from 

 prehistoric times. It invaded the earliest recorded thought and since 

 then it has pervaded all form of literature and has used nearly all 

 human words as signs of its ideas or .as descriptive of its principles, 

 purposes and methods. Poetry, architecture, painting, sculpture, 

 history and philosophy are its ancient hand maidens and now modern 

 science is enrolled as its patient and admiring servitor. Its invocation 

 in a work of this kind is as incongruous as the installation of a 

 gorgeous rose in a tomato can and yet it must serve our present 

 purpose. 



Out of the distant past there come to us two groups of ideas in 

 garden design and they contrast themselves as groups under the 

 terms, the "garden natural" and the "garden formal." Of these the 

 first is often called the English, and the second the Italian, style. But 

 these terms are only modern conveniences, for the principles of each 

 trace back to most ancient prototype the Garden of Eden and the 

 Garden of the Pyramids. The Garden of Eden was of course a 

 natural landscape which Adam evidently did not seriously mutilate, 

 for the record surely indicates tbat he did not perspire much until 

 after he was banished from it. The Garden of the Pyramids with 

 its terracing, its graven images, its flights of stone steps and banks 

 of foliage laboriously hewn straight or grotesquely curved, with its 

 lines of walks and lawns vigorously angular <and perpendicular or 

 parallel to the walls of buildings or elaborately geometric in relation 

 thereto these are the things which brought moisture to the brow of 

 the banished Adam and have involved his successors to the present 

 day in lavish labor or expenditure for that which is not beautiful. 



But it is not our purpose to arm ourselves for a conflict of styles, 

 each of which has its place quite well denned if one will think 

 earnestly about them. This fact is suggested in the following 

 sentences from the leading English champion of the garden natural :* 



"Beneath all art there are laws, however subtle, that cannot be 

 ignored without error and waste; and in garden design there are 

 lessons innumerable both in wild and cultivated nature which will 

 guide as well if we seek to understand them simply. 



"Why is the cottage garden often a picture and the gentleman's 

 garden near, wholly shut out of the realm of art, a thing which an 



* Garden Design by W. Robinson, London, 1892. 



