1814 LANDSCAPE GARDENING 



LANDSCAPE GARDENING 



comprehensive designs for communities. Such work 

 is even more vital than designing home grounds, because 

 it does not merely consider beauty, but goes deeply 

 into the housing problem and all other factors involving 

 the health and prosperity of every inhabitant. Ordi- 

 narily such designs must be made by city planners, 

 but landscape-extension workers can render the state a 

 worthy and invaluable service by helping to educate 

 each community to the city plan as an ideal toward 

 which local forces should work steadily, year after 

 year. 



A third popular demand for landscape extension is 

 for technical advice on all public problems involving 

 beauty. Road, bridge, drainage, and other projects 

 often threaten the needless destruction of beauty which 

 it would cost much money and many years to repair. 

 Local protests are entitled to a fair hearing and organi- 

 zations sometimes ask that expert valuation of the 

 natural beauty involved be presented before courts, 

 and legislative bodies. Organizations interested in 

 conservation are continuously asking for advice on 

 aims and methods, as well as popular lectures. The 

 state legislature is besieged by various bodies with 

 competing propositions for additions to the state park 

 system. A logical outcome of all such unrelated 

 efforts is a survey of each state's resources in natural 

 beauty, showing low-cost lands unsuitable for agri- 

 culture, their location, size, character, ownership, 

 salable value, relative importance to the people, dangers 

 threatening valuable scenery and how these dangers 

 can be avoided. Such a survey naturally leads to a 

 comprehensive policy for state-owned reservations, and 

 for some control of the great scenic features of state- 

 wide interest, which, in states having no mountains, 

 hills, or seashore, generally comprise water-courses of 

 all kinds, including drainage - ditches, railroad and 

 traction rights-of-way, and the roads. Some of these 

 problems will be undertaken by private landscape 

 architects through commissions, and some by state 

 landscape architects, permanently employed, like state 

 engineers and architects of state highways, waterways, 

 health, sewers, buildings, and lands. Obviously, such 

 work is related to landscape extension, and such com- 

 missions or officers may be located at the university 

 for the same reason that a state often locates there such 

 departments as the natural history, geological, and 

 water surveys, and the like. 



The aim of landscape extension is to teach the people 

 the best ways of designing and planting public and 

 private grounds for utility, health and beauty. Land- 

 scape extension is the democratic side of an art that 

 has been too aristocratic. It is part of a national 

 desire to popularize all the fine arts, as music and the 

 drama have been brought into the daily life of the 

 masses by means of mechanisms and moving pictures. 

 Such aims can never be realized wholly by professional 

 and commercial agencies since economic necessity 

 often forces them to subordinate public needs to private 

 gain. The people should have a set of representatives 

 who decide every question relating to outdoor efficiency 

 and beauty from the standpoint of the people. In 

 this article ah 1 questions are so considered. 



The lines of work are too varied to be treated here in 

 detail. Some of the most obvious and popular ones may 

 be named and illustrated in a constructive way under 

 the five headings of individual, rural, town, corpora- 

 tion, and state opportunities. 



Individual opportunities. 



Designing farms and farmsteads. Some work has 

 been undertaken in several states in planning whole 

 farms for efficiency, and men are now being trained 

 for this work. Many farmstead plans have been made 

 by students in agricultural colleges, under the direction 

 of an instructor. Mail-order plans are not made by 

 private landscape architects, and farmers, as a rule, will 



not pay for a visit. The great opportunity of landscape 

 extension is to show the farmers how to make surveys 

 and furnish enough information to enable an expert to 

 design the farm layout with the cost of a visit. 



Home grounds in cities. Technically the design of a 

 small city lot is much the same as that of the farmstead, 

 but with less chance for enframing views, more need of 

 screening unsightly objects, and often a narrower range 

 of materials, owing to smoke, gas, shade, and the like. 

 City people are more eager to spend money on home 

 grounds than country people. After a twenty-minute 

 talk at Peoria, Illinois, 750 out of 2,600 persons signed 

 pledges to do some permanent ornamental planting 

 within a year. Later these persons were asked how they 

 kept their promises. Those who replied had spent 

 about $8,000 in the two years, ending November 

 25, 1914. 



Rural community opportunities. 



Community plans. Small communities can often 

 direct their growth without expensive changes. Good 

 work has been done in Massachusetts in designing 

 rural centers. Facilities for such work will probably be 

 furnished in several states under the Smith-Lever law. 

 The census classifies as "rural" communities haying 

 2,500 inhabitants or less. Some of these communities 

 can afford to employ private city planners. Others may 

 have to be designed by state aid, such as landscape 

 extension can provide. Illinois has a community advisor 

 and a director of community clubs who help local 

 organizations federate toward the permanent improve- 

 ment of rural communities. 



County court-house grounds. The planting of $10 

 worth of vines on the walls of a court-house may be the 

 first step toward a county plan, such as that made for 

 Moore County, North Carolina. The farm advisor 

 movement is beginning to bridge the gap between town 

 and country. Trenton County, Missouri, is one of the 

 first to unite all business men (including practically 

 all of the farmers) in a single county improvement 

 organization. 



Township parks. It is now recognized that country 

 people need parks and playgrounds quite as much as 

 city people, and that they are entitled to have some- 

 thing of a higher grade than amusement parks run by 

 commercial interests. Leaverton Park, near Palestine, 

 Illinois, is a high-class farmers' park organized under 

 a little-known law permitting several townships to 

 unite in levying adequate taxes for making and main- 

 taining rural parks. 



Town opportunities. 



Town planning and planting for efficiency and beauty. 

 Massachusetts has a law requiring every city of 

 10.000 inhabitants or more to have a city plan. Such 

 plans should be made by private landscape architects. 

 The function of landscape extension is to promote the 

 ideal of a city plan and to furnish, on request, the names 

 of two or more competent city planners. 



School grounds. It often happens that money can be 

 raised for planting, but not for plans. In such cases 

 landscape extension may furnish designs. Such work is 

 educational to children and townspeople, and the 

 results, though quickly attained, are permanent. 



Street trees. The needless butchery done by wire- 

 using corporations leads to frequent requests for lec- 

 tures on street trees. Such efforts commonly result in 

 the establishment of a shade-tree commission or city 

 forester, controlling the corporations in harmony with 

 laws like those of New Jersey, Ohio, and Massachusetts, 

 as presented in'Solotaroff's "Shade Trees." 



Neighborhood planting. Frequently the greatest 

 improvement that can be made in the shortest time and 

 at the least expense is to plant the front yards of a 

 single street for three to five blocks. Shrubbery for 

 foundations and for connecting the whole street into a 



