THEORT OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN y^ 



The pleasure of intellection may be very complicated and very keen. 

 For instance, in making a planting plan for a bed in a garden in a 

 difficult situation, a man finally produces an arrangement of twenty 

 different kinds of plants which shall go together in sequence of bloom, 

 which shall be harmonious in the color of the various plants that bloom 

 at the same time, which shall be pleasantly related as to height, and 

 which shall all be suited to the cultural and climatic conditions. The 

 intellective pleasure which he experiences on completing this portion 

 of his plan is plainly of two kinds : first, pleasure in having accomplished 

 his task, and then pleasure in the complete and complicated unity of his 

 result. To the spectator also this intellective pleasure is open, although 

 the pleasure of creation is largely the reward of the designer alone. 



Sensory, perceptive, and intellective pleasures are, then, all to be 

 obtained as the results of the designer's skill. He should recognize 

 each for what it is, however; he should strive for the greatest total 

 result, and he should be sure that in attaining one kind of pleasure he 

 has not sacrificed a greater amount of another. 



That these mental effects are the real values to be produced by the 

 designer is by no means a new conception in the literature of landscape 

 architecture. Repton said, 



"I confess that the great object of my ambition is, not merely to produce 

 a hook of pictures^ but to furnish some hints for establishing the fact, that 

 true taste in Landscape Gardenings as well as in all the other Polite Arts, is not 

 an accidental effect, operating on the outward senses, but an appeal to the 

 understanding, which is able to compare, to separate, and to combine, the 

 various sources of pleasure derived from external objects, and to trace them 

 to some pre-existing causes in the structure of the human mind."* 



A present-day writer. Sir George Sitwell, has given a psychological 

 basis to his delightful book An Essay on the Making of Gardens. 



"Art has another function also: it is concerned not only with the scene 

 but with the mind of the beholder, for more than half of what we see comes 

 from the mind. Here then at last we have found the garden-magic of Italy, 

 in the domain of Psychology." f 



* End of the introduction to Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening, 1794. 

 (See References.) 



t Page 48. (See References.) 



