64 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



Examples of 



Landscape 



Characters 



The Prairie 



by its esthetic essence. We say, for example, Florentine Renaissance 

 garden, and Alpine glaciated valley, — the name used in each of these 

 cases being the name of the example in which the style or character 

 reaches its most complete expression. A few examples of natural 

 characters, from the infinity of possibilities, may make it plainer both 

 that these characters are essentially different, and that this difference 

 is the different expression of the natural forces which have produced 

 them. 



The simplest and, largely for this reason, some of the most striking 

 landscape characters are those which depend on the simplest ground 

 form, the plain. The prairie is of all landscapes the most unchanging 

 in its form. Its level surface offers no point of attack to the erosion 

 of water, and, protected by its matted sod, it is safe also from the 

 power of the wind. As the prairie was when the white man came, so 

 it had been through ages which have witnessed enormous changes in 

 all the mountains and river valleys of the continent. 



The sea alone, or a great lake, can vie with the prairie in the over- 

 whelming simplicity of its effect. Extent, vastness, are alike in prairie 

 and sea, but while the sea is always alive, even if at times asleep, the 

 prairie is dead. It is immovable, ponderous, monotonous, stupefying. 

 Each slight undulation which bounds the view gives promise of some- 

 thing different beyond, a promise always unfulfilled as one swell of 

 ground succeeds another through days of travel.* But nowhere better 

 than on a prairie are to be seen the glories of the powers of the air. 

 The squadrons of towering white cumulus clouds, giving in their 

 diminishing perspective even a vaster sweep of view than the land, 

 the daily miracles of sunset and sunrise, the clean and exhilarating 

 summer breeze, or the deadly fury of a prairie blizzard, give to a man 



* "The unending vision of sky and grass, the dim, distant, and ever-shifting hori- 

 zon ; the ridges that seem to be rolled upon one another in motionless torpor ; the effect 

 of sunrise and sunset, of night narrowing the vision to nothing, and morning only ex- 

 panding it to a shapeless blank; the sigh and sough of a breeze that seems an echo 

 in unison with the solitude of which it is the sole voice ; and, above all, the sense of 

 lonely, unending distance which comes to the voyageur when day after day has gone by, 

 night has closed, and morning dawned upon his onward progress under the same ever- 

 moving horizon of grass and sky." 



Capt. W. F. Butler's The Wild North Land, London, 1873, p. 50. 



