170 LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



an object be dominant in one composition but also at another time 

 subordinate in another. 



Besides their service as adding interest to the composition as seen 

 from within, these inclosing plantations, like other plantations, may- 

 serve to exclude from the composition some incongruous object which is 

 without, and many designs must be made with screen plantations which 

 have their shape and location determined in this way, or by their service 

 as a windbreak, or as a mass seen from a distance in some other scene. 

 Once accepted as necessary parts of a design, however, such plantations 

 should be so treated as to bear their part in every important composition 

 in which they appear. 

 Hedges A hedge is a foliage wall which, being parallel-sided, expresses on the 



outside the form it incloses within. (See Drawing XX, opp. p. 158.) A 

 hedge may be very rough in texture, being little more than a somewhat 

 formalized line of trees and shrubs, or it may be carefully aligned, trimly 

 clipped, decorated with niches for statues, perhaps paneled between 

 stone posts ; treated, that is, as far as possible like an architectural 

 wall. The plants forming hedges impart but little of their own char- 

 acter to the resulting structure; its shape is that put upon it by the 

 design of the area which it bounds. A similar effect to that of a formal 

 hedge may be obtained by the use of a lattice fence or even a wall, 

 thickly covered with a close-clinging vine like Boston ivy. Such a 

 structure is more quickly made, and takes less room on the ground than a 

 hedge of equal height. Simply designed and well vine-covered, it may 

 tell only as a foliage mass ; more commonly, however, it is merely deco- 

 rated with vines and tells more as an architectural object in the design. 



A formal row of plants spaced some distance apart may be effective 

 as a screen if the line of sight falls upon them at such an angle that they 

 are foreshortened one upon another. When, from a point of view more 

 or less at right angles to the line of plants, the same screen must be 

 open and not continuous, such arrangements of free-standing evergreen 

 trees, or even of the repeated trunks of deciduous trees, may well meet 

 this double need. Similar arrangements at smaller scale, of clipped 

 evergreens or vine-grown posts connected with garlands, not high enough 

 or perhaps not broad enough to serve as a screen, are often useful as 

 lines of demarcation of formal areas. 



