176 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



Herbaceous 

 Beds and 

 Borders 



true which we have already discussed more particularly in relation to 

 trees. In formal design, however, shrubs may be used merely as a 

 material from which masses of man-determined form may be made, 

 which may owe little of their interest to any variation in the character 

 of the foliage of which they are composed. In the informal planting of 

 a small estate the separate varieties of shrubs may be arranged in fairly 

 definite segregated groups in the whole planting, just as flowering plants 

 might be arranged in a bed, both for the mass efl"ect of their peculiar 

 characteristics whatever they may be, and because the designer is not 

 averse to the man-made effect so produced. In larger and more 

 naturalistic schemes, a blending of mass into mass is desirable, a use 

 perhaps of plants of several different kinds intermingled in any given 

 space to preserve the apparent naturalness of the mass of the plantation 

 even at some sacrifice of crispness of minor efi"ect. 



Herbaceous plants in masses in the landscape have their primary 

 importance through their most striking characteristic, — their flowers. 

 In conjunction with trees and shrubs in informal or naturalistic border 

 plantations, their comparatively loose texture and delicate form make 

 them things to be backed and protected by the other coarser plant 

 materials, but their brilliant flowers enable them to give a dominant 

 interest to the recess in which they are set, which has already been 

 marked, by its enframement, as the center of the composition. (See 

 Drawing XXI, opposite.) When this kind of flower planting is de- 

 signed, as it often is, to be seen at a considerable distance, the effects 

 may be, as we have said, throughout more powerful, the separate masses 

 of color larger, the plants themselves larger and coarser, than is the 

 case in smaller-scale compositions. 



As the eye commonly ranges along the more distant flower beds at 

 an angle almost parallel to the ground, a mass of color to show any 

 extent to the eye must have considerable extent on the ground in a 

 direction measured away from the eye. This leads the designer seeking 

 this particular effect to lay out his important flower masses more or less 

 in elongated areas radiating from the important viewpoint, if this can 



P* S53> which pages are translated in article, Natural Grouping of Trees, in Landscape 

 Architecture, Jan. 1917, v. 7, p. 83-87; also Meyer und Ries, Garteniechnik und Gar- 

 tenkunst (191 1), in chapter, Die Bepflanzung im Naturstil, especially p. 352. 



