234 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



Esthetic 

 Characteristics 

 of a Garden 



Inclosure 



The landscape designer is naturally most interested in those gar- 

 dens which are works of art; that is, those gardens which are made 

 with some consideration of their pleasant esthetic effect. For our pur- 

 poses as designers, therefore, we may well consider what seem to be 

 desirable esthetic characteristics which a garden may have, suitable to 

 our times and customs. In its effect on the beholder, a garden is typi- 

 cally a place of leisurely restful enjoyment, a retreat from the noise 

 and hurry of the outside world, oflFering a succession of beauties and 

 pleasant interests ; and interests and beauties of this peaceful kind 

 are hardly to be found anywhere so readily and so fully as in the de- 

 velopment and changing natural growth of flowering plants and in our 

 association through them with the large and inevitable forces of Nature. 



A garden should be a single unity, involving a certain feeling of 

 defined extent; largely to enable it to produce this effect it should 

 be inclosed, or, at least, recognizably segregated from the rest of the 

 landscape. It should have plants growing in it, though not necessarily 

 "flowering" plants. These plants, and the other materials which are 

 used, should be arranged in an esthetic composition, and this compo- 

 sition should be evidently the work of man. 



Let us discuss these points. We say that a garden must be inclosed, 

 bounded, sufficiently segregated from the landscape about it. Now it 

 may be so segregated by being completely surrounded by some screen, 

 high enough to hide all the outside objects. It may lie in the courtyard 

 of a building. It may be inclosed by a wall or a hedge of an informal 

 planting, so high that, to any one inside of the garden, the outside world 

 is entirely cut off. Similarly, the screen around the garden may be a 

 lower wall or hedge, but behind it may be a tall tree mass or something 

 of less definite form which, nevertheless, completely blocks any view 

 from the garden. Any such segregation as this leaves the designer as 

 free as he ever can be to make his garden as though it existed in a 

 world of its own. 



Again, the boundary, though in effect completely surrounding 

 the garden, may allow of glimpses into other areas, which, nevertheless, 

 are so definitely segregated from the garden that, though they may be 

 parts of the same general scheme, they are evidently not intended to 

 be part of the same visual unity. Certain views into other units 



