266 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



Tennis Courts 

 and Areas for 

 Other Recrea- 

 tions 



a separate gardener's yard containing the compost yard and space 

 for the various activities intermediate between the greenhouse, hot- 

 beds, cold frames, and the garden. 



Besides all these service areas, there are some areas for recreation, 

 which on account of the definite shape and character necessary for their 

 use are not always easy to handle as objects in an esthetic design.* 

 The tennis court is the most common and the most difficult of these. 

 A turf court with its necessary backstops may form a bay in a lawn, 

 with the planting on each side concealing the backstops ; or with its 

 tennis shelter it may form the end of a formal vista, or with archi- 

 tectural treatment of the backstops it may of itself make a unit in a 

 formal design. A dirt court is still more difficult to use as a unit in an 

 esthetic design where the surface of the ground is elsewhere turf or 

 flowers, and it is commonly better to segregate such a court entirely from 

 the rest of the scheme. 



Croquet lawns and bowling greens, if not used by very expert 

 players, can form merely a part of an open lawn. Where a rectilinear 

 boundary is necessary for the play, they may form a part of some ter- 

 race scheme, and indeed, the term "bowling green" is often applied 

 to a reasonably level, formal, inclosed grass area on which, perhaps, 

 bowls were never intended to be played. 



Outdoor swimming pools may assume any form from formal and 

 architectural treatment of water with surrounding walls, fountains, 

 terraces, to the naturalistic treatment of the enlargement of a brook to 

 make a sufficient sheet of water to swim in. 



Garden theaters, f which were used in a good many instances by the 

 Italians of the Renaissance, are being constructed occasionally in this 

 time and country. They may be worked into a design partly at least 

 in order to give a special character to an area which otherwise might be 

 difficult to make of enough importance, but in a community with much 

 means or much "local talent," such a theater might be very frequently 

 used, for plays, or music, or addresses. These theaters usually have a 

 stage, raised by a retaining wall some three feet above the area in which 



* See footnote on p. 274. 



t See Italian Garden Theaters, by Henry V. Hubbard, in Landscape Architecture, 

 Jan. 1914, V. 4, p. 53-65, with illustrations, and subsequent articles on the same sub- 

 ject in other periodicals by several other writers. 



