274 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



Apportionment 

 of Estate Area 

 into the Units 

 Required 



of a house lot, nor to give to a man in moderate circumstances 

 a scheme requiring great annual upkeep expense. A simple scheme 

 well constructed and well kept up is better than an ambitious scheme, 

 ill constructed and run to seed, and better than a complicated scheme 

 crowded into too small an area. 



The apportioning of the area of an estate into separate parts for its 

 separate uses, esthetic and economic, is again largely a matter of the 

 client's desires and the topographic possibilities. But it should be 

 remembered that some effects may be produced sufficiently well by the 

 skillful use of a small space, whereas other effects are absolutely depend- 

 ent on extent. A flower garden may be very small and still quite suffi- 

 cient; a lawn is likely to be better the broader its expanse. Some 

 areas in an estate have certain necessary sizes and certain typical shapes, 

 like road turns and tennis courts.* Others have formal shapes but not 

 definitely determined sizes, as for instance, a formally arranged garden. 

 In a good design these necessarily predetermined areas are provided in 

 their proper relations without thereby leaving portions of the property 

 unusable because of awkward shape or inconvenient location. Fortu- 

 nately there are some elements in the design of an estate, like groves of 

 trees or, at a smaller scale, plantations of shrubs, which are not fixed as 

 to size and do not need to have any definable relation between one side 

 and another. They naturally come to serve as boundary masses at the 

 edge of the estate or to lie between other units of the design. An in- 

 genious designer should usually be able to make them serve this pur- 

 pose and take up discrepancies between the boundaries of one unit and 

 another, still not wasting an area which might be better employed. 



*For diagrams of areas for certain sports, see article by Henry V. Hubbard, 

 Space Required for Some Common Outdoor Games, in Landscape Architecture, July 

 1912, V. 2, p. 163-166. 



