320 LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



siderable certainty, even although the planning be far in advance of 

 present need. As a matter of general public policy, this land should be 

 acquired as soon as it is demonstrable that it will be needed in the future, 

 because it can be acquired more cheaply now than it ever can be again, 

 and because further developments upon it in ways incongruous with its 

 ultimate recreational use are almost certain to prove a destruction 

 or postponement of landscape beauty, and, since they must later be 

 removed, an uneconomical application of enterprise. 



It is not at all necessary or indeed desirable that any great expense be 

 undertaken at once for the development of these outlying reserved 

 areas, except such as may be necessary to preserve the beauty they 

 have, to render them reasonably accessible, to police them adequately, 

 and to do such planting as may profitably be undertaken at once with 

 a view to their appearance perhaps fifty years hence. In some cases, 

 indeed, while holding the land in fee, it may be wise for the municipal- 

 ity not to remove the land from its present use, but to allow it to con- 

 tinue perhaps as farm land, meadow, and pasturage, as orchard, or even 

 as commercial woodland, with the legal proviso that nothing shall be 

 done by its present tenants seriously detrimental to its future use. 

 Occasionally the environs of a city may be so little distinctive in land- 

 scape character that practically whatever beauty is to be enjoyed by 

 future generations must be created ; or it may be that already certain 

 economic use of the land to be set aside for recreation has so thoroughly 

 destroyed previously existing beauty, in places, that no enjoyment of it 

 as a whole is possible until these places have been restored. In either case 

 early acquisition of the land would be advisable, that planting for the 

 benefit of future generations should be undertaken without delay. 

 Combination There are other purposes besides recreation for which the city must 



wtth Other have such outlying reservations. The time is rapidly coming when we 



must grow our timber as we grow our corn, definitely as a commercial 

 crop ; but this can be economically done only at a large scale, and the 

 broad areas of woodland so created offer too good an opportunity for 

 public recreation to be allowed to remain in private hands or not to be 

 combined with public reservations for recreational purposes.* 



* Cf. the discussion of municipal forest reservations as an example of landscape 

 characters in relation to economic use and maintenance, Chapter V, p. 72. 



