PLANTING. 



THE word planting, which means the act or process of planting, 

 has been adapted with an extended signification in connection with 

 landscape gardening ; it has been taken to indicate as well the 

 thing planted, and is so applied in this treatise wherever the context 

 determines its appropriateness. Planting, in act and in result, is a 

 feature of paramount importance in the art. The well-directed 

 practice or the misuse of it is essential to, or fatal to, the development 

 of those aspects and influences of beauty, which it is the artist's 

 purpose to conserve, to emphasize, or to induce by natural operation. 

 It is a principal means in his hand. As a skeleton is clothed in 

 beauty of line and colour by the flesh, so the undulations and sweet 

 or grand features of the ground in its formation, are clothed by 

 the all-pervading colour of the grass, with its delicious expression 

 of restful quietude ; and thereon Nature lavishes her objects of 

 infinite variety in form, height, colour, in gradations of tone, and 

 splendour of contrast the absolute infinity of curve in detail, which 

 exercises a subtle charm on us, that would deteriorate could we 

 define it ; the gradations of the sky-line, the fine irregularities of 

 line where the lower verge of foliage touches lawn or grass land, 

 the emphasis of sunshine and of shadow and her gifts in this wise 

 are trees and plants. These, then, each beautiful in itself, become 

 chief means by which the designer works in forming the landscape. 



