The Natural Style in Landscape Gardening 



gothic windows and its towering spire, expresses a 

 religious thought; the business block, with its wide 

 doors and its show windows, expresses a commercial 

 idea; the state capitol, with its columned porches 

 and its rounded dome, expresses a civic feeling. So 

 in landscape architecture, the big formal garden 

 carries the spirit of the courtly life which once filled 

 Schoenbrunn and Versailles ; the snug, walled Eng- 

 lish garden expresses the feeling of the home-loving, 

 garden-loving English countryman ; the bold "front 

 yard" of the American suburbs, set out with one 

 blue spruce and one weeping mountain ash, ex- 

 presses the crude taste, the ostentation, the desire 

 for public show, of the bourgeois suburbanite. 



But let us first consider form. It has been said, 

 though hastily and untruthfully, that the natural 

 landscape has no form and no composition. The 

 fact is that it has very definite forms, very distinct 

 and clear-cut types and very rigid principles of com- 

 position. 



These are founded on the most fundamental prin- 

 ciples of physics, such simple principles, for ex- 

 ample, as that water runs down hill and that trees 



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