The Natural Style in Landscape Gardening 



scape more fully into our feeling for nature we 

 shall be less sensitive about the unnaturalness of 

 these informal rows of trees and shrubbery. The 

 agricultural landscape is in reality one of the great 

 topographical types, and one which we must learn 

 to appreciate more highly. 



Mass planting is a comparatively new discovery 

 in landscape gardening and marks one of the great- 

 est advances yet made toward a genuinely natural- 

 istic style. The use of trees by the thousands for 

 screens or backgrounds, the introduction of rhodo- 

 dendrons by carloads for underplanting, the devel- 

 opment of considerable forest tracts as elements in 

 pictorial landscape treatment, these are all good 

 examples of mass planting. We may have mass 

 effects on a much smaller scale than this, however. 

 Without splitting hairs we may define a mass as a 

 group of such extent that its limits are not all vis- 

 ible from some chosen point of view. 



Mass plantings are of two kinds, pure and 

 mixed. Pure masses are composed of a single spe- 

 cies or variety, mixed masses of several. The usual 

 continuous border planting follows the mass struc- 



101 



