The Natural Style in Landscape Gardening 



with skill and imagination. Some heroic landscape 

 makers even create such features for themselves. 

 They make artificial ponds and rivulets, even arti- 

 ficial hills. One of them of whom I know, instead 

 of building a concrete retaining wall to stop the 

 erosion of a troublesome storm-fed gully, preferred 

 to reproduce a complete outcrop of limestone ledge, 

 stratum on stratum. Such work, of course, must 

 be very skillfully done or it is anything but natu- 

 ralistic. But when it is artistically successful it has 

 every right to be called good naturalistic landscape 

 gardening. 



Natural growth of good trees or artificial forest 

 plantations always make good landscape features, 

 and should be joyfully accepted in works of the 

 natural style. Even a single tree of any size or 

 symmetry can be emphasized by proper vistas and 

 may be worth using as a feature. The planting of 

 specimen trees and shrubs on all sorts of grounds 

 has unquestionably been badly overdone in early 

 examples of American landscape gardening. This 

 particular trick may fairly be reckoned as a fault 

 of the late Andrew Jackson Downing and of his 



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