I 24 Landscape Gardening 



manuscript the natural style had as yet hardly received 

 polite recognition. To-day it stands established before the 

 world as one of the great expressions of universal art. It 

 has been cordially received and accHmatized in America, and 

 is, apparently, the style most truly expressive of the taste of 

 the American people. It is the style urged so eloquently by 

 Andrew Jackson Downing and practiced so successfully by 

 Frederick Law Olmsted, It is the usual form of expression 

 adopted by leading American landscape architects of the 

 present day, of whom Mr. O. C. Simonds and Mr. Warren 

 H. Manning may be mentioned as typical exponents. 



The natural style is rather better suited to the treatment 

 of large scenery parks and rural estates than to small resi- 

 dence grounds. Yet it has been used with reasonable success 

 even on small city lots. At its best it depends essentially 

 on the development of broad effects in natural scenery where 

 fields or woods, river or lake, hills or meadows, play a leading 

 role in the picture composition. 



In America the use of native plants has come to be re- 

 garded as an almost essential feature of the natural style. 

 When other plants are used they are to be naturalized, 

 as daffodils and crocuses are naturalized in the grass and 

 Canterbury bells and foxgloves are strewn loosely into wild 

 gardens. 



The Picturesque Style. — Extreme naturalness is the dis- 

 tinctive mark of the picturesque. It repudiates all art, or 

 employs it solely in order to weaken or annihilate it. There 

 is nothing flowing in its lines, or soft in its forms. As 

 extremes are said to meet, so, in the perfection of the formal 

 and picturesque manners, there is something in common. 

 Both call for angularity of figure and sharp projections. 

 But the angles of the one are according to rule, those of the 

 other cannot be too irregular. And while flowing lines mark 



