152 Landscape Gardening 



the same effect as to outline, though it will not be exhibited 

 so well. 



Mere rows of plants that have length without breadth, 

 and are easily seen through at all seasons, will ever appear 

 poverty-stricken and meager. Every group should have 

 some kind of proportion preserved in its parts, especially 

 between its two principal dimensions. All narrowness and 

 thinness will be fatal to this. It is clusters or masses, not 

 mere strips, of plants that are wanted in a garden, a field or 

 a park. Long and slender beds of them look too much like 

 hedges. 



Each plantation or mass of plants upon a lawn will demand 

 to be treated separately, and yet in relation to others. Its 

 own individual outlines should be such as I have described, 

 but these must make part of a series of lines of which the 

 sides of a lawn are composed. It will not be enough to have 

 one group well and tastefully defined; each group must play 

 its part in the whole scene and be shaped so as best to exhibit 

 both itself and others. In laying out a number of groups, 

 then, it will be proper first to arrange them in the plan as if 

 they were one continued mass, and then regard them as 

 severed up by walks or other divisions, in the way that may 

 be afterwards found expedient. -Two or more beds, where 

 a walk divides them, should have their outlines arranged 

 (fig. 48) so as to look Uke one when viewed from a distance. 

 The edges of these beds towards the walk may be either 

 broken into bays, as in fig. 48, or be made continuously 

 regular, with a verge of a uniform width. Either of these 

 modes may be adopted at pleasure, or the latter may be 

 selected where the masses of shrubs are but narrow and 

 small and the former used when they are more ample. 



7. Sky Lines. — But the best arrangement of plants as to 

 the shape and relative position of the masses will be unfinished 



