The Livable House 



walk all around a pool, to see it from different vantage points — 

 and to come up to its edge in places. The free standing pool as 

 well as the wall fountain type of pool should be designed so as to 

 provide for planting spaces about the edge. 



Of informal gardens there are two sorts: the "studied haphaz- 

 ard" garden, and the pure naturalistic garden. Mr. Henry V. 

 Hubbard makes the distinction between the two by saying that the 

 design of the first "consists in informal masses arranged with no 

 particular attempt at naturalness, to make a pictorial composition, 

 and on the other hand, informal masses arranged to give this pic- 

 torial eft'ect, but also to look as though they were organized by 

 some of the laws of untrammeled Nature." The first sort of gar- 

 den is illustrated at its best in the picture and plan of the Bedford 

 Hill garden. The planting is so arranged as to form a vista em- 

 phasizing the delightful view, and the dark foliage of evergreens 

 is an effective background for the flower masses. If all "infor- 

 mal" gardens were as successful as this one, I should be unquali- 

 fiedly converted to the type, but I am bound to say of this kind of 

 inf(jrmal garden in general that it seems to me to have no place 

 in real garden art. It is a mongrel kind of garden, an in-between 

 type — something that is neither formal nor naturalistic, but just a 

 compromise. It usually means that its owner has told himself 

 he does not want a "formal" garden, but — unwilling to give up all 

 the nursery plants of man's making which have no place in a truly 

 naturalistic garden — he has made this half-way garden, which is 

 neither one thing nor the other. It seems to me that it is much 

 better art to put these hybrid flowers and shrubs into a frankly 



[112] 



