The Natural Style in Landscape Gardening 



likely to be a matter of grouping. Now the cor- 

 respondence between music and landscape is very 

 close; and since rhythm plays so great a role in 

 music we might expect it to be equally important in 

 landscape composition. But this expectation is not 

 wholly fulfilled. Repetition of similar elements — - 

 lines, forms, colors, species, — is indeed a very val- 

 uable practice in landscape composition, and this 

 repetition may be fairly regular and rhythmic. It 

 is easy, too, to cite the great rhythms of Nature, 

 particularly the round of the hours, of day and 

 night, and of the seasons. Yet when we come to 

 practical problems of grouping plants in informal 

 composition it must be confessed that Nature's 

 rhythms are too subtle for easy imitation. The 

 landscape designer, sitting at his drawing board, 

 with his nurseryman's catalog in his left hand, can 

 not make much headway in his planting plans upon 

 any rhythmic formula. Rhythm in the formal gar- 

 den is a much simpler matter, for the formal garden 

 is essentially rhytlimic in its structure, like poetry. 

 It is fairly evident that each group must have 

 some character — some individuality. Otherwise it 



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