The Natural Style in Landscape Gardening 



Usually this arrangement is wholly pleasing to 

 the eye. The spiritual effect is characteristic and 

 agreeable. It is unfortunate, therefore, that this 

 method should have been quite generally overlooked 

 by the men who make planting plans. It would 

 seem to be a method capable of considerable service 

 in informal designing. 



Old time debates about questions of grouping 

 used to turn usually upon the shapes of groups, 

 meaning their horizontal projection or plan. Some 

 planters, whatever their theoretical principles, 

 plainly made all their groups in a monotonously 

 oval form. Hundreds of gardeners — and not all of 

 them amateurs — still speak of "clumps of bushes" 

 or of trees. Quite recently I visited a city park 

 where the designing was professedly naturalistic 

 yet in which the margin of an informal lake was' 

 decorated with successive, equally spaced perfectly 

 circular "clumps" of shrubs, each "clump" of a 

 single species, but each one different from all the 

 others. 



Earlier in this chapter reference has been made 

 to the equilateral triangle which so easily becomes a 



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