The Natural Style in Landscape Gardening 



color effects in the garden — much more, indeed, 

 than the matter warrants. Color plays such a very 

 important part in some other closely related arts 

 that beginners naturally try to follow the same 

 well-marked paths in garden designing. Frankly 

 this color scheming in the garden seems to me to 

 have been greatly misunderstood. There is a dan- 

 gerous facility in the assumptions that gardening 

 is merely a decorative art, and that it may therefore 

 follow all the rules of the other decorative arts. 

 Neither assumption is quite half true. The infer- 

 ences and practices which follow in this train of 

 reasoning are frequently altogether wrong. 



Under the first head let it be stressed that gar- 

 dening is a structural art, like architecture. The 

 purely decorative work put upon a church or villa 

 is its least important feature. The architect is con- 

 cerned mostly with foundations, the distribution of 

 loads, the requirements of heat and ventilation and 

 all that sort of thing ; even the esthetic value of the 

 church building is gained more bj^ structural mass 

 than by decorative detail. The art of gardening 

 stands precisely where architecture stands in this 



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