2o6 3Lan&scape arcbitecture 



happy and behaved especially well. Considering plants 

 as live creatures, whose strange idiosyncrasies are often 

 seemingly almost past finding out except by the most 

 sympathetic and penetrative study, we should start 

 first to dispose certain of them in the landscape design 

 as if we were blocking in the outlines of a picture indicat- 

 ing the main and controlling features of the group or 

 place. To mark this distinctive character only a few 

 kinds of trees, shrubs, and flowers are really necessary, 

 the ones that assume such forms that the eye instinc- 

 tively singles them out in any group. It may be said, 

 with truth, that a park could be planted effectively 

 with twelve trees, tweh'^e shrubs, and twelve herbaceous 

 plants. This means that if such kinds as an oak or 

 elm, a linden, a maple, a plane tree, a birch, a spruce, a 

 pine, a yew, an iris, a hollyhock, a phlox, a chrysanthe- 

 mum were chosen, it would be quite possible to make 

 a great place, perfectly designed in aU essential ways. 

 Of course, it would not be the greatest effect possible, 

 because it would lack the fine, more recondite inter- 

 mediate gradations of colour and form that would come 

 in a less distinctive fashion from the employment of a 

 large variety of hardy ornamental plants. It is not 

 only necessary to ptmctuate, as it were, with marked 

 trees and shrubs, the outlines or articulations of each 

 member of the group, but of the group within the 

 group, so that the lineaments of these familiar con- 

 structive features may direct the eye to the actual 

 composition of the design. 



Further than this, it is necessary to go on to the 



