October, 19 2 1 
23 
FRAMING THE LANDSCAPE PICTURE 
Distant Views Are Always More Satisfying When We Apply 
To Them the Principles of Pictorial Composition 
LUTON ABBOTS WOOD 
I N planning a garden it is important to 
consider not only the garden itself, but 
also the landscape that surrounds it. Only 
the walled garden can afford to disregard the 
surrounding landscape, and even the walled 
garden must have at least one opening on to 
the outer world. If the surrounding landscape 
is beautiful—and there are very few 
places in our countryside where it is so 
positively repulsive that one would like to 
shut out all sight of it—the designer of 
the garden is wise if he tries to involve 
the landscape in his garden scheme. You 
may possess only an acre of ground but, 
esthetically speaking, you are monarch 
of all you survey from any point on that 
little acre. Yet the process of exploiting 
the landscape for the uses of the garden 
is not entirely simple. Let us consider 
some of the methods employed by the 
skilled gardener to press it into his service. 
Composition 
If your house happens to be situated 
on the top of a lofty eminence, no very 
subtle methods need be adopted. All you 
have to do is to walk about your domain 
and look at the panorama; its mere extent 
makes it perennially interesting as well 
as independent of artificial composition 
in the foreground. But the houses and 
gardens which command a really exten¬ 
sive panorama are so rare that we need 
consider them no further. We are inter¬ 
ested in the ordinary dwelling, situated 
in a valley, on a flat plain, or on the 
gentle slope of a hill, and commanding a 
modest prospect of not very distant hills, 
fields, and trees. How shall we involve 
this prospect in our garden scheme? How 
make it pay us its tribute of beauty ? 
The gardener must approach the prob¬ 
lem in exactly the same spirit as that in 
which the landscape painter approaches 
his similar problem. As a machine, Na¬ 
ture is extremely ingenious and well or¬ 
dered; but as an esthetic whole it is a 
chaos. The business of the landscape 
painter is to compose the chaotic elements 
of Nature into an esthetic whole or work 
of art. The gardener is faced with pre¬ 
Limitation 
cisely the same problem; he, too, has to com¬ 
pose Nature into a work of art. His task is, 
if anything, more difficult than that of the 
painter, because he has to work in the actual 
stuff of Nature itself. If a tree is badly placed 
in a landscape the painter merely alters its 
position in his picture; but the gardener has 
to cut it down and plant another one in the 
right spot or move the tree. His work is the 
more laborious and slower. He is also handi¬ 
capped by the fact that the ways in which he 
can arrange his natural materials are extremely 
limited, while the means of the painter, unless 
he is tied down by some ridiculous theory of 
photographic realism, are almost infinite. 
The gardener who is engaged in bring¬ 
ing the surrounding landscape into rela¬ 
tion with his garden has at his disposal 
only one method of composition. He is 
impotent to alter the actual landscape 
beyond the boundaries of his garden. 
All he can do is to alter his garden; his 
power extends, that is to say, only over 
the foreground of his picture. Neverthe¬ 
less, in spite of these limitations, the gar¬ 
dener contrives to do a great deal. How 
much he can do by simply paying due 
attention to his foreground is shown by 
the accompanying photographs illustrat¬ 
ing a number of landscapes, in which a 
few simple touches in the foreground 
have turned a chaotic prospect of hills 
and woods and fields into a beautifully 
composed work of art that is an integral 
part of the garden. 
A doorway or loggia arch, purely architectiiral features, 
can be so placed as to frame a garden glimpse. Such 
pictures should be studied before the house is built and 
the garden laid out 
The first principle of all composition 
is limitation. Absurd as it may sound, it 
is yet true that the picture cannot exist 
without the frame. The essential differ¬ 
ence between Nature and a work of art 
is that Nature is without limits, and 
exists in a perpetual state of flux, while a 
work of art is fixed and clearly defined. 
The business of the gardener is so to ar¬ 
range his foreground that the eye sees a 
clearly limited picture in which there is a 
harmonious relation of form between the 
foreground and the far-off background. 
The ordinary way of framing and 
composing a distant view is by means of 
trees or of some architectural detail. A 
dense mass of trees may be used to block 
out all but a limited section of a land¬ 
scape, which will be seen down a vista. 
The same effect can be produced by the 
use of walls and a gateway. Almost mere 
