If it is possible to give over any considerable part of a place to one special effect by massing rhododendrons, spring-flowering bulbs, or one particular flower, the result is incalculably greater than if the same number of plants are dotted about promiscuously, but it must be borne in mind that in order to get an effect like this planting must be done on a big scale; the artist must try to keep step with the great stride of Nature and copy as far as may be her breadth and simplicity. This can only be attempted where there is plenty of room. Ten barberry bushes in a front yard may be very good because they are simple, but they cannot even suggest the broad effect of which we have been speaking.
Shasta daisies in a border.
A garden, large or small, must be treated in the impressionist manner. Old paintings and colored prints are interesting from their quaintness, but they do not make one feel the real effect of a garden any more than if they were in black and white. They treat it as a part of the landscape and therefore subdue its coloring that it may not jar with the rest, whereas in reality a garden vibrates with color as the air rising over some reflecting surface on a summer day vibrates with heat.
Moorish fragment at Villa Reed.
The gardener must also consider the length of time in each year in which his work will be looked at. In the north it is difficult to keep one from being more or less unattractive during six months at least; therefore, if a country house is to be lived in for the larger part of the year it is better not to put the garden too close to the house, as in that case the owners will have for several months a dreary view of garden walks with puddles in them and flower-beds covered with manure, or at best with evergreen boughs and leaves. If, however, they only stay in the country for two or three months it is comparatively easy to arrange a mass of color like a Turkey carpet, in which flowers are laid in in broad washes. This brilliant effect can be held for a couple of months, and during that time there need be no holes where flowers have died which have served their usefulness and left not even a tuft of green leaves to cover the brown earth. If the garden has to be presentable from early spring to late autumn it will be impossible, unless it covers a considerable piece of ground, to do more than keep a continuous succession of bloom in small patches rather than in great masses. Breaks in the surface of the ground are also needed, like terraces, arbors to interrupt long walks by shadow, benches and balustrades. Here is where the old Italian gardens are so successful; their fountains and their statues, their benches and their vases, are used as emphasis to give height or light or variation to a part of the composition which might otherwise be uninteresting. In the great Italian garden of Castello the whole interest of the parterre is focussed at the centre by the splendid high bronze fountain of Hercules and Antæus by John of Bologna and Tribolo. It is difficult to put a rule into words which will serve as a guide in even one hypothetical place, perhaps for the same reason that no two people would paint exactly the same picture from the same subject, or tell the same story in the same words.
The pond garden at Hampton Court palace.
In nature colors are set rather as an incident than as the principal feature of a landscape; the spring flowers in the Alps, even if they are not surrounded by trees and much grass, are covered by the simple expanse of the sky; the colors in an American autumn, the change of leaf in the trees, the golden-rod and asters, are all playing in a certain tone of color. The whole symphony of nature changes at that time to an entirely different key from that of summer; the tawny, the brown, the red and yellow and purple have completely changed the aspect of things from what it was in July, when there was nothing but slight gradations in a scheme with green as its key-note. Where colors do not change, as among the evergreens, the effect of the autumn coloring is much more than doubled, as they are the only objects in the landscape which have remained as they were. This unchanging quality of the evergreens is, of course, the basis for the well-known French saying that “Evergreens are the joy of winter and the mourning of summer.” It cannot be too often repeated that a garden is an absolutely artificial thing, not only as to the congregation of flowers but principally as to color, and for this reason must be treated as such. One can seldom, if ever, command a setting as wide as nature’s in which to place our work, and therefore we must tune up our settings to the key of the whole artificial composition. Writing in rhymed verse has been compared to dancing in fetters, and to apply that simile to gardening, it may be said that it is like composing in French alexandrines with their measured rhythm and subtle cæsura. We must keep time with Nature, and follow her forms of expression in different places while we carry out our own ideas or adaptations. Perhaps the so-called natural garden is the most difficult to fit in with its surroundings, because there is no set line to act as a backbone to the composition, and the whole effect must be obtained from masses of color, contrasting heights, and varieties of texture without any straight line as an axis, without any architectural accessory for emphasis, without anything but an inchoate mass of trees or shrubs of a nondescript shape in which to put something that will look like a thought-out composition and not a collection of flowers grown alphabetically on the principle of a nursery-man’s catalogue. These gardens are very hard to design, far more so than the formal garden, and almost impossible to reproduce, as pictures of them are apt to look like views of a perennial border, and all the play of light and color, which is the making of the actual place, is translated only by a little more or less depth in the values of black and white. The planning of an informal garden must be more or less like the arrangement of a painter’s palette; and as an artist would not think of putting a rosy pink and a violent yellow side by side, so the gardener must go through careful processes of choice and elimination. Each garden has one or more points from which it may be seen to more advantage than from others, and in a formal one these are comparatively easy to manage, but in the natural garden the grouping of color must be considered from every reasonable point of view, in order that there may be no jarring combinations.