III. Open center treatment in a semi-tropical country.
The planting is part of the design or picture.
If the reader catches the full meaning of these pages, he has acquired some of the primary conceptions in landscape gardening. The suggestion will grow upon him day by day; and if he is of an observing turn of mind, he will find that this simple lesson will revolutionize his habit of thought respecting the planting of grounds and the beauty of landscapes. He will see that a bush or flower-bed that is no part of any general purpose or design—that is, which does not contribute to the making of a picture—might better never have been planted. For myself, I would rather have a bare and open pasture than such a yard as that shown in Fig. 9, even though it contained the choicest plants of every land. The pasture would at least be plain and restful and unpretentious; but the yard would be full of effort and fidget.
Reduced to a single expression, all this means that the greatest artistic value in planting lies in the effect of the mass, and not in the individual plant. A mass has the greater value because it presents a much greater range and variety of forms, colors, shades, and textures, because it has sufficient extent or dimensions to add structural character to a place, and because its features are so continuous and so well blended that the mind is not distracted by incidental and irrelevant ideas. Two pictures will illustrate all this. Figures 10, 11 are pictures of natural copses. The former stretches along a field and makes a lawn of a bit of meadow which lies in front of it. The landscape has become so small and so well defined by this bank of verdure that it has a familiar and personal feeling. The great, bare, open meadows are too ill-defined and too extended to give any domestic feeling; but here is a part of the meadow set off into an area that one can compass with his affections.
These masses in Figs. 10, 11, and 12 have their own intrinsic merits, as well as their office in defining a bit of nature. One is attracted by the freedom of arrangement, the irregularity of sky-line, the bold bays and promontories, and the infinite play of light and shade. The observer is interested in each because it has character, or features, that no other mass in all the world possesses. He knows that the birds build their nests in the tangle and the rabbits find it a covert.