The second conception is the principle that the picture should have a landscape effect. That is, it should be nature-like. Carpet-beds are masses of color, not pictures. They are the little garnishings and reliefs that are to be used very cautiously, as little eccentricities and conventionalisms in a building should never be more than very minor features.
Every other concept in landscape gardening is subordinate to these two. Some of the most important of these secondary yet underlying considerations are as follows:—
The place is to be conceived of as a unit. If a building is not pleasing, ask an architect to improve it. The real architect will study the building as a whole, grasp its design and meaning, and suggest improvements that will add to the forcefulness of the entire structure. A dabbler would add a chimney here, a window there, and apply various daubs of paint to the building. Each of these features might be good in itself. The paints might be the best of ochre, ultramarine, or paris green, but they might have no relation to the building as a whole and would be only ludicrous. These two examples illustrate the difference between landscape gardening and the scattering over the place of mere ornamental features.
There should be one central and emphatic point in the picture. A picture of a battle draws its interest from the action of a central figure or group. The moment the incidental and lateral figures are made as prominent as the central figures, the picture loses emphasis, life, and meaning. The borders of a place are of less importance than its center. Therefore:
Keep the center of the place open;
Frame and mass the sides; Avoid scattered effects.
In a landscape picture flowers are incidents. They add emphasis, supply color, give variety and finish; they are the ornaments, but the lawn and the mass-plantings make the framework. One flower in the border, and made an incident of the picture, is more effective than twenty flowers in the center of the lawn.
More depends on the positions that plants occupy with reference to each other and to the structural design of the place, than on the intrinsic merits of the plants themselves.