Title: The garden as a picture
Author: Jones, Beatrix
Language: English
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[Illustration: Garden of the Villa of Castello.]



                        THE GARDEN AS A PICTURE


                            By Beatrix Jones

                    ILLUSTRATIONS BY HENRY MCCARTER

Garden literature of to-day, as we all know, does not confine itself
merely to flowers, insects, and the weather, but is equally
authoritative as to astronomy, cookery, philosophy, and even matrimony.
Some quotations from old writings, however, come back over and over
again, like the burden of a song, and we have grown so accustomed to
them that we feel almost defrauded if a garden book does not open with
the first sentence of Bacon’s stately essay. These books have done much
good in making people realize that gardens are not pieces of ground kept
solely for the delight of gardeners of the old school, who seem to have
spent their time in designing flower-beds of intricate pattern filled
with bedding plants so atrocious in color that a kaleidoscope is
Quakerish in comparison. They have also taught the great essential of
gardening, that in order to have good gardens we must really care for
the plants in them and know them individually as well as collectively.
This is an important part of the technique of the garden-maker; he must
know intimately the form and texture as well as the color of all the
plants he uses; for plants are to the gardener what his palette is to a
painter. The two arts of painting and garden design are closely related,
except that the landscape gardener paints with actual color, line, and
perspective to make a composition, as the maker of stained glass does,
while the painter has but a flat surface on which to create his
illusion; he has, however, the incalculable advantage that no sane
person would think of going behind a picture to see if it were equally
interesting from that point of view.

The painter has another great advantage over the gardener, because, as
he cannot possibly transfer to canvas the millions of colors and shadows
which make up the most ordinary landscape, he must eliminate so many
that his presentment becomes more or less conventional, just as a
playwright must recognize the conventions of the stage, and these
limitations are taken for granted by the public, whereas the landscape
gardener has to put his equally artificial landscape out in real light,
among real trees, to be barred by real and moving shadows. The garden
designer has no noncommittal canvas at the back of his picture, but must
be prepared, like the sculptor, for criticism from any standpoint, and
it would seem as though most people were irresistibly drawn to look at a
composition from its least attractive side, as if, in a parallel case,
they should criticise only the backs of statues, all of which are not so
beautiful as that of the Venus of Syracuse.

The painter has yet another advantage hard to overestimate, in that his
palette is really in great measure the creation of his personal artistic
temperament, expressed with more or less variation in all that he does,
while the landscape architect must take the elements given him by nature
as the basis of his composition in each separate piece of work; this
means that he cannot use the color, form, and texture suited to one
place in another possibly only a few miles away. The painter also
usually follows his own bent and seldom varies from marines to
portraits, or from still life to landscape, and although some have run
the whole gamut, the personality of the artist unconsciously translates
his subjects into his own individual language.

The landscape artist, on the other hand, must subordinate himself to the
elements given him, the climate and the soil, the character of the
vegetation, and last but usually not least, the wishes of his client.
The painter and the sculptor may finish their work and it can at once be
judged as a whole, while the person who works with plants has to make up
his mind to see the particular shrub he wanted in a special spot
perversely die, while for years the shady groves of the future will
decorate the scene like feather dusters on broomsticks.

[Illustration: Fountain in the Garden of Castello.]

Although each year an increasing number of people interest themselves in
out-of-door life and the habits of birds, trees, and wild flowers, they
may realize only the striking contrast between a landscape where
deciduous trees predominate and another where evergreens give the
characteristic note. Everyone can see the difference between the
austerity of the rock-bound coast of Maine, the quiet beauty of a
Massachusetts intervale, and the sleepy luxuriance of the Pennsylvania
pastoral country, but slight variations between these may often pass
unnoticed; it is only in trying to copy the expression of a landscape,
or rather to fit in with its character, that it is possible to realize
how infinite and yet how minute these variations are. The quality of the
light is perhaps the most important. There is a pellucid quality in the
northern atmosphere which does not demand shade as do the richer colors
and warmer light farther to the south. The recognition of the importance
of the balance between light and shade was one of the chief elements in
the composition of the great Italian garden artists. They used shadow as
having the same value of accent as color. Their long and sunlit walks
were relieved by patches of shade; their brilliant and sometimes glaring
parterres, vibrating with light, were contrasted with the cool darkness
of a little grove. This feeling for the balance between light and shade
may not have been a faculty consciously exercised on their part, but it
is unquestionably a feeling without which no artist can make a
composition at all. We are apt to read into the people of a past time
subtleties of which they probably knew nothing, on the principle of

                   Critics who from Shakespeare drew
                   More than Shakespeare ever knew.

The difference of the quality of light is no doubt what unconsciously
affects the outdoor art of different countries, and the demand of the
eye for contrasts may be what makes the English gardens so full of dark
yews, which even on dull days make the bright flowers near them seem as
if the sun were actually shining, whereas in Italy the dark laurels and
bays are more apt to be used as a contrast to actual light and not
color. It should also be remembered that the art of gardening at its
best is as strongly national as that of painting or sculpture; in the
England of old days gardens which were honestly supposed to be Italian
were in reality British, just as the so-called “English gardens” of the
eighteenth century were either French or Italian when they were made in
one or the other country. One reason for this was that artists were not
distracted by the multitude of photographs and rapid mental impressions
of travel which with us make individuality so difficult to keep; for
instance, a model seen in Rome is now often repeated in an alien
American garden, merely because it looked well in the place for which it
was intended. We cover more ground in a short holiday than our
forefathers did in one of their solemn “tours,” and can bring home any
number of accurate records of what we have seen. Before photography was
invented, if a traveller wanted to be sure of remembering a terrace or a
summer-house he had to sketch it more or less accurately; now we snap a
camera which reproduces every detail with a minuteness usually
impossible in a drawing. When the old tourist returned and went to work
again there was an exotic flavor in his design, but he had necessarily
forgotten many minor points of decoration, as in mouldings and
ornaments, so he replaced them by those with which he was familiar, and
his neighbors took it as a matter of course. Now we are terribly
cultivated and scrupulously accurate; we know just how everything all
over the world looks, whether we have actually seen it or not, and if it
is a work of art we think we know just “how it was done.”

It is well to remember that many of the garden decorations imported from
one country to another, as from Italy to England, look much better now
than when they were first expatriated. Time and neglect will do wonders
for inappropriate garden architecture; in our climate, for instance,
chilly marble goddesses will soon lose their noses and fingers in spite
of their hibernation in wooden sentry-boxes, and fountains will go to
pieces if the gardener delays putting on them the little thatched capes
which look oddly like the mackintoshes of the Japanese jinrikisha men.

A collection of flowers, no matter how beautiful they may be, does not
make a garden, any more than the colors on a painter’s palette make in
themselves a picture. A real garden is just as artificial as a painting,
and yet it has not the advantage of artificial surroundings. The
landscape architect must put his composition down in the open air with
the sky and the trees and the grass as a background, and must juggle
with nature in order that his composition may not look out of place,
keeping always in his mind the balance between masses of color and
offsetting masses of green. It is perhaps for this reason that we
unconsciously feel that a garden is best shut in, at any rate, in part,
from the surrounding lines of the landscape. This enclosure does not
necessarily mean a wall, nor does it mean that a garden should have no
outlook, but only that there should be some definite limit.

If one may use a musical expression, there is the same difference in
quality of color between a landscape and a garden that there is between
an old orchestra and a modern one of nearly double its size, where the
parts are much more subdivided and the sound consequently more
complicated. In the same way the vibrations of color from a garden,
being more closely brought together, are much more exciting than in an
ordinary landscape. This makes it necessary that the garden should be
treated in a bolder manner; flowers must be used as color and
interrupted by high lights and dark shadows to throw out contrasts.

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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: Approach to a natural garden.]

Perhaps it is a cowardly subterfuge, but it is one which is at least
safe, to keep the bright yellows and the pinks absolutely separate in
any place where masses of color are used. If you are going to make your
garden in one of the very hot gamuts of color, you can use the deep
oranges, the yellows and browns, the scarlets, and that wonderful
unifier, blue, as seen in the larkspurs, but you cannot use a certain
quality of papery white in some thick petaled flowers, like the white
phloxes and the Shasta daisies, which seem to spring out of any group of
other flowers in which they are placed, leaving the rest of their
companions looking muddled and woolly beside the intensity of their
perfectly untranslucent white.

In quiet colors, some of the misty whites, like gypsophila or
antirrhinum, the faint blues, such as veronica spicata, the pale yellows
of some of the evening primroses, with the dull violets of aconitum
autumnale and the lilacs of hesperus matronalis, make a subdued harmony
less exciting than the red of lychnis chalcedonica and the yellow of
helianthus strumosus, but are more appealing and quite as effective in
their own way. The blaze of the high colors may be compared to the
brasses of an orchestra while the quieter shades are like the strings.

No splendid and complete garden, however, can afford to shut itself out
from the high colors, any more than a composer writing an opera would
omit all the horns and trombones. In some places where special effects
are sought the gardener may leave out the fanfare of the yellows and
scarlets; perhaps his garden will be looked at often from the house or
terrace on hot summer nights, and then he may wish to get the peculiar
floating effect of certain white flowers which seem to quiver in the air
rather than to grow on stems. Then, too, at dusk the scheme changes
again as the yellow of the daylight fades and with it takes the subtler
colors, leaving only the whites and some of the yellows to prevail. The
elimination of detail at night and the thick quality of the light change
the effect and the apparent distance of colors entirely, and give a
curiously submerged appearance to the garden.

[Illustration: An informal garden.]

One of the most important things that the impressionist school has been
trying to teach us is that shadow is a color and must be used as one,
and the reason why the eye seeks relief from a flat surface is not only
that it instinctively resents monotony, but that it feels the need of
shadow. A flat country like Holland may be made beautiful and
interesting by the cloud shadows which pass over it constantly from the
ample vault of its sky, but it is not easy to imagine anything more
dreary than a wide expanse of level earth with no shadows at all. This
quality of shadow, which must be recognized as color, makes it one of
the most important factors in outdoor composition. Who has not noticed
the beauty of outline of the shadows of a group of trees thrown on a
lawn by the later afternoon sun, the round-topped ones making gracious
curves, and the pointed ones seeming stretched out to hurry on the dusk?

[Illustration: A water garden.]

People must not hesitate to make gardens because they fancy the
difficulties are too great; it is only by having them, living in them,
and never ceasing to notice the changes that are constantly passing over
them, the effects that are good and those that are bad, the shadows that
come in the wrong places and the superfluity of high lights, that they
will learn to see; and not only must they see but they must think. They
must notice the different lights and shadows and see how they change the
effect; they must remember the plants whose scent begins at dusk and
those whose fragrance stops with the light. They must distinguish the
flowers that are beautiful by night from those that are beautiful only
by day; they must learn to know the sounds of the leaves on different
sorts of trees; the rippling and pattering of the poplar, the rustling
of the oak-leaves in winter, and the swishing of the evergreens. And by
noticing they will also learn that plants are only one of the tools,
although to be sure one of the most important, with which a garden is
made. Then, too, they will learn to see that the garden, to be
successful, must be in scale with its surroundings as well as
appropriate to them, and also that it must be kept up, as a garden, if
left to itself, will quickly make alterations in the original scheme;
certain plants will become rampant, others will die out, and thus the
delicate balance will be destroyed. The owner of a garden is like the
leader of an orchestra; he must know which of his instruments to
encourage and which to restrain. After all this notice and study and
care many of us may feel that the more we learn about gardening the more
there is left to know, but at any rate, we shall have gained a sort of
working hypothesis on which to build the foundations of a good design.



                          THIS IS ANOTHER DAY

                             By Don Marquis


          I am mine own priest, and I shrive myself
          Of all my wasted yesterdays. Though sin
          And sloth and foolishness, and all ill weeds
          Of error, evil, and neglect grow rank
          And ugly there, I dare forgive myself
          That error, sin, and sloth and foolishness.
          God knows that yesterday I played the fool;
          God knows that yesterday I played the knave;
          But shall I therefore cloud this new dawn o’er
          With fog of futile sighs and vain regrets?

          This is another day! And flushed Hope walks
          Adown the sunward slopes with golden shoon.
          This is another day; and its young strength
          Is laid upon the quivering hills until,
          Like Egypt’s Memnon, they grow quick with song.
          This is another day, and the bold world
          Leaps up and grasps its light, and laughs, as leapt
          Prometheus up and wrenched the fire from Zeus.
          This is another day—are its eyes blurred
          With maudlin grief for any wasted past?
          A thousand thousand failures shall not daunt!
          Let dust clasp dust; death, death—I am alive!
          And out of all the dust and death of mine
          Old selves I dare to lift a singing heart
          And living faith; my spirit dares drink deep
          Of the red mirth mantling in the cup of morn.

------------------------------------------------------------------------



                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
      spelling.
 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.



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