Beatrix Farrand

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 8alexandrines 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. ”

“ 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 3many 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ An informal garden.
One of the most important things that 10the 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Everyone can see the difference between the austerity of the rock-bound coast 4of 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is perhaps for this reason that we unconsciously 5feel 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. ”