Art out-of-doors : Hints on good taste in gardening

Front matter

Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Horticulture Branch Library September 1984 by the

James Smithson Society van w A-

Preface

I hope that no one will open my little book thinking that its title means “ Every Man His Own Landscape Gardener.” A book justifying this name could never be written, and none conceived in its spirit ought ever to be attempted. Practical treatises for artists’ and students’ use are, of course, another matter ; but it was not for me to try to add to the number of these. All I have wished to do is to say a friendly word to the public on behalf of gardening as an art-— not attempting to speak of all its phases and problems, or to speak exhaustively of any among them, but simply to plead the cause of good taste by showing why this art should be practised and judged as are arts of other kinds.

It is the one which has produced the most remarkable artist yet born in America; and this is reason enough why all

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Preface

Mr. Olmsted’s fellow-countrymen ought to try to understand its aims and methods. But they ought also to try to understand them in the interests of self-protection ; for to-day the art of gardening is practised much more often than any other, in ignorant, impulsive ways, by people who never stop to think that it is an art at all.

M. G. Van Rensselaer.

9 West Ninth Street, New York,

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Contents

PART PAGE

I. The Art of Gardening ... 1

II. Aims and Methods .... 25

II

“ If the art of gardening is at last to turn back from her extravagances and rest with her other sisters, it is, above everything, necessary to have clearly before you what you require. . . . It is certainly tasteless and inconsistent to desire to encompass the world with a garden-wall, but very practicable and reasonable to make a garden . . . into a characteristic whole to the eye, heart, and understanding alike. ”

— Sclnller .

II

, now, we ask when and where we need the Fine Art of Gardening, must not the answer be, Whenever and wherever we touch the surface of the ground and the plants it bears with a wish to produce an organized result that shall please the eye? The name we usually apply to it must not mislead us into thinking that this art is needed only for the creation of broad “landscape’ ’ effects. It is needed whereever we do more than grow plants for the money we may save or gain by them. It does not matter whether we have in mind a great park or a small city square, a large estate or a modest door-yard : we must go about our work in an artistic spirit if we want a good result. Two trees and six shrubs, a scrap of lawn and a dozen flowering plants may form either a beautiful little picture or a huddled disarray of forms and colors.

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If they form a picture, it will give us the same sort of satisfaction that we get from a good landscape on canvas ; indeed, it w& do more than this, for the living picture will reveal new beauties day by day with the changing seasons, hour by hour with the shifting shadows. But if they form an inharmonious, unorganized mass, they will please us only by the beauty of this detail and that ; and even their details will be intrinsically less delightful than had they formed part of an agreeable general effect. Ruskin defines a good composition as one in which every detail helps the general beauty of effect ; but it may also be defined, conversely, as one which brings out the highest beauty of each of its details.

A glance at any American town or summer-colony of villas shows how deficient we are in artistic feeling when we deal with natural objects. The surroundings of our homes have not improved as rapidly as the homes themselves. Even in these we are still far from a general average of excellence. But I think we are on the right road to reach it. We have learned certain architectural truths, and we respect them theoretically even though we may often err in their application. We do not expect to build a good house without an architect to help us; we do not expect him to begin without a clear idea of the kind of house we want— of the special site it must occupy, the special needs it must fulfil, the special tastes it must meet. We are not content if he designs it by throwing together a number of pretty features regardless of harmony in the result. Nor do we buy our furniture bit by bit as passing whims dictate, or pile it casually about in our rooms. At least there are not so many of us who do these things as there were twenty years ago, and we are all aware that they ought not to be done.

Yet they are just the things which almost everyone does outside his house. If he has ‘ 4 no taste for Nature ’ ’ himself, he puts his grounds into the hands of a gardener, without inquiring whether he has any qualifications beyond a knowledge of how to make plants grow. And if he has such a taste himself, it means, in a great majority of cases, a mere love for being out-of-doors, for planting things, and for watching them develop. Or, at the most, it is apt to mean no more than a taste for Nature’s individual products — a special love for trees, an interest in shrubs, a passion for flowers. The cases are very rare in which it means a taste at all analogous to what we understand by a taste for art ; that is, an appreciation of organized beauty, a love for the charm of contrasting yet harmonizing lines and masses, colors, lights and shadows ; a delight in intelligent design, in details subordinated to a coherent general effect. Yet it is only such a taste as this which means a real feeling for Nature’s beauty, and which can make the surroundings of our homes really beautiful.

We have had some admirable landscape-gardeners in America ; and one of them, Mr. Olmsted, is the greatest living master of his craft, if not the very greatest who has lived since gardening art has dealt with landscapeeffects at all. Naturally these artists are more often asked to manage large problems than small ones. But as yet they are not asked often enough to manage even very important ones ; and when they are, their counsels are seldom rightly respected. They may be permitted to lay out a park or a country-place as they wish, but when once their backs are turned, how quick is parkcommissioner or owner to retouch and spoil, or to neglect and likewise spoil their work ! How seldom does he ask himself what it was that his landscape-gardener really wanted to do, what was the general effect he wanted to produce, and then address himself to developing and preserving it ! We seldom see any park or country-place, great or small, of which we can say, There is everything here that the eye desires, there is nothing that it could wish away. Almost any proprietor would be surprised did we venture to criticise the view from his window upon the same principles that we should apply to a painting on his walls ; and yet, unless it will bear such criticism, it is not what he should have wished to make it.

Of course, only an experienced and capable artist is likely to arrange any extensive gardening scheme with success ; and even

3* the smallest scheme is likely to be more successfully planned and more rapidly perfected under an artist’s eye. Yet if his help is unattainable, there is no reason why the amateur should resignedly fall back upon haphazard ways of working. Any man can try to work in an artistic spirit, even if he cannot rival an artist’s skill in execution. That is to say, no result made up of various elements (even if those elements be the very fewest in number) can be good which is not good as a whole ; to make it good as a whole we must begin by having a clear idea of what sort of a whole we want ; and to begin with such an idea is to work in an artistic spirit, no matter how well or poorly we succeed in giving it beautiful expression. The scheme is the main point— the scheme, and the will to stick to it and not be tempted by the beauty of individual things into frittering away or confusing its effect.

Is it needful to say that working in this spirit we should not only work to better eventual effect, but with greater pleasure at the moment ? To have some appropriate and charming little picture in our minds which we want to realize ; to dispose our ground, and to choose and place our plants, with the requirements of this picture before us — this is to get the highest degree of pleasure from our planting. Nor can it be objected that, when the picture is once arranged, our work and pleasure are over unless it can be perpetually tampered with and disarranged. To the artist in gardening the mutability of Nature is often a heavy cross, since he knows that when his result is considered “ finished, ” he must leave it to others who will permit it (even if they do not aid it) to transform itself into something very different. But the proprietor or gardener who is trying on a modest scale to emulate the artist, finds in this very mutability an assurance of the permanence of his pleasure. Day by day and year by year he can watch the development of his picture, guard against Nature’s disfiguring touches, welcome her happy accidents, and carefully correct and retouch the result himself while preserving its general integrity. And this work will surely be pleasant, for to the scientific satisfaction of the cultivator will be added that highest of all intellectual delights, the consciousness of being a creator in the field of art.

I do not like this use of the words “ artist ” and “amateur” into which I have been driven by our lack of clear descriptive terms. Rightly, an artist is anyone who produces good works of art, and no one else, and an amateur is an intelligent lover of art ; and it is a pity that we must twist the words to mean professional and nonprofessional practitioners of art, irrespective of the merit of their results. I have seen work done by professional “artists” in gardening which disgraces alike the dignity of Nature and the dignity of art ; and I have seen very artistic work done by men who have merely labored upon their own domains, and whose indisputable skill will never be at the public’s service.

It has amused and yet distressed me to find that some of these artists-in-private do not know that they are artists at all, and that most of their friends are astonished if the name is given them. They sometimes think that they are simply “ lovers of Nature.7 ’ They have chanced to learn their art, not in schools, or offices, or books, but face to face with the problem that Nature has set them, the materials that she has supplied, and the lessons that she and her worthy ministrants have explained in other places ; and they do not realize that they have studied at her knee with an artist's eye, and have used her brushes and chisels with an artist’s hand.

I visited not long ago the home of such a man. It is a large place, gradually turned into one by the union of two or three small places which, as first laid out, had no artistic relation to each other. Now it is the most beautiful suburban home I have ever seen. Its grounds have every artistic excellence— breadth, repose, simplicity, and fitness (these first of virtues in all works of gardening), harmony between part and part and between detail and detail, concentration of interest, variety in unity, stimulus for the imagination ; and these excellences did not come by accident, for their names are perpetually on their creator’s lips.

The principles of composition upon which he has worked in beautifying his grounds are the same as those upon which a good landscape-painter works, as regards perspective and composition, color, lights and darks, and light and shadow; and from the outset he had just as keen a sense of the general impression he wished to produce, the sentiment he wished to convey; and at each step just as true a knowledge of the right expedients for compassing his ends. His trees have been planted, cherished, or cut down as they have helped or hurt the general effect of his landscapes, each special landscape formed by his varied woods and lawns and shrubberies and glimpses of water being kept consistent with itself, harmonious with its neighbors, and yet individual in character. His flowers have been placed, not where they would look well when seen only close at hand, but where they would “ tell ” well in the broad pictures they adorn. A pond has been made just where a pond was needed to unite, yet, in a sense, divide, different landscape -passages ; and every foot of ground in its vicinity is perpetually considered, not for itself alone, but for the water’s reflections also — even a great group of poppies high up on a bank at some distance from the pond growing just there in order that a red stain may show on the bosom of the water, near the yellow stain made by great clumps of hardy azaleas. No flower is allowed to stand where its color would not harmonize with adjacent things, and none which is intrinsically ugly in color. And this careful artist takes as much pleasure in finding that the sky-line of his trees is beautiful against a midnight heaven, and that their masses group well under the rays of the setting sun, as though his work had been done on canvas.

I do not know how many of his visitors really appreciate the pictures he has thus created, but, I fancy, very few; and he himself was surprised to be told that the lover or art would be more likely to appreciate them than the “ lover of Nature.” He did not know that he was an artist ; he thought he was only a lover of Nature himself. But all the years he has spent in studying his place, and the works of Nature and of men outside his place ; all his careful energy ; all his wide botanical knowledge and practical acquaintance with the needs of trees and shrubs and grass and flowers, would not have helped him to his beautiful results had he not had the vision of an artist.

This means that he had seen Nature with a particularly keen eye, had studied her details and effects with unwonted enthusiasm as well as knowledge, had loved best her most beautiful products, and had discovered, therefore, that the noblest of all beauties is organized beauty — beauty of general effect. Acting on this feeling, patiently and cautiously, yet boldly too, he has made of his domain a series of luxuriant pictures more perfect than any which Nature herself could paint. For, as I have said, no natural scene can fittingly surround the home of highly civilized people ; and, moreover, every natural scene is marked by certain accidental blemishes— by signs of death and decay at the very least — which detract from the purity, if not from the impressiveness, of its charm. Here, on the contrary, human comfort and convenience have been fully provided for in ways which do not detract from beauty ; and, while the eye asks nothing more, it can wish away no feature or detail from pictures as carefully tended as they have been carefully designed.

This country-place is an example of creative work in a very strict sense. Its beauty is almost altogether artificial. It does not even look natural to any trained eye; it merely looks naturalistic ; and, in truth, none of its features, except in one outlying tract of woodland, stand and grow according to a scheme of Nature’s devising. The soil has always been there, of course; but for two hundred years it had been put. to various human purposes ; its surface has now been a good deal altered, and over much the greater part of it everything it bears has been planted by man. So this place stands at one of the extremes of landscape-gardening art : it is an example of what, under certain conditions, the landscape - gardener ought to do.

But I have in mind another American country-place which is very beautiful too, and which stands at the other extreme : it is an example of what the landscape-gardener ought sometimes to leave undone. It has not been made beautiful, and appropriate for human use, by acts of creation but by acts of elimination and preservation. The pictures it presents have not been composed with materials brought from other spots or grown from planted seeds, but have been carved out of a wild landscape by a judicious use of the axe alone.

This place lies on the shores of Buzzard’s Bay and covers some 1,500 acres. In this wind-swept and sandy region Nature grows, in very charming arrangements, a considerable assortment of beautiful plants ; yet her nursery (as regards its larger products) seems very restricted if we compare it with those she has established in fertile inland districts. Of course this means that it is difficult even to cultivate here the majority of the plants upon which, in inland districts, an artist may depend for varied gardening effects ; where plants do not grow with ease they are always likely to look out of place if man coaxes them to persevere ; and this is doubly true of spots where Nature has contented herself with few species, for such spots have an unusually distinct character of their own, an unusually well-marked individuality.

In such spots what is an owner or his gardener likely to attempt ? Most often to “makeup,” as he would say, for Nature's niggardliness — to supply the deficiencies of her limited nursery. He strives to reproduce, on a soil unfit for the purpose and amid inappropriate surroundings, the varied and luxuriant effect of the average inland country-place. And, as a consequence, he misses the chance to get a good result which would be characteristic of the country-side where he has chosen to make his home, and gets only a bad imitation of results proper to very different regions.

A true artist would go to work in quite another way. He would accept Nature’s frame, outlines, and materials, and paint his pictures according to her local specifications. He would strive to re-unite her “scattered excellences,” but not all of them, and not an assortment chosen at random — only such as she herself might here have brought harmoniously together, and disengaged from encumbering details, were she able to make pleasure-grounds instead of wild landscapes merely. He would respect, preserve, heighten, accentuate, civilize, and yet poetize the natural character of the special site he had chosen, and thus would produce, not only a good work of art but one with a special, local, personal charm, inimitable anywhere else.

And this is just what has been done, by an artist-in-private, with the place I know on the shores of Buzzard’s Bay. It lies very beautifully at the head of the bay, and its water-front, measured in and out along its little headlands and coves, is some six miles in length. When it came into its present owner’s hands it was partly farm-land and partly thick second-growth forest, the woods fringing almost all the little beaches, and, after the lovely local manner, coming down to the very sand with a tangle of shrubs and vines. The house was already built. It is very ugly, and no attempt has been made to mitigate its ugliness by planting. But it fortunately stands on just the right spot, and when a better one replaces it, a few native shrubs set around its foundations will be all that is needed to complete an harmonious picture of what a northern seaside home should be.

On all this big estate no planting whatever has been done except the planting of useful crops in places where they are seen only by those who may seek them out ; and nowhere upon it does there stand a single tree or conspicuous shrub which a gardener would call a “ fine specimen.” Yet it is one of the most satisfying, one of the most artistic, country-places that I can call to mind. No artist would wish it otherwise. Any lover of art would know that it would be ruined by the least attempt at conventional gardening, the smallest importation of florists’ plants. Thousands of trees have been cut down to form the many miles of road, and the roads are scientifically constructed. But their curves through the woods, or along the water’s edge, are as natural-seeming as they are graceful ; and no hand is ever allowed to touch their borders except when the shrubs, which Nature grows here very lavishly, trespass in inconvenient ways upon the roadbed. Many fields which once were cultivated now lie, like lakes of tall grass and wild - flowers, encircled by arms of woodland. But very large clipped lawns have rightly been made around three sides of the house, as it stands on its little promontory, so that the magnificent encircling stretch of sea and distant shore may make its due impression of broad and peaceful beauty.

A few years ago the expanse now covered by these lawns was a tangled mass of stones, bushes, and small trees, with here and there a few trees of larger growth. The labor of clearing was great ; but the natural slopes were fine, and, as I have said, further labor in the way of planting was wisely shunned. In well-chosen positions some groups of oaks and pines and tupelos were left where Nature had put them, and as the winds of many winters had twisted and torn them ; and, seen against the background of blue sea, they are more delightful than the best gardeners’ specimens could be. They are in place, in keeping, in harmony ; they are characteristic of this country-side ; they are fit , and therefore they are rightly artistic in effect. The lawns themselves are not smooth and velvety like those of a Newport villa ; but they are evidently lawns and not meadows, and their comparative roughness is, again, entirely pleasing because entirely appropriate.

And flowers? Somewhere, out of sight of the house and the main drives, near the kitchen-gardens, there is a garden for florists’ flowers. And elsewhere, too, there are flowers in plenty — on the slender shrubs which grow beneath the trees, on the thickets of vines and bushes which border the open stretches of road, all through the grasses of the meadows, and all among the rocks which form the transition from lawns and copses to narrow beaches ; but these are all wild flowers. Nature plants them, and Nature is allowed to grow them as she will ; they may not be roughly handled by man, and neither may their harmonious beauty be disturbed by any of man’s additions.

Here, too, where art has done nothing but disengage, clarify, and preserve, we find the artistic merits which characterize the suburban place where art has planted, composed, created. Here, too, are breadth and unity of effect, repose, simplicity, and consistent character, and yet variety, mystery, contrasts, and surprises. Here, where no professed artist has worked, no botanical or horticultural knowledge has been needed, and no gardener at all is kept, the eye rests upon a work of art ; for Nature has been cajoled into doing real gardening work by the bribe of artistic non-interference on the part of man.

Of course the creation of the one place has needed more knowledge, more time, more skill, and a more experienced taste than what I have called the disengagement of the other. But the second task was, in essence, just as artistic. Blundering execution would have been almost as fatal here as there ; and, besides, the mere conception of such a piece of wrork — the mere choice of aim and method — gave proof of remarkable good taste. It is easier to understand that much must be done than that little may be done and yet a good work of art result ;

and it is a great deal easier, whatever one’s scheme, to work it out too far than sternly to hold one’s hand at just the right moment. I have said that in a work of gardening art, as in a work of architectural art, the plan, the scheme, the fundamental idea, is the main thing, and that this Nature never can supply ; and I have also said that most people, in their gardening, think more of everything else than of a plan. But for this seashore country-place the owner conceived a very beautiful plan ; he has consistently adhered to it while letting Nature do everything else ; and the outcome is a singularly successful, a singularly individual and personal work of art. “I think,” wrote Addison, “ there are as many kinds of gardening as of poetry.” A very beautiful idyllic poem has been written on the face of the suburban country-place which I have tried roughly to describe. But Addison’s further words might well be affixed to the gate-lodge of the place on Buzzard’s Bay : “ You will find that my compositions in gardening are altogether after the Pindaric manner, and run into the beautiful wildness of Nature without affecting the nicer elegancies of art.” Too often, on similar sites, these nicer elegancies are sought, and, mingling with the wild Pindaric local strains which they cannot extinguish, produce an inartistic, because an inharmonious, effect.

I have cited these two cases to show that exceptional men, if they take time and trouble, if they work slowly, carefully, and lovingly enough, may master difficult problems in the art of gardening. And, of course, what can be done on a large scale can more easily be done on a small scale. Nevertheless, it must not be thought that I mean it is wise, on general principles, to dispense with professional help. I mean just the opposite. I have cited these two cases for encouragement ; now, for right instruction, I will say that they are the only two I have ever seen where, without professional help — or at least without the advice of men well experienced in artistic composition of some sort — an amateur has laid out his domain with entire success. Well-designed large country-places, devoid of conspicuous blemishes, are a great deal rarer than well-designed large buildings ; and we can find twenty good villas or cottages for one small stretch of ground which is in any degree an artistic picture. The more a man loves, in an unreasoning way, the works of Nature, the more likely he is to think that he cannot have too many of them in his grounds, and no error is so fatal as this to a good general result. And the stronger his horticultural passion, the more apt he is to care about novelties and eccentricities — about conspicuous plants as such ; and the profuse use of these gives a last fatal touch to the inartistic disorder of the usual overcrowded domain.

No ; we want artists to help us with our grounds as much as to help us with our houses ; and we want them most of all before our houses have been founded or even planned. But when we cannot have them we should try, in a reasoning, intelligent, systematic, and therefore artistic way, to conceive what their aims would be and to follow out their methods. We should decide upon some scheme of design, whether our acres be many or our square rods be few ; make sure that, given our special site and our special tastes, it is a good scheme ; and then consider our plants and other materials, not chiefly for their individual charms, but for their value as factors in the general picture we desire. I fear I shall say this very often ; but if it could be said a hundred times a year to every owner of American ground, it would be a good thing for all the people who live in America.

So

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“ The first law of a painting and of a picture on the soil is to be a whole. . . . Without principles and without discernment one never attains veritable beauty.”

- — Edouard Andre

“ That is best which lieth nearest,

Shape from that thy work of art.”

— Longfellow.

Ill

HE union — a happy marriage it should be — between the house beautiful and the ground near it,” says a recent English writer, “ is worthy of more thought than it has had in the past ; and the best ways of effecting that union artistically should interest men more and more as our cities grow larger, and our lovely English landscape shrinks back from them.”