The Garden As a Picture

Part 1

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.

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.

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