LANDSCAPE GARDENING


The subject to-night is a very pretentious one, for no one would expect
boys and girls to be landscape gardeners. But many boys and girls have
excellent taste and taste is the foundation stone of landscape
gardening. This work has often been likened to the painting of a
picture. Your art-work teacher has doubtless told you that a good
picture should have a point of chief interest, and the rest of the
points simply go to make more beautiful the central idea, or to form a
fine setting for it. Look at that picture over Miriam's head. See that
lone pine, the beautiful curve of the hillside, the scrub undergrowth
about the tree, the bit of sky beyond! As soon as one looks at that
picture one's eye rests on the pine, and the other features seem to
appear afterward.

"So in landscape gardening there must be in the gardener's mind a
picture of what he desires the whole to be when he completes his work.
Take, for example, your school grounds. You did a bit of landscape work
there, although we never called it that before. The little schoolhouse
itself was our centre of interest. How could we fix up the grounds so
that the little building should have a really attractive setting? That,
I believe, was the thought in each of your heads, although no one of you
ever put this into words.

"Notice now with me the good points about that work, and from this study
we shall be able to work out a little theory of landscape gardening.

"First there is a good extent of lawn about the building, the path to
the door is slightly curved and pleasingly so, a fine little maple