Shingles took the place of thatch, wooden construction throughout, since wood was so plenty, replaced the part stone construction of a land where wood was dear; but there are to-day a considerable number of English wooden cottages which might almost stand as models of the houses of the Pilgrims. Within a very few years, there were gardens around these houses in the new land; but although here there was ground enough, necessity for defense and economy of labor in cultivation of the none too fertile soil still kept the garden small and near the house and restricted the flowers to a few hardy plants, mostly serving also some medicinal or household use, in a border along the paths in a garden otherwise devoted to vegetables and fruit, or as a decoration of the front dooryard,- a bit of fragrance and color and a reminder of the old gardens whence their seed had been brought. In later times when the prosperous merchants of Salem and Newburyport and Portsmouth and Boston built their houses which are still the much-copied examples of New England colonial architecture, their gardens did not depart far from the style of those their great grandfathers had built. (See Plate 5.) The white-painted wooden picket fence and the latticed vine arbors found their prototypes in the English gardens, though rarely were the English structures so refined in detail; the pear-tree bordered walks and the area of lawn and box-bordered flower beds and vegetable garden lying close together, or often indeed forming part of one simple design, were all what their owners still could see when they returned to the mother country; and the flowers, the trees, the box bushes had probably most of them come directly from England as did in the early days the bricks of the houses themselves. The colonial gardens of New England are different in style from the cottage gardens of England not because the owners had different ideals of design, but because their surroundings in the new world forced upon them a different choice of material and eventually a different method of life.* Previous to the very modern national consciousness of the German The Modern empire, there has been in Germany nothing which could fairly be called German Formal * Cf. Grace Tabor's Old-fashioned Gardening, a History and a Reconstruction, in Style which Chapter V, Austere Puritan Gardens, treats this one of the five styles of American colonial gardens which she differentiates. (See REFERENCES.) an independent historic style of landscape design, unless, perhaps, we should except the cottage gardens. Just as English cottages and their gardens had an unconscious similarity of form due to similar conditions, there is a recognizable similarity of construction, though to a less degree, among German cottages and gardens, and indeed some modern German designers are finding part of their present inspiration in this old work.* But the long-continued turbulence and destruction to which Germany has been subject has left to modern times but comparatively few examples of such prototypes. In larger designs, such recognizable style as there has been in Germany has been first the Dutch, then the style of Le Nôtre, then that of the "Englischer Garten." In many cases these styles in Germany appeared in ill-considered imitations of their originals; but as disciples of the landscape school, Germany has shown in Hirschfeld, Sckell, and Prince Pückler von Muskau a conception of naturalistic design which worthily matched the work of Repton and Price, and largely inspired the naturalistic ideals of Petzold and of such a presentday writer as Camillo Karl Schneider.† The modern German conscious seeking for national expression in every field has had its influence on German landscape architecture notably in the production of a formal style of landscape design, intentionally different from any style which has gone before. In many another style the artist has consciously adapted his means to his ends to express the ideal which seemed to him of most worth, but here for the first time landscape designers have gone deliberately to work to determine what their national ideal ought to be and then logically deduced what means should be employed for its attainment. To be sure, there is easily traceable a strong influence from English landscape designs, but it has been accepted in general principle rather than adopted exactly in any part, and the result is certainly an independent *For instance see Schultze-Naumburg's Kulturarbeiten, and the Introduction by J. A. Lux to Volkstümliche Kunst, Ansichten von alten heimatlichen Bauformen, Land- und Bauernhäusern, Höfen, Gärten. . . Photographisch aufgenommen von Martin Gerlach. (1904.) † See his Landschaftliche Gartengestaltung, p. 4. (See REFERENCES.) Especially through the writings and designs of Hermann Muthesius. (See REFERENCES.) style. The modern German formal landscape work seems to show, to the non-German, the weakness as well as the strength of its conception of design. In the smaller private places where the needs and the life of the owner can be definitely known, the adaptation of the different parts of the scheme each to its use, the arrangement of these parts for economic efficiency, is usually excellent, and where the designer has been blessed by nature with a sensitiveness to beauty of form, the proportions and arrangements of these parts are often consistent and beautiful. But especially in parks where the form of the design has been made to depend on its obvious and economic functions, with no consideration for the lightness of touch that comes from a certain waywardness, the result seems, esthetically, uninspired. In decoration, particularly in the choice of statuary and similar features, indeed in all that part of landscape design where the choice of form is a matter of esthetic sensitiveness rather than economic adaptation, the modern German feeling that a German must be different from other men in his nature and in his needs has found an interesting expression. In the landscape work of the past, the modern designer has an infinity of examples of forms adapted by artists to the various needs of man, esthetic and economic, the results of centuries of experiment and refinement. When, as has been the case in some of the modern German work, a designer attempts to meet these same needs for in effect they are the same throughout all time — by some conscious independent invention of his own, his work is likely to seem, as much of this German decorative work seems to most non-Germans and to some of the Germans themselves-grotesque or childish or at best crude. In another respect the Prussian cast of mind has impressed itself recognizably upon this new design. In private estates, in parks large and small, in other public designs, and recently in cemeteries, the Prussian impatience of anything indefinite and not to be accurately codified has produced a leaning to formality of design to the exclusion of other possible solutions of some of the problems. This formality has been the more insisted on in the smaller private places, because it lends itself to the typical German care and method of up-keep, and because, in the usual rectangular lot, such an arrangement is the least wasteful of land, The Japanese and because the national habit of sitting outdoors and eating and drinking in a leisurely way makes of the grounds about a house a number of outdoor rooms actually much used, for which use the rectangular forms are the more convenient. And there is a very just feeling among German designers, helped doubtless by this use of the grounds, that the house and its surroundings are all part of one architectural scheme and should be so treated for esthetic as well as economic reasons. (See Drawing VIII, opposite.) The considerable amount of garden architecture and garden furniture required shelters and arbors, seats and tables makes more necessary and more easy the architectural treatment of the ground. The national habit of congregating of an evening in some quiet and orderly concert-garden or beer-garden has produced a multitude of these places, the design of which, for practical reasons, is almost invariably formal. All these considerations have probably had their effect on the design of the German park. Those parks which serve the purpose of playgrounds are, in fitness to their use, formal; but some of the much larger parks, which in this country would be treated naturalistically, still are affairs of open level turf or gravel and straight lines of equi-spaced trees, usually without any attempt to make this formality tell for grandeur as in the French formal style, but being rather an economic fitting of each area to its use and up-keep, and an arrangement of all the available area of ground so that nothing may be wasted. The fact that the topography of these formal parks is often flat has evidently also been a contributing cause to this formality. As in the case of another self-conscious expression, the Romantic landscape style, this German formalism has been accompanied by propagandist literature, of which Leberecht Migge in his recent book Gartenkultur des XX. Jahrhunderts (1913),* is an advanced exemplar. What is to be the future of the Gartenkultur and Gartentypen which he so earnestly recommends for Germany, and apparently also for the rest of the world, will depend, however, on their fitness in use, on their adaptability to the actual needs of men. Arising many centuries earlier than the landscape school of Western Europe and under a quite different civilization, the styles of Japanese landscape design nevertheless have something in common with the * See REFERENCES. |