Conditions It is to be noticed that landscape effects often depend objectively Effects from on transitory conditions like light and shade, hour of day, weather, and Transitory season. (See again Plate 20, and also Plate 11.) A landscape of rocky upland country about a mountain tarn might be mysterious in a day of low-drifting clouds, stern or desolate in a storm, and perhaps on a bright breezy spring morning even gay. Effects In the larger landscape designs which are necessarily divided into Harmony and Contrast in a number of separate scenes,* and where the observer comes to one scene with the memory of the previous scene still fresh in his mind, it is to be noticed that this memory is practically the landscape effect of the previously beheld scene, and that therefore in the total effect of the whole design the sequence and the nature of the subordinate effects must be a matter of careful study.† A broad outlook from a hillside is well led up to by a walk through a deep and gloomy wood. The quality wherever the eye seeks to penetrate the depths of the wood; while in other parts the undergrowth has been so completely removed that the eye ranges freely in every direction amongst a rather monotonous succession of bare trunks and through them to the open spaces or to the buildings that lie beyond. In either case there is a loss of that enticing mystery and that feeling of indefinite extension inviting one to wander from glade to opening glade which forms one of the most charming and refreshing qualities of sylvan scenery. . . . Glades of turf with moss and other low ground cover plants, free from bush and brambles that impede the foot and from foliage at a height that obstructs the vision, ought to lead into the woods like narrow extensions of the adjoining meadows, disappearing out of sight around a bend of denser undergrowth on either side in a manner to invite exploration, branching irregularly into other glades, widening here and there as the disposition of the larger trees may suggest, forming at some points dark shady tunnels that widen out beyond into sunny but secluded openings in the heart of the woods. There is need of skilfully developing intricacy, mystery and harmonious variety in the composition of glades and thickets, and of light within the shade; and at the same time and by the same means of developing such conditions as will lead great numbers of people to wander in comfort and safety through the pleasant labyrinth." From F. L. Olmsted, Jr.'s unpublished report to the City Plan Commission, Detroit, Mich., March 19, 1915. * See Chapter V, p. 71. "Gardening indeed possesses one advantage, never to be equalled in the other art [architecture]: in various scenes, it can raise successively all the different emotions." Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, from Chapter XXV, Gardening and Architecture. Effects in lively cascade is set off by the still pool below it. The effects of the quiet open landscape in one part of a great park and the meeting-place for crowds in another part are each heightened by the presence of the other. The shady pergola at the end of a garden, the sunlit open flower beds around the central fountain, are each the more attractive for the contrast the other affords. Any natural feature sufficiently unified to have a character will have thereby its own effect. In some cases, this effect, this spirit of the scene, will seem a definite individuality. This is particularly true of waterfalls, which have so much in form, in motion, in setting, to make them individual. This is well exemplified by the three falls shown in Plates 12, 13, and 14, which, although they all lie not far apart on the same river, are still strikingly different in their expressions. In a varied natural landscape, particularly that of a mountainous country, the sequence of natural characters produces its corresponding sequence of effects, each enhanced in the mind of the beholder by the memory of the others. Take for instance what a man may see who climbs a peak in the Alps. He starts in the early morning from his room in the little Swiss village in the sheltered valley, and walks in the halflight through the narrow crooked street between the overhanging houses where people are just astir. Presently he comes out on the open grassland, steep, sidelong, clinging to the hill, but every foot of it either used for pasturage or cut for hay for winter fodder. Then he enters the deep spruce woods, still cold with the night air before the coming of the sun, and goes upward along the valley of a mountain brook, following first a road down which the wood for the village is hauled, and then a path which scales the head wall of the brook valley. As he comes over its crest, he finds himself above the wood and for the first time in the morning sun, and he sees across the lower open ridges of rock and snow the peak which he means to reach. For two or three hours he goes upward, over slopes of rock and sparse grass and then through snow which, first lying in wisps on the north sides of bowlders, soon covers all the ground and stretches in furrowed fields toward the foot of the peak. Looking down, he sees the village from which he has come, a group of toy houses on a patch of green velvet grassland, still |