when you compare with them the trunks of the six-foot sugar pines, which elsewhere you had looked on as forest monarchs, that the size of the sequoias begins to dawn upon you. Where these great trees stand close, the ground is free of undergrowth in their shade, but where the sunshine can filter through to the forest floor, there may be groups of smaller trees and shrubs, dwarfed and insignificant in relation to the sequoias, but forcing the party to wind about among them with the pack animals, seeking a level open place for a camp. Perhaps it is late afternoon when you reach the little bench or basin in the mountainside where the "Big Trees" are growing, and the sun has already sunk behind a ridge to the west. The trunks of the great yellow pines, sugar pines, and Douglas firs, perhaps a hundred feet high and six in diameter, stand in the growing dusk swaying slightly in the evening wind, but above their heads, borne on red-brown trunks immovable as stone towers, the short heavy gnarled branches and the close-massed foliage of the sequoias, green-gold against the darkening blue of the zenith, still catch the evening light. It may aid your understanding to know that these trees were much as they now are when the Norsemen first set foot on this continent, that they were old when Cæsar was born; but even without such helps to the imagination, these trees have a majestic - even an awe-inspiring quality which is more usually the effect of great mountains or of the sea: you feel a sense at the same time of your own utter insignificance and yet of your being a part of a vast, solemn, ordered, and inevitable scheme.* Meadow Any one traveling in the High Sierras inevitably seeks out the The Sierra location of the mountain meadows for the reason that there, and often Mountain only there, can be found sufficient feed for his animals; but beside that use, such a meadow is in itself extremely beautiful, with a fairly definite characteristic beauty.† (See Plate 8.) It may lie so close to the peaks as to occupy the old glacier cirque at the head of a mountain valley, free from snow only a few months of the year, or it may lie anywhere along the course of the stream where a landslide may have made a dam and so eventually a flat of deposited loam. In any case the * Cf. Lafcadio Hearn quotation, Chapter VI, p. 80. Also see chapter, The Sequoia and General Grant National Parks, in John Muir's Our National Parks (1901). † Cf. The Wild Gardens of the Yosemite Park, Muir, ibid. The Bushy striking character of the mountain meadow is the contrast of its brilliant green open level with the barren ragged rocks or with the brown fallen needles under the dark firs of the surrounding slopes, a contrast which gives a special value to the lushness of the plant growth grass and sedge and veratrum - tall in the midst of the meadow where the sun has lain for long, and just springing from the ground at the foot of the retreating snow drift on the southern side of the deep valley or in the shade of the trees. After a long day of travel you may come, toward evening, to the edge of such a meadow. You unpack and unsaddle your animals and turn them loose, to roll and then to start leisurely and comfortably to feed. After your camp is set and your supper under way, you sit and smoke and watch the long shadows of the outstanding groups of taller pines stretch across the meadow, and the smoke of your fire make a level film across the open as the first gentle cold drift of evening wind from the snows carries it down the valley. You hear the gurgle of the stream near your camp, winding from pool to pool between steep earth banks in the flat, and perhaps a whisper from a distant fall in the same stream where it comes down from the snows over the cliff which heads the valley. It is hard to imagine that anywhere there is a natural landscape which has more completely an expression of peace and protection and rest. In one fundamental way the "free landscape" to which most of us are accustomed differs from the examples which we have just been discussing. Although man has not interfered with our ordinary country landscape with the primary intention of changing its esthetic appearance, yet man's activities for other purposes have to a greater or less degree resulted in a distinct landscape character. Take, for instance, the case of the New England bushy pasture.* When the white man came, the land where now the pasture lies was probably woodland. It may have been cleared for purposes of pasturage, or it may have been tilled for some generations after the pioneers first cleared it, and then, with the abandonment of so many of the New England farms, reverted to the less intensive use of pasturage. Where the cattle have grazing ground enough, and where man has not expended the energy * See a section of Charles Eliot's Vegetation and Scenery in the Metropolitan Reservations, 1897, reprinted in Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect, pp. 727–729. to keep the area entirely in grass, such trees and shrubs have found their way in as can protect themselves against the browsing cattle. In New England these plants are noticeably the thorny and bitter things like wild rose and barberry and juniper and red cedar; and perhaps hawthorns, wild apples, and other hardy trees. First in this invasion by the forest come the roses and the red cedars, which the cattle can hardly browse upon at all. When a thicket of such material has established itself, other plants like shad-bush or hawthorn will grow in the midst of it, protected by it from the cattle; or at times plants like wild apples will spring up in the open, and though eaten down every year will gradually grow into so wide a mass that finally from its center, out of reach of the cattle, a vertical stem will start and bear a head of foliage, so producing a series of conical and afterwards vaselike forms. This particular group of circumstances, in which man's activity is a factor, results in an automatic choice of the plant materials in the composition and a consequent production of repeated and fairly definite plant forms, enframing and diversifying what remains of the pasture, giving a definite and recognizable landscape character, and often great pictorial beauty. The pastures most neglected are those outlying on the higher slopes of the hills, and so the typical bushy pasture which the name calls to mind lies high above the orchards and meadows of the valley, framed by the oak and birch and maple of the "wood lot," scattered with outcropping lichened ledges warm in the sun, and patches of sweet-scented fern, and hardhack and brambles concealing the old stone walls, - a landscape plainly once the work of man, but so far received back by nature that man's interference is no longer an incongruity, but rather an added pleasure of association. (See Plate 9.) The English pastoral landscape, like the New England pasture, English had its origin in the clearing of land for economic use, but the land Pastoral Landscape was thereafter thoroughly kept up and made as efficient as possible for a pasture, old large trees being preserved, or new trees being planted, singly or in groups, scattered throughout the rich grassland, to furnish shade for the animals. The foliage of these trees which is within the reach of browsing cattle is very usually destroyed by them, and thus is produced a "browsing line" parallel to the undulating ground surface, a unifying element in the composition, in a sense unnatural but not Design in always displeasing. The lower land, being the better soil, is usually that chosen for open pasture, while the knolls and higher lands are crowned with trees. The short-cropped turf displays to the full the gentle undulations of the ground, accented by the long shadows of the isolated trees and enframed by the adjacent woodland. The esthetic possibilities of these compositions of forest edge and free-standing trees and turfed ground surface appealed to the English people, and in the parks of the great English estates (see Plate 10) this pastoral landscape character was copied, intentionally for its esthetic effect, as a landscape style, which on account of its adaptability to so many of man's uses still forms the basis of much of our modern park and private place design. In studying such landscapes as this we find ourselves in a border land, where it is sometimes a matter of academic definition rather than one of important distinction to say whether the organization of the scene should be called style or character. The landscapes which we have briefly discussed have depended primarily for their character some on ground form, some on vegetation, some, in a relatively slight degree, upon the hand of man. Further consideration of landscape character particularly as it is affected by ground forms will be found in Chapter VIII: Natural Forms of Ground, Rock, and Water as Elements in Design. These examples of landscape characters are but a few out of a great number, not necessarily the most important, but given because they are typical of many, and because the character in each case is distinctive and striking. Each student of landscape will have his own field of experience in this regard, and he may learn reverence for Nature and gain information for use in his own designs from any considerable experience of Nature's works, in whatever part of the globe he may have obtained it.* The greater and more striking examples of Nature's handiwork will serve the designer as inspiration and as training in appreciation, and he may by his knowledge of their peculiar value to the race have the duty and the great opportunity of defending them from destruction. * See Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.'s, application of ideas from tropical scenery to the planting of portions of Central Park, in a letter to Mr. Ignaz A. Pilat, 1863, published in Landscape Architecture, April, 1915, v. 5, pp. 124-133, under the title The Esthetic Value of Tropical Scenery. But the humbler and less striking characters will be those to which he will usually go for models and for materials in his designs, since these will be the forms most commonly lying near the homes of the citybred people for whom he works. His work will be on a small scale relatively to the great free landscape; the character which he will endeavor to produce will be of a less striking sort, and it will therefore be doubly necessary for him to make the expression of this character as complete, as unified, and as distinct as possible. He must be sensitive to feel what character is latent in the more or less inchoate scene on which he is called to work; he must know what of the elements now present are masking this character, and should be removed; he must know what can be added to perfect it without confusing it. But his duty as an artist is not accomplished even when he has achieved this success he is bound also by other laws. He must so arrange his natural materials that, while they express the natural character of the landscape, they also produce harmonies of form, of color, of texture, harmonies of repetition and sequence and balance.* His designs must be, as far as is humanly possible, both interpretations of natural character and effective pictorial compositions. (See Plate 21.) Where the landscape architect is dealing with designs of any considerable size, like parks, or large private estates, he cannot treat the area as one visual unit. Within his total area he must seize upon smaller unities; and therefore he will endeavor to develop each important view as a pictorial composition, and at the same time he will enhance and differentiate the individual landscape character of each separate and subordinate unit of his whole design. He will make a pine wood in one place, an oak wood in another; here he will steepen his brook to make a cataract, there restrain it to make a pool. He will cut out a group of trees in one place which interrupts the openness of his valley floor, and he will plant trees in another place to segregate a little woodland pool from the rest of the landscape. To increase the apparent height of a rocky ledge, he will remove débris from its base, and perhaps destroy some large and coarse-leaved plants and replace them with small rock-loving ferns appropriate to the situation and enhancing the naturalness, the scale, and the beauty of the ledge; * Cf. Chapter VII, p. 89. |