A home perched on a hillside or mountaintop gets complete privacy as well as a mountain view. (See Plate 2.) These days, homes are being built on the edges and even in the midst of the American desert. The sand and rock, mountain and basin, of the desert, in all its changing moods and colors, enter into the garden design and become a part of it. And probably this is what the people who live there like most about their environment. They moved to the desert to gain both privacy and a view.
Privacy. In other instances, a sense both of space and vista and of privacy are mutually exclusive. If we gain one, we lose the other. Anyone with a garden in an urban or semi-urban area, where houses are relatively close together, and who insists on freedom to enjoy his house and garden as he pleases, will require some kind of enclosure. Fences limit his view but substitute for it a sense of personal freedom. This is certainly a desirable effect that becomes necessary as we live more and more in our "outside room." It is, in fact, more democratic to put up a wall, fence, hedge, or plant screen than to live constantly within the sight and sound of our neighbors. With no privacy in our garden we feel constrained and inhibited by fears of annoying our neighbors or of incurring their disapproval. But by simply erecting a barrier the problem is solved. Each may now live his life as he sees fit, with no interference from or disturbance of the people next door. Enclosure also induces a pleasing effect of repose and tranquillity by cutting out distracting outside noises and sights (see Plate 3). Finally, it defines the limits of a garden, just as a frame sets off a painting, thereby enhancing its beauty.
Color Plate 3. Nature and art met here six hundred years ago when this garden was first created. Since then, the trees have passed through more than one generation of planting. Through the high overhead limbs the light filters through to the ground, providing the partial shade that is the perfect condition for the moss that now holds sway. But the hand of man, though ever so lightly applied, is still at the controls. (View from Koin-zan, Saiho-ji, Kyoto.)
Color Plate 4. This is not a wild, wooded glade. It is a gentle land scape constructed about six hundred years ago as a "stroll garden'' for a temple built at the foot of a wooded hill. The ground cover is moss of many species, which long ago took over from the rocks set in the banks of the pond and a long its paths. The trees are principally pines, maples, and evergreen oaks interspersed with spring -flowering trees and shrubs and bamboo. (Soiho-ji, Kyoto.)
Age & Antiquity. A sense of age and antiquity is another garden effect. We love to feel that things embody tradition and continuity with the past. We thereby gain roots. It is an assumption of dignity and substance, of a well-established place in our society. We treasure our antiques. An old house or a venerable landmark evokes a kind of nostalgia in us. We have the feeling that we would like to live there, if not to possess it. (See Plates 175, 187, 188, 194, and 197.)
Rhythm of Nature. We see the imperishable, the never-ending rhythm of nature manifested in the elemental forces which are always at work even in the most insignificant details of a garden. Thus, after a long, cold winter we are reassured of nature's power and cyclic beat on first seeing the tender buds of the crocus pushing their heads up through the residual snows of March and April. It is a promise of the renewal of the seasons. Equally heartening is the feeling we experience standing in a grove of California's giant redwood sequoia, listening to the wind sighing through the towering treetops.
Imagination. A garden which stirs the imagination has precious vitality. This effect requires that everything not be revealed to complete view from any single vantage point. The spectator is left to imagine what lies behind a hedge, a turn of the path masked by an artful arrangement of shrubs and rocks, the winding thread of a murmuring brook whose banks can be only partially seen from any one point in the garden, a lake whose shoreline is indented by rocky inlets, or the depths of a woodland glade, dark and shady in some parts and light and sunny in others (see Plates 4 and 12).
In quite another way the imagination may be stirred through the perception of materials in the garden, formed into abstract designs, or, on a small scale, made to symbolize grand features of the natural landscape (see Plates 11 and 87 ).
2. Some Human
Principles
A STROLL in a garden affects our senses of touch, sight, sound, and smell. The sense of touch is affected by feelings of muscular activity and memories of tactile sensations. So is it also with sound and sight and smell, recalling memories from the past. These sensations stimulate perceptions, which then lead on to the formation of intellectual concepts. These three compose the materials of our imagination. The pleasure of a sensation is determined by its duration, intensity, and character. We derive pleasure from perception by discovering esthetic harmonies and unities, while pleasure in intellection arises from relating our concepts.
Any design to be successful must stimulate recognition of the universality of experience. This applies to gardens as well as to other works of art. A successful garden then must satisfy certain needs felt by the people who use it. These needs are for logical, economic, esthetic, and spiritual unity. They require the presentation of truth, the satisfaction of a physical need, the apprehension of a complete esthetic totality, and finally man's identification with nature and his God.
Logical Unity. We love to look at things that are logical, the reflections of truth, and the realities of our environment and daily lives. We respect sincerity and abhor falseness. We appreciate what we can understand and feel and know, but we hate to be fooled. We want genuine things about us. If we have to choose between artificial roses, no matter how beautifully and artfully they are contrived, and a bed of modest violets, we would still prefer the latter. We reject sham and look for what is real.
Economic Unity. When we seek the satisfaction of a physical need we are simply choosing what we can put to use. This is economic unity which is easily grasped. We tend to select what makes sense and has for us some practical value, and we discard the senseless and useless. Thus, for example, a young family needs a simple garden where the growing children can play without the parents' worrying that they are ruining the garden and with the least risk of injury to the children. In such circumstances a fish pond or intricate flower and shrubbery arrangements would be disastrous. Or, a retired couple who love to work in their garden need a place which will challenge their creative energies, providing a happy way to pass the time that hangs heavy in retirement. Physical needs vary with the individual, but a good garden that satisfies these needs, whatever they be, has economic unity.
Esthetic Unity. We want our garden also to have esthetic unity. It must be a composition that affords pleasure in the beholding because we can immediately appreciate, consciously or unconsciously, harmonious relations in the color, texture, shape, size, attitudes, and intervals of its parts. Stated subjectively, it is a harmony of interest and not merely of objects or characteristics.
If a garden has logical and economic unity but not esthetic unity, it is not a real garden. Art is the missing factor. Design, of course, is not hard and fast. It varies with each project which has its own conditions—the objective ones of the site and the subjective ones of the people who will live on it. In his book Landscape for Living, Garrett Eckbo recognizes how esthetic unity may be captured when he writes:
"Our theory then must point the way to good form in the landscape; but it cannot define it rigidly, on an exclusive, selected basis, with dogma and formulae, rules and regulations,, precedents and measured drawings. We must base ourselves upon a flexible understanding and assimilation of those basic questions of scale, proportion, unity, variety, rhythm, repetition, which have been the primary guides for good men in all fields in all times and places."
Spiritual Unity. Going one step further, granted that a garden
