be appropriated.

If a landscape is a picture, it must have a canvas. This canvas is the
greensward. Upon this, the artist paints with tree and bush and flower
as the painter does upon his canvas with brush and pigments. The
opportunity for artistic composition and design is nowhere so great as
in the landscape garden, because no other art has such a limitless field
for the expression of its emotions. It is not strange, if this be true,
that there have been few great landscape gardeners, and that, falling
short of art, the landscape gardener too often works in the sphere of
the artisan. There can be no rules for landscape gardening, any more
than there can be for painting or sculpture. The operator may be taught
how to hold the brush or strike the chisel or plant the tree, but he
remains an operator; the art is intellectual and emotional and will not
confine itself in precepts.

The making of a good and spacious lawn, then, is the very first
practical consideration in a landscape garden.

The lawn provided, the gardener conceives what is the dominant and
central feature in the place, and then throws the entire premises into
subordination to this feature. In home grounds this central feature is
the house. To scatter trees and bushes over the area defeats the
fundamental purpose of the place,--the purpose to make every part of
the grounds lead up to the home and to accentuate its homelikeness.

A house must have a background if it is to become a home. A house that
stands on a bare plain or hill is a part of the universe, not a part of
a home. Recall the cozy little farm-house that is backed by a wood or an
orchard; then compare some pretentious structure that stands apart from