The Formal Landscape
Little in American life today is formal. Yet most of our Minnesota home landscapes are still designed, if they are designed at all, more or less formally. Early Minnesota city & town streets and lots were plotted by newcomers from Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England. Streets were straight and lots were rectangular. Houses for most buyers were boxy and had to be built fast! The Vikings were coming!
One of the texts of the day which easterners brought with them was “Beautifying the Suburban Home Grounds”, a text to “aid persons of moderate income” to help them “make gems of home beauty on a small scale”. “Suburban” meant a part of the city to be built not as rural or congested as in the existing urban areas but as an ideal community of “reasonably” priced lots on 50-foot front by 200-foot depth to some 200-foot by 300-foot lots for “commodious” houses and “suburban homes with stables and gardens”. These are to be located “within easy walking distances from business where men of congenial taste and friendly families may make purchases and cluster their improvements so as to obtain all the benefits of rural pleasures and many of the beauties of park scenery without relinquishing the luxuries of town life”.
As a mark of displaying the civilized rather than the wild, and influenced by the grid patterns of city streets, the home landscape would generally become a formal design where plants to decorate the house would be arranged more or less in geometric patterns; straight lines (hedges, tree lines, foundation plantings), triangles, circles, or groupings of threes and fives and guided by some unwritten rule that what is placed on the right must be placed on the left. Here is where your “graph paper, pencil, and ruler” method of landscape design could be helpful.
When well designed, the formal landscape makes its greatest impact upon the visitors’ first view of the grand pattern. For decades the beauty of the stately, uniformly pruned American Elms formally lining the streets of Minnesota towns and cities declared to richer and poorer these communities were civilized and the people here lived in harmony.
(For a review of the idealized natural landscape garden setting, click on The Landscape Garden on our Home Page.) Call us at Masterpiece for an artistic review of your grounds, business or residential…..952 933 5777 .