The gardened grounds around my house over which I have domain are about a half acre in size. However, the setting is enlarged by a near acre-sized pond adjacent to half of the back area of my property, a part under which I also “own”, and an extensive hill rising from the rest of the back border covered with nature’s collection of this and that woody deciduous growth, both the visually exceptional and its substory junk. Supported by the careful placement of mostly conifers, I have been able to suggest the entire visual space is within my garden world.
Positioning plants in the landscape garden is to the eye ideally what positioning notes by classical composers is to the ear.
There are many tricks attached to any of the visual arts, especially the art form most revered throughout human history, the art of the landscape garden. PARADISE in the dreams of nearly every culture anywhere and anytime in human recordings is a LANDSCAPE GARDEN.
Yet, Landscaping at the university where ever, is not taught as an art form, but as a matter of maintenance. Therefore, the university in our time, dictates landscape teachings from coast to coast as a maintenance industry. The university is the dead end for individual creativity within any art form when success and/or failure is determined by “can’t do bureaucrats” lecturing about art and things associated.
We live in a new era where beauty has disappeared from our vocabulary and challenge. If something is deemed “beautiful”, something else is caused to be “less beautiful”, a grievous sin in our days of Political Correctness teachings and policing.
Ugliness inspires ugliness. One learns to create things beautiful from ones eye, from ones ear, and above all from ones soul.
The easiest of all art forms to impress beauty upon the soulful or the soulless is the art causing sounds through the aural passages “invented” by Beethoven, Handel, Verdi, Wagner, Mozart, and the like, who made their living overwhelming their followers by creating the drug of beauty for the ear. (Most classical music available through public radio is NOT beautiful, for most music called “classical” has been composed without intention to capture or crown with beauty.
Logically, if some things are equally beautiful, they are equally ugly. It is the artistry of the artist to capture the victim’s, that is, the listener’s ear and soul as he sees fit.
Among the most beautiful sounds of loneliness ever capturing the human ear comes from the middle movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Other moods are conquered by other sounds of beauty. Have you ever heard a live, first class performance of Karl Orff’s Carmina Burana? Handel’s Messiah? There are many roads to beauty. For shame that you have lived in a culture going from birth to death unaware, ignoring and disdaining, unable to seek such unsurpassed, classical creations inspiring beauty. That great art arrived from the human brain, should never be forgotten. That it no longer arrives in our times should tell us something about today’s human animal’s brain.
Throughout the existence of mankind, the landscape garden was supposed to be a classical art form, a paradise ideally designed to stimulate thought, memory, escape from the trials of the day to inspire the soul through the eye supported by sound, touch and smell for those entering its ‘sacred’ grounds.
Yet, we still live in the same modern American world when no one seems to know or care much about beauty, the enemy of political correctness emanating from our universities.
Not all of the photos at our Masterpiece home page are beautiful or equally beautiful. Most are at least okay, an improvement for a particular setting for a particular cost. We create our grounds by distributing the plants we believe will cause either inspiration or visual comfort and harmony either by collections or by units depending upon the wishes of our clients.