Landscape architects will say that fresh projects, either hardscaped or planted,
commonly require a settling in period to look good. Through rainfall, sun and
growth, however small, nature has its way of rooting the manmade in its context.
The most powerful landscapes are not merely well designed, but also those
found as part of nature or where the lines between what was inserted by man
and the natural occurring become blurred.
There are, broadly speaking, three categories of landscape projects.
The first is the simple garden; a single roomed space bounded almost strictly by
the provisions of a land title, the simple garden can be established fairly quickly
and without the need to accommodate the scale demanded by old growth.
The next is the estate; established as either a single entity or as a collection
of gardens, estates have the privilege of claiming the long vista as its own,
since the cumulative effect of its legal boundaries permit framing of views and
linked garden space The last is the epic landscape: less constructed than it is
delineated, epic landscapes are most usually instituted as national parks or
forests: its legal boundaries are blurred since the borrowed landscape claims
gardens, estates and the horizon as its own.
There are, strictly speaking, three categories of landscapes. Each have similar
elements within, be it ponds or trees, fields or lawns, squirrels and birds. What
makes them each different is the element of scale.
The epic landscape is not merely so for regard of its sheer scale. It is so for the
reason we protect it for the future since experience of it would be beyond us
were these to be begun in our lifetimes...
And because only time answers the questions of scale.