SINCE landscape design is primarily the arrangement of land for use, planning must precede planting. The two must be integrated, the one to serve as a basis for the other. Too often the beginner starts with planting and proceeds no further. Then, after the planting is done, he finds that the basic design and construction are difficult to accomplish.

Too many places are merely planted. When this happens we soon become dissatisfied with our efforts and wonder why they lack interest and charm. These qualities are not accidents but the result of well composed garden pictures. A friend of ours, a careful gardener, had arranged her borders so that they presented a lovely color display. Her husband, not a gardener, remarked, "How nice it is that so many things hap pen to bloom in our garden at the same time." "Happen," said she, "Happen indeed! What do you think I've been doing all spring with charts, diagrams, seedlings, and plants?"

Plants have to be carefully selected for definite purposes and placed properly to achieve any sort of landscape composi tion worth looking at. Not until we have designed our land scape pattern are we ready for planting design. Not before, or at the same time, but after. We emphasize this because so many people fail to realize it. They start to plant around the new home before they have designed the circulation, or the areas, or provided for the various activities.

Perhaps Americans have always been too horticulturally minded in their gardening like the English who grow plants superbly but too often arrange them in gardens carelessly, and unlike the French who design on a magnificent scale and care little about the plants they use. There ought to be a mid dle ground. Design must be good, but so must our gardening or else the whole project fails.

Landscape design, like architecture, has moved a long way from the Victorian era of the iron stag and the bed of cannas on the lawn. The contemporary fashion is for simple, broad effects, easy to take care of. Color is considered garish if there is no adequate background for it or segregation from the rest of the landscape. The effectiveness of broad expanses of well kept lawn to serve as foreground for floral displays is fully appreciated. The use of intricate garden patterns, except where more than the usual amount of labor is available, is discouraged. This does not make gardens any less effective, since we have learned to create simple pictures and lovely color harmonies that do not need intricate designs.