Landscape Gardening: A Definition.
SOME of the Fine Arts appeal to the ear, others to the eye. The latter are the Arts of Design, and they are usually named as three—Architecture, Sculpture and Painting. A man who practices one of these in any of its branches is an artist; other men who work with forms and colors are at the best but artisans. This is the popular belief. But in fact there is a fourth art which has a right to be rated with the others, which is as fine as the finest, and which demands as much of its professors in the way of creative power and executive skill as the most difficult. This is the art whose purpose it is to create beautiful compositions upon the surface of the ground.
The mere statement of its purpose is sufficient to establish its rank. It is the effort to produce organic beauty—to compose a beautiful whole with a number of related parts—which makes a man an artist; neither the production of a merely useful organism nor of a single beautiful detail suffices. A clearly told story or a single beautiful word is not a work of art—only a story told in beautifully connected words. A solidly and conveniently built house, if it is nothing more, is not a work of architecture, nor is an isolated stone, however lovely in shape and surface. A delightful tint, a graceful line, does not make a picture; and though the painter may reproduce ugly models he must put some kind of beauty into the reproduction if it is to be esteemed above any other manufactured article—if not beauty of form, then beauty of color or of meaning or at least of execution. Similarly, when a man disposes the surface of the soil with an eye to crops alone he is an agriculturist; when he grows plants for their beauty as isolated objects he is a horticulturist; but when he disposes ground and plants together to produce organic beauty of effect, he is an artist with the best.
Likeness Causeth Liking
Numerous myrmecologists have studied the reciprocal behavior of ants and plant-lice (aphids) which, in the course of evolution, seem to have become finely adapted to one another. Certainly, the behavior of both kinds of creatures is altered in each others’ presence. Nutritious food services have become readily available to ant species which extract honeydew from the excrement of the lice.
Aphids, by sinking their extended proboscis into the vascular tissue of the plants, gain direct access to their juices, and exude through the anus the surplus of the digested sap they have taken in. The liquid is rich in sugar (although poor in nitrogen). The worker ants crave to drink the unutilized, undigested honeydew. Their access to this nourishment is thus indirect: they “milk” the aphids; this means that the ants pat the abdomen of the aphids with their antennae tips, a tickling which causes the lice to exude a drop of syrup. Aphids thus managed by ants thrive. Little wonder that Linnaeus called the aphids ants’ cows.
Nobody quite understands why, instead of devouring the aphids, the foraging ants treat them with ritual courtesy insuring, in general, their survival. The way the ant massages the aphid resembles the way that it habitually begs for food from a nestmate. Intraspecific food-sharing behavior in Formica—how donor or acceptor initiates the sequence leading to regurgitation—has been analyzed in impressive detail, and it is now known that the pattern is a nearly universal one among Formicidae. What still remains uncertain is how the habit became extended into a setting involving two vastly different species.
Image-Words
It is generally believed that the “social function of communication is the ensuing of continuity through access to the experiences and ideas of the past, expressed in [loosely speaking] symbols for transmission across space and through time. This is the ‘time-binding’ function of social communication” (Neelameghan 1979:103). Man’s time-binding ability arises from his usage of “language, number, gesture, picture and other symbolic forms” enabling him to transcend the limitations of inherited characteristics and the seemingly insurmountable barrier of “time.” It should be noted, in passing, that an era will come when messages vitally important to the race, affecting its survival, will be transmissible by microsurgical intervention with man’s molecular blueprint, but the technology required for this form of temporal communication is far from available yet.
Thomas Sebeok, I Think I Am A Verb, 152, (1987).
We are, for better or worse, stuck with communicating primarily through words, images, and gestures.. Jogged by a post at 2 Blowhards, I wanted to jot down a relevant bit from Sebeok regarding “messages” crossing the supposed divide behind linguistic and alinguistic communication. I have long suspected that it’s a matter of inflection rather than any alteration or intermingling of codes between media. Even the sense of smell can get into the act:
