Landscape gardening is eminently a fine art. All of the painting, sculpture and architecture as a fine art are seriously deficient yet they have a wide currency. Fine art is that which endeavors to create organized beauty—to unite several dissimilar parts into one harmonious whole. In this respect, landscape art stands on a level with the other, more obvious fine arts. In some other respects it even surpasses them.

This art is also known as landscape architecture. Landscape architecture is the term often used by professional workers in America, although ''landscape engineering" and "landscape design" are also occasionally used. All these different titles for practically the same thing are a bit of a nuisance.

There has been some controversy as to which should be the official term, but so far the argument has gone nowhere. The average person should just regard all these names as synonymous, although the “professional” may want to differentiate, for whatever reason.

In simpler times, the word "gardening" was a sufficient title for this type of art, especially the style of gardening known as the natural, or English, method. This would still be the most convenient word if we could dissociate it from the growing of cabbages and parsnips; but that seems impossible with us now.

The main problem with the other titles is that they are too long, and have a pretentious sound to them. They give off the image of princely and magnificent landscaping for parks, villas and hunting grounds, ignoring the small, domestic yards that most people are concerned with. This is the difficulty we would avoid if we could just call it "gardening".

Landscape gardening does, however, have consideration for these problems; in fact it is mostly for the sake of these smaller things that we need to study the principles.

Everybody should try to understand the methods and aims of landscape art - such as decorative and functional garden fountains, just as they attempt to understand literature. Good taste in gardening will reward with as much pleasure as good taste in architecture, poetry or music.

And just as you may cultivate good taste in literature without deigning to become a professional writer, so can you properly educate your taste for landscape gardening with no expectation of becoming a landscape gardener.

Gardening art offers this advantage to its lovers: that they can enjoy it wherever they are, and they can even dabble themselves for a lower price compared with painting or sculpting. A single mother who has hardly enough money to pay the bills is able to grow geraniums in her windows and to have a pretty bed of marigolds and phloxes in the yard.

The opportunities to cultivate a taste for this sort of landscape art lie all about us, while to only a few comes the freedom of art galleries and exhibitions.

"Landscape gardener," "landscape architect," "landscape artist," and "gardener" all have and obvious relation to the terms already mentioned. Whatever they may be called, the practitioners of the art are artists. They may be good or bad; they would face the same outcomes if they were painting.

We need to differentiate because the obsession of our age is science—something quite different from art. Thousands of people have been sleeplessly trying to reduce every human activity and emotion to science. Many have tried to place gardening upon a scientific basis.

Maybe this works for the commercial production of onions, or even of hothouse roses, but the making of beautiful landscapes is an art, not science, and if we are to understand it at all we must keep these ideas separate.