Lake

See also: Pond

History

The terms lake, pond, and, to a lesser extent, “pool,” were used to describe still-water features in garden settings in American landscape writing. Distinctions between them were not consistently made in dictionaries, treatises, or usage examples, and several of these sources used them synonymously. William Bartram, for instance, used the terms “lake” and “pond” interchangeably when describing Lake George, Ga., in 1791. Nehemiah Cleaveland, in his 1847 guide to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, N.Y., was also undecided as to whether the bodies of water of “different size and shape” were either small lakes or ponds. A. J. Downing (1849) suggested that the terminology differed from British usage because of the abundance and scale of America’s natural waterways: “many a beautiful, limpid, natural expanse which in England would be thought a charming lake, is here simply a pond.” The first American edition of the Encyclopaedia (1798) stated flatly that “A pool and a pond are the same.” Noah Webster (1828) was clear in his distinction between a pond and a lake, with the latter being larger, and between a pond and a pool, but even Webster noted that the term “pool” was “used by writers with more latitude.” He also defined pool as “a small collection of water in a hollow place, supplied by a spring, and discharging its surplus water by an outlet. It is smaller than a lake, and in New England is never confounded with pond or lake. It signifies with us, a spring with a small bason or reservoir on the surface of the earth.”

The term “lake” generally connoted a larger-scale feature than that of a pool or pond, although, as noted above, the term “pond” was used interchangeably with that of “lake” in several descriptions. As indicated in the Horticultural Register (1836), the term “lake” signified a dignity that the smaller scale of a pond could not match. Lakes fulfilled a variety of functions in the garden, serving, for example, as a habitat for fish and water fowl, a source of ice and irrigation water, and, in garden design, a natural mirror and animating element. Their scale made them suitable for swimming and boating, as evidenced by the boating and bathing houses found along the shores of many.

Lakes in American garden settings were usually created by enlarging natural water features or by damming water courses. Existing lakes were incorporated into a landscape design by the addition of plantings, mounds, garden buildings, or bridges, such as those depicted at Monte Video and Blithewood [Fig. 5]. Lakes could also be created by enclosing part of a river, as described by A. J. Downing in his plan for a “Mansion residence, laid out in a natural style,” and seen in the plan for Point Breeze [Fig. 6]. Most of the American examples of lakes as garden elements date from the nineteenth century, and were found in the largest and most elaborate gardens of their time. As Downing pointed out in 1849, this exclusivity was due to the abundance of natural waterways in America, which made artificial lakes superfluous in many settings. In addition, the cost of undertaking such massive earthmoving made them impractical for most American garden owners.

Bodies of standing water, whether called lakes, ponds, or pools, provided many of the same visual effects, and writers praised the associations of coolness and the animating quality that water brought to a garden. As Downing noted, animation might come from the sparkle of the reflecting sun, the movement of wind on the water, or from the sound of a fountain or a stream feeding the pond. Water was prized, as Abercrombie (1817) noted, as a natural mirror reflecting the surrounding vegetation or, as at the carefully placed pond at Monticello and in a painting of an unknown site [Fig. 7], the house itself. Bodies of water not only sustained fish for sport and food, but, as Humphry Repton (1803) advised, they also attracted waterfowl and other animals and thus enhanced visual and aural interest of the garden. Downing (1847) praised the effect of contrasting water features, such as the rush of the waterfall at Blithewood, on the Hudson, juxtaposed with the still waters of the lake, “so full of the spirit of repose.”

-- Elizabeth Kryder-Reid