A Garden’s Best Font Size

Really a question of appropriate scale of plants and plantings, if you can’t read it without straining your eyes, then the font is too small.  A dizzyingly detailed landscape that is busy with a million colors and textures and fine leaves and so on cannot possibly be quickly rationalized.  Details are fine if there is an opportunity to be close to the landscape and if there is time to explore the landscape.  However, if it is being passed by at any pace or viewed from any distance, then a certain bold font, that is, plantings which are in some context massed together, is helpful if the garden or landscape is to be understood by those from certain distance or at a certain pace.

The size of font symbolizes the size of particular swath of species planting.  The size, at which reading or seeing the text or planting accommodates the most common and/or the most important readers or viewers, is the most appropriate.  Within a planting en masse, the gardener may plant more details on the interior, a more leisurely pedestrian level, to satisfy his or her need for finer points.  Or, a planting that appears en masse for its similar hue may reveal itself upon closer inspection to be a quite detailed undulation of multiple species without overwhelming the passer by.           


So...  is this font too small?