"Less is more." Mies Van der Rohe said it, and exemplified what he said with such architectural masterpieces as the Seagram Building in New York City.

By "less is more" he meant the avoidance of gratuitous ornamentation. He believed in strong, simple design, with no decorative encumbrances to detract from the structural purity. His guiding principle was restraint, the kind of restraint that is critical to success in all the arts, including the art of garden design.

Admirable though it may be as a concept, restraint is not always easy to achieve in practice. You must start, of course, with good structure, and add to this structure only those elements which are essential to its delineation.

Above all, you must resist the temptation to add decorative elements simply because you happen to like them. Cute little frou-frous that don't reinforce the core motif serve only to whittle away a garden's integrity.

To put it another way, if it doesn't help, it hurts.

Creative restraint is beautifully evident in the gardens of such masters as Russell Page and Jacques Wirtz. But can be carried to almost ungardenlike extremes in some of the new minimalist gardens.

In practicing restraint, garden designers can take a cue from the acting profession. Good actors don't overact-they leave something for the viewer's imagination. "Spelling out" is not nearly as effective as triggering the image-making abilities of the viewers, inspiring them to develop their own creative insights.

Dame Sybil Thorndike said it best. After watching a performance by the young John Geilgud, she remarked: "If he had cried less, the audience would have cried more."

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