28 Landscape Gardening. [January, 



had but just thrown off the shackles of ignorance and barbarism — were 

 not yet in fact quite released from their bonds — and naturally sought to 

 make as clear a distinction as possible between the present and the but too 

 recent past. They were the admirers of the false in art. By art they 

 understood artificiality — by artistic, something labored, and consequently 

 unnatural. Thus we read of the hanging gardens of Semiramis ; of the 

 vast spaces, divided into squares, circles, and other artistical figures, which 

 formed the model gardens of Eome ; and we meet even yet in Europe 

 with specimens of these primeval barbarisms in gardening : trees trimmed 

 to fanciful resemblances of animals or statues; flower-beds sown in 

 names ; sheets of water formed into strange and grotesque shapes ; and 

 the still ruder device of endeavoring, by means of a painting at some 

 garden wall, to produce the illusion of an indefinite extension of the 

 grounds. In this category must be reckoned, too, the host of sheared red 

 cedars, junipers and arbor vitaes, which, as the forlorn sentinels of the 

 French and Dutch styles of gardening, disfigure but too many of our 

 American residences. 



All these, instead of producing the impression intended by their 

 devotees, of a mature state of civilization and a refined taste, argue only 

 a crude and undiscriminating mind, which, having just emerged from the 

 one extreme, the state of nature, rushes at once to the other, and 

 becomes of course ?^imatural ; mistaking alteration for improvement, and 

 hailing that as art which is only artifice. 



Let us now look at the other system — that which, introduced by 

 eminent men in England, has spread all over the European and Ameri- 

 can continents, and is now acknowledged to be the only exposition of the 

 true aesthetic love of nature which prompts to the beautifying of grounds. 



The design in this system is not to alter the whole face of nature. 

 Taking for granted the fact, that in nature he must find all that he can 

 possibly want of form or arrangement, and that all for which he can not 

 there find authority, of beauty, must be considered a defect, as being 

 essentially false, the modern landscape gardener aims simply to aid 

 nature, — to carry out to perfection her most charming designs. 



What the painter aims at in transferring to the canvas the beauteous 

 conceptions of his mind ; what the sculptor performs when he represents 

 on marble those aesthetic fancies, which we call the evidences of his 

 genius : this is also the landscape gardener's object. His aim is, or 

 should be, to be true to nature. Who would admire the most artistically 

 executed painting, or the most finely finished sculpture, if the object 

 represented was deformed. So in the creation of the garden, true 

 taste refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of that which has no proto- 



