THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



what should be a living garden by an elaborate tracery on the 

 ground, then error and waste are at work, and the result is ugliness. 

 The proof of this is at Versailles, at the Crystal Palace in great 

 part, in the gardens in Vienna, and at Caserta, near Naples. One 

 may not so freely mention private places as public ones, but many 

 ugly and extravagant things have been done by trying to adapt 

 a mode of garden design essential in a country like Italy, where 

 people often lived for health's sake on tops of the hills, to gardens 

 in the plains and valleys of England. I know a terrace in England 

 built right against the house, so as to exclude the light from, and 

 make useless, what were once the reception rooms. That deplorable 

 result came about by endeavouring to adapt Italian modes to English 

 conditions, and was the work of Sir Charles Barry. To anyone 

 deeply interested in the question, one of the best places from which 

 to consider it is the upper terrace at Versailles, looking from the fine 

 buildings there to the country beyond and seeing how graceless and 

 inert the whole vast design is, and how the clipped and often now 

 dying, because mutilated. Yews thrust their ugly forms into the land- 

 scape beyond and rob it of all grace. To those who tell me this 

 sort of work is necessary to " harmonise " with the architecture I say 

 there are better ways, and that to rob fine buildings of all repose 

 by a complex geometrical " pattern " in the foreground is often the 

 worst way. 



Cost and care of stonework in gardens. — Where stone or stucco 

 gardening is done on a large scale, its cost and maintenance are 

 monstrous. The repair of elaborate stonework in gardens is a 

 hopeless task, as any one may see at Versailles or at the Crystal 

 Palace. Is it in the interest of architecture that noble means should 

 be so wasted ? As the cost and difficulties of the finest work in 

 building increase, the more the need to keep it to its true and 

 essential uses, especially in face of the fact that half the houses 

 in England require to be rebuilt if our architecture generally is to 

 prove worthy of its artistic aims. 



I delight in walls for my Roses, and build walls, provided they 

 have any true use as dividing, protecting, or supporting lines. To 

 take advantage of these and sunny sheltered corners in and about 

 our old or new houses, and make delightful little gardens in and 

 near them, as at Drayton or Powis, is quite a different thing from 

 cutting off the landscape with vast flat " patterns " and scroll-work, 

 as on the terrace at Windsor and many gardens made in our own 

 day. 



" Design " not formal only. — I find it stated by writers on this 

 subject that " design " can only concern formality — an error, as the 

 artistic grouping and giving picturesque effect to groups and groves 



