24 Xan^scape Hrcbitecture 



sted and Calvert Vaux to whom America owes Central 

 Park in New York, the finest example of park-making 

 in the world. The French are great gardeners, and of 

 landscape gardening principles and lore Edouard 

 Andre is a worthy and competent exponent, but 

 although the French generally make their parks nowa- 

 days in what is called the English style, which is really 

 only what is recognized as good landscape gardening 

 the world over, yet in spite of all, they sometimes allow 

 themselves to instinctively recall Le Notre and Ver- 

 sailles in their designs of parks and estates. 

 Victor Hugo writes in Odes and Ballads: 



"Thought is a fruitful and virgin soil, whose 

 products must insist on growing in freedom, and, 

 so to speak, by chance, without arrangement, with- 

 out being drilled into knots in one of Le Notre's classi- 

 cal gardens, or the flowers of language in a treatise 

 on rhetoric. Let it not, however, be supposed that 

 this freedom must beget disorder; quite the reverse. 

 Let us expand our idea. Compare for an instant a 

 royal garden of Versailles, well levelled, well kept, 

 well swept, well raked, well gravelled, quite full of 

 little cascades, little basins, little groves, bronze 

 tritons in ceremonious dalliance with oceans pumped 

 up at great cost from the Seine, marble fauns woo- 

 ing dryads allegorically imprisoned in multitudes of 

 conical yews, cylindrical laurels, spherical orange 

 trees, elliptical myrtles, and other trees whose natural 

 form, too trivial no doubt, has been gracefully cor- 



