LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 279 



architectural lines of the house itself, such as a terrace the 

 entire length of the front, with statues, vases, and the like, 

 the landscape gardener's study should be to conceal all this 

 till you come upon it, and the landscape is shut out. But if 

 the landscape style is to be kept up throughout, so far as aU 

 in front of the main entrance is concerned, the more formal 

 portions may be still more isolated. In laying down the road, 

 therefore, use stakes which can be seen at a distance, and 

 mark out the plan by placing them in the centre of your 

 proposed road ; let it take a gentle sweep to the right and 

 left of the entrance, not abruptly, but by an easy turn on 

 each side, as soon as the road can be made to do it without 

 inconveniencing the drive of a carriage. When we say that 

 this road is to skirt the premises, we mean that it shall go in 

 some places within twenty yards, and in others thirty or forty, 

 but the object is to give a large space of green. Where the 

 roads part at the entrance, there must be a tolerably heavy 

 plantation, both to prevent the view of the house and to form 

 a reason for the roads diverging ; for let it be remembered, 

 that as nature always gives a reason for the absence of straight 

 lines, the landscape gardener must do the same. There must 

 be an apparently natural cause for every turn. It must be 

 because trees, mounds, or water, or some other natural obstacle, 

 prevents us from going straight, and the gardener has to 

 create these natural obstacles. It must always be sho^Ti that 

 the road cannot go straight : climips of shrubs here, a mound 

 there, water in the other place, are in the way of a straight 

 line ; and keeping this in view, the road may not only be 

 sweeping round the estate on the dressed part of it, but it 

 may also go here and there in a serpentine figure, the hollow 

 sides being occupied by some proper obstacle, which however 

 may give harmony and grace to the view. Where the road 

 forms, as it must in all of its turns, part of the segment of a 

 circle, the inner side of the circle may be planted with shrubs, 

 forming a clump close up to the road ; but in any clump or 

 figure that we may choose to adopt inside, to render the scene 

 broken and yet harmonious, it is that we make a road ser- 

 pentine, independent of its general direction, which would be 

 round the estate, that we may plant on both sides occasionally ; 

 and as we propose from the first, to have a good space to 

 spare on the outside between the road and the boundary 

 planting, this plan of serpentining it affords great opportunity 



