48 LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



except in the shade. The people, even the nobles, who built these 

 gardens, were lovers of the outdoors and had a great deal of homely 

 common-sense knowledge of the processes of agriculture and gardening. 

 The laborers who actually did the work of construction and maintenance 

 had been for generations on the same land. They were slow, conserva- 

 tive, and trained in definite and practical ways of doing their work. 

 The designs of these estates were usually the work of the owners, helped 

 it may be by some one of more trained taste, or realizing on their own 

 land some memory of designs which they had seen in France and Italy, 

 but in any case adapting their means to their ends with a very practical 

 recognition of the influence of local material and individual use. 

 Decorative flower beds they doubtless had in early days, and flowers 

 against the walls of the houses and in protected places, grown for their 

 sweet scent and for their bright colors in a dull atmosphere where 

 bright color is particularly to be desired, and where the moisture is 

 favorable to their luxuriant growth. The garden of sweet herbs, the 

 garden of simples, was as often as not a part of the same scheme as the 

 garden of flowers. The smooth texture of velvety turf with the shade 

 of great free-standing trees gave beauty and dignity to their grass 

 terraces and to the level expanses of bowling-greens and lawns for 

 archery. There were pleached arbors and alleys for shady walks and 

 for outdoor resting-places. The same workmanlike but fanciful use of 

 the materials of stone and brick which give the buildings of the period 

 much of their charm appeared also in the walls, steps, and balustrades 

 of the gardens as, for instance, at Montacute House. Water in pools 

 was used sometimes purely for decoration but more often served also the 

 practical purpose of a fish pond. An old device was still common, the 

 mount, whence a man might look not only over his own inclosed gar- 

 dens but out across the countryside. The grounds were arranged for 

 outdoor living and active use, and their designers drew no hard and fast 

 line between such areas as might be considered as entirely decorative 

 and such as were in part at least devoted to economic purposes. The 

 separate areas immediately about the dwelling were for the most part 

 formal, but the garden with its walks and hedges, the terrace with its 

 curious knots of flowers, were designed each for itself, and there was 

 little attempt at any relation of these areas in a general formal scheme 



