296 THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



the shimmery blue valley below — the pale blue distant hills ; 

 and if you had it, some antique statue, not good enough for the 

 courtyard of the town house, set on the balustrade or against 

 the tree ; also, where water was plentiful, a little grotto scooped 

 out under that semicircular screen of cypresses. A very modest 

 place, but differing essentially from the orchard and kitchen- 

 garden of the mediaeval burgher ; and out of which come some- 

 thing immense and unique — the classic Roman villa. 



For your new gardens, your real Italian garden, brings in a new 

 element — that of perspective, architecture, decoration ; the trees 

 used as building material, the lie of the land as theatre arrange- 

 ments, the water as the most docile and multiform stage pro- 

 perty. . . . 



Now go where you may in the outskirts of Rome you are 

 sure to find ruins — great aqueduct arches, temples half-standing, 

 gigantic terrace works belonging to some baths or palace hidden 

 beneath the earth and vegetation. Here you have naturally an 

 element of architectural ground-plan and decoration which is 

 easily followed : the terraces of quincunxes, the symmetrical 

 groves, the long flights of steps, the triumphal arches, the big 

 ponds, come, as it were, of them — obeying the order of what is 

 below. And from underground, everywhere, issues a legion of 

 statues, headless, armless, in all stages of mutilation, who are 

 charitably mended and take their place, mute sentinels, white 

 and earth-stained, at every intersecting box hedge, under every 

 ilex grove, beneath the cypresses of each sweeping hillside 

 avenue, wherever a tree can make a niche or a bough a canopy. 

 — Limbo and other Essays. {Old Italian Gardens.) 



— ww^^ 



ALICE CORGOTTEN by the side of some rosy palace by the Adriatic, 



MEYNELL 1 j|.g fountain overrun with maidenhair, its gold fish twinkling 



in the marble font, and grass growing gaily and wildly where it 



will, the garden that once was trimmest has a delight and a spirit 



that it could not have without precisely that past of artifice and 



