APPENDIX 329 



painters first began to see nature as she is and to paint land- 

 scapes truthfully and without artificial features. Until modern 

 times landscape-gardening was modeled exclusively on the old 

 formal gardens of Italy. The terraces which were required on 

 the steep sides of the Italian hills were transplanted to the 

 plains of Versailles and to the gentle slopes of England. You 

 all know the famous old gardens of Italy and the continent. 

 You remember the balustrades ; the paved terraces ; the 

 straight walks between clipped hedges, and the straight avenues, 

 ending in the inevitable bad statue or silly fountain; the 

 childish surprises of objects which suddenly cover you with 

 spray. If, by chance, you come upon a charming bit of turf, 

 with masses of flowering shrubs and trees not in lines and left 

 to grow untrimmed, you are told -- it may be in Italian or 

 German or Spanish or French -- that this is the "English 

 Garden"; and you say to yourself, "God bless it!" There 

 is a touch of nature in it. 



Now, I ask you, are we to ignore the glorious progress of the 

 nineteenth century and go back to this ? Instead of striving 

 to carry landscape-gardening to perfection along the natural 

 lines on which it has made its greatest growth, are we deliber- 

 ately to give up all that the world has gained, and go back for 

 our models to the dark ages of landscape-gardening when it was 

 wholly artificial and unnatural, ages before it had grown to be 

 a fine art ? I cannot believe it. 



Hence I deprecate the tendency of to-day toward a stiff and 

 unlovely formalism in landscape design. I protest against it 

 because I believe that it will lead to the decadence of a most 

 glorious art which it would reduce to the condition of modern 

 Italian sculpture, mere technique without spirit, a body with- 

 out a soul. 



If you think that I exaggerate, I beg you to look over one of 

 the most popular of recent books on landscape-gardening, - 



