38 THE BOOK OF GARDEN DESIGN 



frequently see an avenue, perhaps no more than fifty 

 yards in length, leading to a modern villa. Against 

 this we protest, as a form of pretentious imitation, 

 foolish to the last degree. The avenue, which should 

 never be less than one hundred yards long, is essentially 

 associated with a house and estate of considerable size 

 and some measure of importance, and to attach it to a 

 small residence is merely to cast ridicule on the owner. 

 Plantations of shrubs, with a few bold groups of 

 deciduous trees, will give the needed shelter to carriage 

 drives, and at the same time allow of far greater 

 freedom of design than is permissible with a style of 

 planting which is both formal and exacting. 



As regards the use of clipped yews for garden hedges, 

 much diversity of opinion exists among designers. On 

 the one hand, we have men who employ them in nearly 

 every garden they undertake to lay out, and argue that, 

 far from being objectionable, every opportunity should 

 be embraced for planting them ; on the other, a class 

 who regard them as wholly foreign to the ideals of 

 beauty and the picturesque. Which is right ? Cer- 

 tainly not the former, for of all things tending towards 

 monotony both in summer and winter, an undue pro- 

 portion of evergreens clipped evergreens especially 

 must be considered the most likely. If people must 

 have topiary gardens, such as exist at Levens and 

 Elvaston, by all means let them ; but, at the same time, 

 they should not fail to realise that these are gardens of 

 deformity, mere curiosities in no way connected with the 

 teachings of Nature. Yew hedges are the great delight 

 of the "office designer," whose thought is less- for the 

 true beauty of the living plant than for the elegant 

 completeness of his deftly-drawn plan. An ill-kept 

 hedge is a wretched sight, thin at the bottom, full of 

 holes, and generally decrepit, and the labour of keeping 

 some hundreds of yards of clipped yew in repair entails 



