6 FLOWER GARDENING 



Few will care to carry consistency beyond this 

 compromise ; for the more one studies Italian gar- 

 dens the more one inclines to the view that to the 

 average American gardener some part is of greater 

 value than the whole. Perhaps it is only a group 

 of cypresses in the Villa Albani, Rome, that sug- 

 gests how to plant some red cedars standing out 

 against the sky. Or the plan of the Villa Lante, 

 at Bagnaia, is just the thing from which to adapt 

 a parterre design, or the view up the terraces to 

 the palace at Villa d'Este, Tivoli, the solution of a 

 sloping rear-yard problem, or the Hill Walk of 

 the Boboli Gardens, Florence, the pattern of a 

 smaller scheme with a modest gateway. None, 

 in the making of gardens, need fear to look too 

 high; perhaps the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, 

 as pictorially imagined, may furnish the very key 

 to the planting of a cottage yard that is so hilly as 

 to require a series of retaining walls quite close 

 together. 



French gardens have formality, too, but there 

 are long vistas which the Italian style does not 

 call for, though they are not necessarily lacking. 

 For these vistas there are avenues, sometimes with 

 clipped trees; and there are broader stretches of 

 water and more spouting fountains than in the 

 gardens of Italy. 



A reduction of the garden at Fontainebleau to 

 very moderate proportions would provide an ex- 

 cellent model for a French garden. Here the 

 square pool has four wide approaches and the 



