GARDEN DESIGN AND RECENT WRITINGS UPON IT. 15 



light, and found only plans of the usual approaches necessary for 

 a country house, for kitchen, hall door, or carriage-way. And we 

 gardeners of another sort do not get in like the bats through the 

 roof, but have also ways, usually level, to our doors, but we do not 

 call them " formal gardens." There are gardens to which the term 

 " formal " might with some reason be applied. Here are a few words 

 about such by one Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose clear eyes saw beauty 

 if there was any to be seen in earth or sky : 



We saw the palace and gardens of Versailles full of statues, vases, fountains, 

 and colonnades. In all that belongs essentially to a garden they are extraordinarily 

 deficient. 



A few more by Victor Hugo : 



There fountains gush from the petrified gods, only to stagnate ; trees are forced 

 to submit to the grotesque caprices of the shears and line. Natural beauty is 

 everywhere contradicted, inverted, upset, destroyed. 



And Robert Southey tells us of one 



where the walks were sometimes of lighter or darker gravel, red or yellow sand,, 

 and, when such materials were at hand, pulverised coal and shells. The garden 

 itself was a scroll-work cut very narrow, and the interstices filled with sand of 

 different colours to imitate embroidery. 



It is only where the plants of a garden are rigidly set out in 

 geometrical design, as in carpet-gardening and bedding-out, that the 

 term " formal " is rightly applied. 



We live in a time when men write about garden design unmeaning 

 words or absolute nonsense ; these, as any one may see, are men 

 who have had no actual contact with the work. They think garden 

 design is a question that can be settled on a drawing-board, and have 

 not the least idea that in any true sense the art is not possible 

 without knowledge of many beautiful living things, and that the right 

 planting of a country place is of far greater importance than the 

 ground-plan about the house. 



In many books on garden design the authors misuse words and 

 confuse ideas. Many, not satisfied with the good word, " landscape 

 gardener," used by Loudon, Repton, and many other men, call 

 themselves " landscape architects " a stupid term of French origin 

 implying the union of two distinct studies, one dealing with varied life 

 in a thousand different kinds and the natural beauty of the earth, and 

 the other with stones and bricks and their putting together. The 

 training for either of these arts is wide apart from the training 

 demanded for the other, and the earnest practice of one leaves no 

 time, even if there were the genius, for the other. 



