22 THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN. 



gardens, and there is a modern castle in Scotland where the embank- 

 ments are piled one above another, till the whole looks as if Uncle 

 Toby with an army of Corporal Trims had been carrying out his 

 grandest scheme in fortification. The rude stone wall of the hill 

 husbandman, supporting a narrow slip of soil for olive-trees or vines, 

 became in the garden of the wealthy Roman a well-built one ; but 

 it must be remembered that, even where the wall is necessary, the 

 beauty of the true Italian garden depends on the life of trees and 

 flowers more than on the plan of the garden. 



Terraced gardens allowing of much building (apart from the 



house) have been in favour with architects who have designed 



gardens. The designer, too often led by custom, 



Terraced gardens, falls in with the notion that every house, no 



matter what its position, should be fortified by 



terraces, and he busies himself in forming them even on level ground, 



and large sums are spent on fountains, vases, statues, balustrades, 



useless walls, and stucco work out of place. 



Elaborate terraced gardens in the wrong place often prevent the 

 formation of beautiful lawns, though a good lawn is the happiest thing 

 in a garden. For many years past there has been so much cutting 

 up, geometry and stonework, that it is rare to find a good lawn, and 

 many a site so cut up would be vastly improved if changed into a 

 large, nobly fringed lawn. 



A style of garden " design " that for a long time has had an 

 injurious effect on many places is the "railway embankment" phase ; 

 there we see a series of sharply graded grass slopes like well- 

 smoothed railway embankments often several sharp banks, one 

 below the other, without a protecting wall at the top, and obtruding 

 their sharp green angles on various points of view, and this perhaps 

 in the face of a beautiful landscape. 



A beautiful house in a fair landscape is the most delightful 

 scene of the cultivated earth, all the more so if there be an artistic 

 garden. The union between the house beautiful and the ground 

 near it is worthy of more thought, and the best way of effecting that 

 union artistically should interest men more and more as our cities 

 grow larger and the landscape shrinks back from them. 



After we have settled the essential approaches and levels around 

 a house, the natural form or lines of the earth itself are in nearly all 

 cases the best to follow, and it is often well to face any labour to get 

 the ground back into its natural grade where it is disfigured by ugly 

 or needless banks, lines, or angles. In the true Italian garden on the 

 hills we have to alter the natural line of the earth, or " terrace it," 

 because we cannot otherwise cultivate the ground or stand at ease 

 upon it, and ii) such ground the formal is right, as the lawn is in a 



