TYPES OF GARDENS 



deliberate landscape alone is to be counted as correct and judicious 

 gardening. Neither is wrong when they are properly used, but 

 both are ridiculous when they are dragged incongruously into places 

 where they are unnatural and inappropriate, or when they are called 

 into existence to satisfy some whim of the gardener or some dictate 

 of fashion. In the history of gardening there are many unfortunate 

 examples of thoughtless obedience to fashion, illustrations of the way 

 in which a convention is often mistaken for an inspiration, and in 

 which a principle can be misapplied by people who think that 

 artificiality is the basis of style. 



Round the formal garden there have raged endless controversies. 

 It has had many eloquent defenders, many quite as eloquent and 

 outspoken detractors. It has been described as the only form of 

 garden design which can be reckoned as worthy of serious con- 

 sideration on artistic grounds, because it is the only one in which 

 every detail can be planned beforehand and in which every develop- 

 ment can be foreseen and systematically controlled. It has been 

 abused as the reduction of nature to a condition of dull unreality and 

 as an example of the way in which her charm can be destroyed by 

 applying to her the methods of the drill-sergeant. It has been 

 defended as the best expression of the decorator's taste, and it has 

 been attacked as the worst manifestation of the spirit of the pedant 

 and of the man with the narrow mind who knows little and cares 

 less about nature's ways. 



Yet it neither requires defence nor merits condemnation when it is 

 called into existence to satisfy the right kind of demand. Round 

 about the house, which by its character and architectural style 

 requires obviously a setting in which nature is given a sort of 

 architectural aspect, the formal garden is very evidently suitable. A 

 palace standing in a wild park or dropped apparently by accident 

 into the middle of a bare expanse of turf wears an unfinished air. 

 It looks as if the intentions of the man who designed it had failed 

 half-way, or as if the owner, having spent more than he intended 

 upon the building, had economised by neglecting to cultivate the 

 ground upon which his house was erected. It is incomplete, in fact, 

 the beginning of a great scheme which has never been carried to its 

 logical conclusion, and it offends by its suggestion of failure. 

 But when the house with architectural pretensions has about it the 

 terraces, the fountains, the flights of steps, and the paved walks, 

 which are the delight of the maker of formal gardens, when it 

 stands among stately clipped hedges, and makes a centre to a well- 

 proportioned pattern of flower borders and orderly avenues, it 



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