TYPES OF GARDENS 



artistic devices are to be properly veiled, he must have his art at his 

 finger-tips and be able to do the right thing by infallible instinct, 

 and he must possess fully the cunning to efface himself even while 

 he is playing a part of no little importance in the management of 

 affairs. 



There is, nevertheless, no need in making this effort after reticence 

 and self-effacement, and in seeking thus for consistent naturalism, to 

 disregard the value of a certain measure of formality in even a pure 

 landscape design. Nature is often quite formal in her repetition of 

 forms and in her way of arranging the facts of a landscape. A piece 

 of wild forest scenery not infrequently suggests the intervention of 

 a human designer, so precisely is it planned and so well balanced are 

 the parts of which it is composed. Instances, indeed, are not 

 uncommon of her carrying balance into absolute symmetry ; spacing 

 her forms with regularity, and keeping an exact proportion of mass 

 to mass. 



Therefore, to mix intelligently formality with naturalism is quite 

 permissible, so long as it does not involve any actual contradiction of 

 facts or any attempt to create impossibilities. To edge a stream 

 with a brick wall would be unpleasant and wrong in a wild valley, 

 because bricks are essentially man's handiwork and could not have 

 got into such a situation without human agency; but to define the 

 course of the stream with pieces of rock arranged with sufficient 

 sense of the picturesque would not be objectionable, and a sloping 

 grass bank would equally be in keeping with the surroundings the 

 stream can be kept within bounds and its course can be regulated 

 without blatantly advertising the fact that its liberty to carve its 

 channel where it pleases has been taken away. Again, to plant an 

 avenue of clipped yews through a piece of natural woodland would 

 be to introduce a rather ridiculous incongruity, but an avenue that 

 would be quite effective and yet look pleasantly unintentional could 

 be made by choosing a part of the wood where the trees grew for 

 the most part in some sort of order and by cutting away those which 

 confused the design. A rocky slope, too, could be terraced and 

 diversified with sheltered walks by judicious building up here and 

 there with natural stone, in reasonable imitation of nature's manner 

 of shaping a craggy hill-side into ledges and steeps. 

 In the same way, a wooded garden can be brought into correct 

 order by observing and reproducing the natural alternations of thicket 

 and open glade, which in a forest come automatically from variations 

 in the soil or from the killing of the undergrowth under the shadow 

 of some wide-spreading tree. Effects of light and shade can be 

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