Garden Furniture 345 



In Tuscany, hard-baked clay most exquisitely designed and 

 wrought into garden seats, sun-dial mounts, fountains, vases, big 

 pots for bay trees and smaller jardinieres for porches and window 

 gardens, well-heads and decorative devices for garden walls, are 

 still manufactured from Renaissance and ancient classical models. 

 Florence, which remains the centre of this craft in terra cotta after 

 centuries of supremacy, exports quantities of her charming wares 

 to America. Mrs. Watts, the widow of the Royal Academician, 

 conducts a village industry for the manufacture of similar work 

 at Guilford, England; and in this country, where we have an infinite 

 variety of beautiful clays, a few potteries, not so well patronised as 

 they should be, are beginning to supply the home market with 

 pieces of original design. Red terra cotta is never conciliatory with 

 flowers, but for evergreens it is especially effective. Some great 

 pots of biscuit-coloured clay, three feet in diameter, with a simple 

 Aztec arrow design about their top, hold shapely specimens of 

 pyramidal boxwood at a garden entrance. They were made at a 

 woman s pottery in New Jersey. After the sprinklings of a single 

 summer they took on a mossy tone. Cecil Rhodes used forty 

 similar pots for blue hydrangeas in his famous garden at Cape 

 Town, South Africa. 



Garden furniture in stone and marble is an indulgence for 

 the wealthy only. Somehow marble looks harder and colder in 

 our country than in sunny Italy where, weather-worn and harmoni 

 ous though it be, a dark background of ilex, cypress, or other 

 evergreen is invariably given it; but it could be used here much 

 oftener and more effectively than it is, especially in Southern and 

 California gardens, were imported pieces sold less absurdly high 

 and if a proper setting for them might be furnished. A single 

 piece of marble statuary, like Elihu Vedder s charming figure of a 



