ON GARDEN DESIGN GENERALLY. i_| 3 



ropy of the one in the market-place of I erugia. It has a good deal of panelled decoration, and is set in 

 a basin of fair si/.e. Hut the surroundings are quite inadequate, especially the very plain and weari 

 somely monotonous rounded kerb. Such examples show the dangers that beset the imitation and 

 importation of isolated objects. It is bad enough in England, but far worse in the Northern States of 

 America, where the pleasure grounds seem still less tilted lor the reception ol Italian garden ornaments. 

 If in England they often look out of place, in the States they have the appearance ol unhappy exiles. It 

 is true that there is a certain measure of success in the case of some ol the Italian gardens in England, 

 but this success maybe nearly always traced to the strong individuality of some hi.ulily-cultmed owner 

 whose mind had become saturated with the spirit of the older work, and who was, therefore, able to 

 reproduce it. Some notable examples (among others) that come to mind are the gardens made in recent 

 years by Mr. John Morant at Brockenhurst in the New Eorest , the parterre and other portion-, at ( a&amp;gt;tle 

 Ashby in Northamptonshire, and those of Balcarres and Halcaskie, both in Eileshire. But even in these 

 one misses the delightful alminion ol the design, the way the Renaissance artist let hiinselt go, bur&amp;gt;tint; 

 with the wealth ol his lancv and the over-mastering force of his conviction. 



The Italian garden designers of the fifteenth century, imbued with the spirit of the ancient work 

 and with their own traditions of nearly two centuries, showed an astonishing boldness of conception and 



l6o. THE C.ESARS AT (. ASSK &amp;gt;11URY PARK. 



fertility of invention. The whole thing was done with a kind of passion of spontaneous exuberance. It 

 came straight out of the artist s mind and is instinct with his vitality of imagination ; his sense of beauty 

 and fitness insisting on adequate and unrestrained expression. We, on the contrary, import a Venetian 

 pozzo and put it as a centre ornament on gravel in the middle of a hybrid parterre in an open garden, 

 where the poor exile cries aloud for its old environment of wall-encompassed courtyard and flagged 

 pavement ; or, if we are more ambitious, we bring over a pair of highly-decorated marble vases and erect 

 them on plain plinths with a very slight and thin moulding at the base, as an ornament to the top of a short 

 flight of unmoulded garden steps ! 



Such are the usual results of our attempts to introduce the Italian character into our gardens, 

 although there is now and then a glimpse of the true Italian feeling, as in the well-designed box-planted 

 parterre at Balcarres, and the view up the south walk at Chatsworth. In the latter case, and one or two 

 others, the pleasant southern effect is gained by the straight outline of the masses of trees, recalling the 

 bosco, the woodland frame that commonly surrounds the picture in the gardens of Italy. 



Another of the many uses of water in the Italian gardens was in the grotto, to which the hillside 

 building readily lent itself. Sometimes these grottoes were actual caverns in the mountain, sometimes 



