6 The Garden Beautiful 



through the roof, but have also ways, usually level, to 

 our doors, but we do not call them ' formal gardens'. 

 There are gardens to which the term 'formal' might 

 with some reason be applied. Here are a few words 

 about such by one Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose clear 

 eyes saw beauty if there was any to be seen in earth or 

 sky: 



We saw the palace and gardens of Versailles full of statues, 

 vases, fountains, and colonnades. In all that belongs essentially 

 to a garden they are extraordinarily deficient. 



A few more by Victor Hugo : 



There fountains gush from the petrified gods, only to 

 stagnate ; trees are forced to submit to the grotesque caprices 

 of the shears and line. Natural beauty is everywhere con- 

 tradicted, inverted, upset, destroyed. 



And Robert Southey tells us of one 



where the walks were sometimes of lighter or darker gravel, 

 red or yellow sand, and, when such materials were at hand, 

 pulverized coal and shells. The garden itself was a scroll- 

 work cut very narrow, and the interstices filled with sand of 

 different colours to imitate embroidery. 



Such gardens may be called formal without too much 

 disregard of language, and yet one might plant every one 

 of them beautifully without in the least altering their 

 outline. It is only where the plants of a garden are rigidly 

 set out in geometrical design, as in carpet gardening and 

 bedding out ', that the term ' formal garden* is rightly applied. 

 We live in a time when men write about garden design 

 unmeaning words or absolute nonsense ; these are men 

 who have had no actual contact with the work. They 

 think garden design is a question that can be settled on 

 a drawing-board, and have not the least idea that in any 



