THE HISTORY OF GARDEN-MAKING 



I shall here publish a catalogue of greens to be disposed of by an 

 eminent town gardener, who has lately applied to me on this head. 

 My correspondent is arrived at such perfection that he cuts family 

 pieces of men, women, or children. Any ladies that please may 

 have their own effigies in myrtle, or their husbands in hornbeam. 

 I shall proceed to his catalogue as he sent it for my recom- 

 mendation. 



" Adam and Eve in yew ; Adam a little shattered by the fall of the 

 tree of knowledge in the great storm ; Eve and the Serpent very 

 flourishing ; the Tower of Babel not yet finished ; St. George in 

 box, his arm scarce long enough, but will be in condition to strike 

 the dragon by next April ; a Queen Elizabeth in phylyrcea, a little 

 inclining to the green-sickness, but of full growth ; an old maid-of- 

 honour in wormwood ; divers eminent poets in bays, somewhat 

 blighted, to be disposed of a pennyworth ; a quickset hog shot up 

 into a porcupine by its being forgot a week in rainy weather." 

 Against attacks such as this the old formality was unable to make 

 any etfective"resistance, and gradually, but none the less surely, it 

 had to give way to the new fashion. It died hard, and throughout 

 the eighteenth century it continued to find adherents, but in steadily 

 diminishing numbers. Meanwhile the men of the landscape gar- 

 dening school were busy in all directions obliterating the work 

 which had survived from past generations and creating gardens 

 which, with all their professed naturalism, were in a different way '"^ 

 just as formal as anything that had existed before ; only the formality / w-^ 

 was less "honest and less logical, and hardly more in sympathy with J) 

 nature s real spirit. 



What were the methods employed can be judged from the account 

 given by Horace Walpole : — " No succeeding generation in an 

 opulent and luxurious country contents itself with the perfection 

 established by its ancestors ; more perfect perfection was still sought, 

 and improvements had gone on till London and Wise had stocked 

 all our gardens with giants, animals, monsters, coats-of-arms, and 

 mottoes in yew, box and holly. Bridgman, the next fashionable 

 ^designer of gardens, was far more chaste ; he banished verdant 

 sculpture, and did not even revert to the square precision of the 

 foregoing age. He enlarged his plans, disdaining to make every 

 division tally to its opposite ; and though he still adhered much to 

 straight walks with high clipped hedges, they were only his great 

 lines ; the rest he diversified with wilderness, and with loose groves 

 of oak, though still within surrounding hedges. As his reforrrTatloh 

 gained footing, he ventured to introduce cultivated fields and even 



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