42 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



2. An elaborate display of fountains and marble statuary with 

 broad expanses of water and formal pools. 



3. The use of many herbaceous flowering plants in sharply 

 defined border plantations surrounding the shubbery plantings. 



4. The presence of very formal avenues of trees pruned to solid 

 perpendicular faces of foliage. 



The entire underlying principle may be summed up as design 

 plus plantings as an accessory. 



Unlike the Italian spirit of gardening in which the design was the 

 strong underlying motive, very much subdued by plantings etc., the 

 motive in these French gardens is design which is always the 

 dominating spirit. In the Italian gardens the student is impressed 

 with the wonderful adaption of the design to the specific location 

 only after careful study, and he is not impressed with the formality 

 seen on the scale of grandeur illustrated by the noted gardens of 

 France. 



I would not have you feel that the gardens of these countries as 

 such are the only features worthy of study. Within the recent past 

 the various cities have established beautiful parks, extensive boule- 

 vards, public squares and play grounds to the careful study of which 

 much time might well be devoted. The city of Paris has done 

 more than any other city on the continent to improve and plant its 

 boulevards and parks. Other foreign cities among which are 

 Reims, Nancy, and Orleans, together with a great number of the 

 important cities of Italy, are fostering with a great deal of civic 

 pride the growth of art as evidenced in these public improvements. 

 The distinctive characteristics of these parks etc. are not of a widely 

 varying nature except as influenced by the different variations of 

 climate, etc. as seen on the Mediterranean coast and in southern 

 Italy, where the vegetation used is as different in character from that 

 of Northern Europe as is our own North different from the South. 

 The time of distinctive types of gardens in the different countries 

 of Europe is passing into history, and a more universal Continental 

 art is replacing the old and widely differentiated influences. The 

 progressive exponents of the landscape gardening art upon the 

 continent are making their imprints on the gardening work over 

 that entire country, and the tendency seems to be that in time to 

 come there will exist no modern Italian, German, or French school 



