THE PRECEDENT OF GARDEN DESIGN. 



is it more fit to admire the Dyer, than imitate his workemanship. Colouring not onely 

 the earth, but decking the ay re, and sweetning every breath and spirit." 



It is in these men and such as they, that the English school of garden design finds 

 its parentage. They wrote for the people of average means rather than for the very 

 wealthy, and they advocated a restrained and ordered formality in the least ambitious 

 gardens. They retained all that was pleasing of the medieval examples, the high en- 

 closing wall, the clipped hedges, the knots and borders, advocating the inclusion of 

 topiary and straight paths bounding and intersecting short courts of grass, with a foun- 

 tain, a sundial or a pyramid at their junction. 



They knew how to frame the dainty jewel in its rustic green setting, trim and 

 neat within and in harmony with its rural surroundings without, and even with the 

 azure sky above. They resented the grandiose assumptions of the Italian and other 

 imported styles and, in attempting to repair the vagaries of the landscapists who suc- 

 ceeded them, it is to these same healthy traditions we must return. 



The Italian inspiration was fostered under the renaissance revival by Inigo Jones, 

 who had studied the neo-classic style in Italy and had given special attention to the 

 productions of Palladio, and who erected what is probably the first garden pavilion 

 ever built in England, at Beckett near Farringdon. This revived interest in classic 

 architecture had a salutary effect on the design of both houses and gardens in 

 demanding in everything proportion and symmetry and, although widely popular up 

 to the time of the supremacy of the Puritans and the disturbances of the civil war, when 

 the gentler arts were for a time despised, nevertheless provides the highest standard for 

 the education of public taste reached up to the close of the last century. 



The accession of Charles II. restored garden design to favour. It was he who 

 invited to this country le Notre, whose creations at Versailles and other places were 

 on the largest possible scale. Such gardens as he planned needed an enormous expanse 

 of ground and were combined with avenues which extended for miles beyond the boun- 

 daries of the garden proper. Le Notre taught the English gardeners expansive ideas, 

 though, with exceptions like Badminton, there have naturally not been many oppor- 

 tunities of carrying them out. The ordinary country gentleman of the time avoided 

 sumptuous effects and remained staunch to the unpretentious delights which had pleased 

 his ancestors. That le Notre could adapt himself to his environment, however, is evident 

 from his work at St. James's and Greenwich Parks. 



With William and Mary was introduced the quaintness of the Dutch garden, which 

 later ran riot in extravagant and ridiculous topiary. It was a degenerate art which 

 destroyed the restful simplicity which had hitherto been such a marked characteristic of 

 the national school of garden design. The introduction of these foreign styles had 

 an unsettling effect on English gardening and, when the teased and tortured extrava- 

 gances fell before the ridicule of Walpole, Pope, and Addison, a new fashion was evolved 

 which usurped to itself the title of the " Natural Style," though, in spite of all that 

 it professed, it was, in a different way, as much the subject of rules and as formal 

 as anything which had gone before. As we see in the writings of Markham and Lawson, 

 the formality of the old school was more honest and logical and more sincere in its 

 genuine love of Nature. 



From this time up to the latter part of the nineteenth century, garden design, Decay of 

 considered as a decorative art, could not be said to have made any decided advance, the Italian 

 Even the wealth of material which had been evolved or introduced in the interval, School. 

 and which should have enlarged the scope of the art, merely resulted in obscuring 

 broad principles under a mass of small detail and in giving free rein to those lovers of 

 the curious and exotic who, by converting the garden into a floral and arboricultural 

 museum, destroyed its restfulness and placed it entirely out of sympathy with the 



