THE PRECEDENT OF GARDEN DESIGN. 



surrounding rural scenery. If we study the principles upon which the medieval and 

 renaissance gardeners worked, and contrast them with the practice of the garden designers 

 of the last century, we find that the former subordinated every detail to principle, 

 whereas the latter considered sundry points of detail to the exclusion of any regard for 

 the scheme as a whole and of the relation the parts should bear to it. 



The men of the old school were idealists and expressed their ideas in a straight- 

 forward, common-sense manner, basing everything on a balanced plan and using ornament 

 to emphasize it. They laid out a garden in so many plots, with hedges or trellis round 

 each, or a tree was planted at each corner to give point and expression to the shape. 

 We have to thank these old designers for many stately avenues, grand parterres, quiet 

 alleys, shady walks, sparkling fountains, quaint hedges, architectural ponds and broad 

 lawns, wedded together in such a masterly way as to impress the spectator with the 

 grandeur and transparent honesty of the whole scheme. Their restrained and harmonious 

 details, so admirably adapted to the purpose they had to serve, marked these early 

 designs as the work of men of the widest sympathy with garden craft. Here, in figures 

 Nos. 2 and 3, are two examples of their work, the first shewing Haddon Hall, erected 

 on a Derbyshire hillside and needing the support of masonry, thus giving an opportunity 

 to its designer for a chaste and beautiful balustrade and a fine flight of steps. The 

 other is of Levens Hall, suggesting a strong Dutch influence, a style more adapted to 

 gardens laid out on a level site. 



Eighteenth ' Landscape Gardeners," as the garden designers of the late Georgean and Victorian 



Century periods called themselves, may, for want of a more correct expression, be called realists, 



Gardening. their theory being that the perfection of the art of garden making consisted in pedantic 

 imitation of Nature. The founder of this school was " Capability Brown," a man who 

 was, for a long time, regarded as a genius. As he lived at a period in which almost 

 every branch of art and literature was in the throes of change, there is no wonder 

 that he turned his back upon the old examples of garden design and espoused the 

 promised novelty of what he and his followers conceived to be a new discovery, which 

 was briefly that every bit of pastoral scenery was of itself a garden fair, which they 

 fondly imagined could be reproduced wherever the designer willed. Brown and his 

 admirers thought that the old pleasaunces possessed greater possibilities than the original 

 designer had realised, so down came the terrace walls, the mattock was laid to the 

 roots of the box and yew hedges, and the pleached alleys were demolished. Remon- 

 strance or counsel was useless, the tide had set in, onward it ruthlessly swept, regardless 

 of the labours of a past generation and recking little of the sanctifying hand of time. 

 Nature, they proclaimed, must henceforth supplant idealization, and the crudest effects 

 perpetrated in her name be placed on a higher pedestal than that ordered symmetry and 

 balanced proportion which is the soul of all true design. 



The old school was doubtless decadent, and some corrective to the vagaries and 

 appalling insipidities into which it had fallen was certainly required, but such a revolu- 

 tionary change as that brought about by the garden designers of the eighteenth and 

 the beginning of the last century is to be deplored. The ability of these men was 

 measured by the amount of deception they were able to perpetrate, for their one claim to fame 

 consisted in imitation and not in invention. With such ideas it is not surprising that 

 sham castellated ruins and other absurdities came to be considered as necessary adjuncts 

 to garden scenery. Ignorance and blind infatuation must altogether have possessed these 

 innovators, or they would have seen that the old designers had learned many of the 

 secrets of Nature which they seldom caught. 



It is refreshing to find that, among all this turmoil of propaganda of new ideas, 

 this wanton destruction of beautiful work for the sake of an upstart fashion, there were 

 men who still clung to the old principles and who dared to risk adverse criticism by 



