vi THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND 



a time when tradition was active and when there 

 existed a sense of the arts in their general re- 

 lationship, as opposed to the merely skilled 

 individualism of modern art, they inevitably 

 maintained in garden design the habit of mind 

 which they maintained in all the other arts. In 

 other words, garden design took its place in the 

 great art of architecture, with the result of that 

 well-ordered harmony which was characteristic 

 of the house and garden in England down to 

 the middle of the eighteenth century. It has 

 been the work of the last century to destroy 

 this invaluable instinct, and all that it has offered 

 in its place has been a habit of specialising which 

 may sometimes arrive at technical excellence, 

 but has assuredly lost us the architectural sense. 

 It is the absence of this sense which is the most 

 glaring fault of modern design, and it is shown 

 most conspicuously in the work of the modern 

 landscape gardener. 



At the date at which the first two editions of 

 this book were issued, a somewhat acrid contro- 

 versy raged between landscape gardeners and 

 architects. The gardeners said the architects 

 knew nothing about gardening, and the archi- 

 tects said the gardeners knew nothing about 

 design, and there was a good deal of truth on 



