OF FORMAL GARDENS 63 



endless configuration, is not familiar. Such a 

 garden is full of permanent value, being fitly 

 framed in the setting of historic association ; and 

 all gardeners should be grateful to the owners for 

 the reverent care with which such national monu- 

 ments are cherished and maintained. But efforts 

 have been made of recent years to revive the taste 

 for this mechanical art, which surely is mistaken 

 energy. Gardens like that of Levens should be 

 held sacred from any attempt at paltry modern 

 imitation. In a garden of to-day grotesque dis- 

 tortions of Nature cannot but be out of character 

 and lacking in taste. With most of us such sculp- 

 tured trees are not heirlooms, as they have been 

 in many a Holland garden for generations ; and 

 it is as distressful to think of a Dutch family part- 

 ing, for liberal largesse, with their ship, or church 

 steeple, or armchair of greenery, which has been 

 a daily care from father to son for time untold 

 a temptation not infrequently placed in their way 

 as to hear of the sale of some ancestral portrait. 

 Leaving out altogether the discordant element of 

 grotesqueness, it is a question whether evergreens 

 may not be used too profusely in our climate. A 

 classic garden, perfect as it may be in all the 

 formal grandeur of green walls and fountains and 

 amorini, would soon become a weary monotony 

 without some kind of changing relief. It mattered 

 little, perhaps, in sunny Italy, the home, if not 

 the birthplace of this style of garden, that flowers 

 had little share in relieving the solemn shade of 

 ilex and olive and cypress in the pleasure grounds 

 of old. Judging from records of the past, flowers 



