OF FORMAL GARDENS 65 



content ourselves with makeshifts of less intrinsic 

 worth and beauty. At the same time, it is well 

 to bear in mind that there may be an abuse as 

 well as a good use for evergreen trees and shrubs 

 in garden design. 



It is by no means a necessary condition, how- 

 ever, of the happy use of the formal yew or holly 

 hedge, or evergreen verge, that the garden should 

 be on a grand scale. An old garden, though of 

 no great claim to fame, on the Cornish coast, with 

 high box hedges after the Dutch pattern, and 

 dating, presumably, from the reign of William 

 and Mary, was in existence only a few years ago, 

 and is worthy of a passing record, if only for the 

 reason that we might do worse, for a restricted 

 garden space, than in some degree to follow it 

 as a guide. It belonged to an unpretending and 

 rather gloomy granite-built house, with a semi- 

 circle of wind-tossed oak and ash trees planted for 

 shelter to right and left of it. The plain grey 

 front and yard-thick walls were pierced with many 

 square-cut windows. A flight of high weather- 

 worn steps led up to the stout oaken door, un- 

 protected by porch, or even by rude stone coping. 

 Before the house nothing but a roadway and rough 

 greensward giving away slightly to the edge of 

 the sheer cliff, where a heedless step might easily 

 send the unwary, headlong, forty or fifty feet, to 

 the boulder-strewn beach below. Beyond, far as 

 the distant horizon, the wide expanse of open, ever- 

 changing sea, now blue and sunlit as an Italian 

 lake, now leaden and tossing with angry crests 

 of foam as the mighty Atlantic waves dashed in. 



