CHAPTER III 



THE FORMAL GARDEN 



SINCE orthodoxy was ever "my doxy/' it need surprise no 

 one but the merest tyro in gardening to learn that this, 

 the most peaceful of the arts, has the greater part of its 

 devotees divided into two bitterly hostile camps. The "spirit of 

 sect," so heartily deplored by Turgot in matters of politics and 

 religion, is rife even in their midst, and there would seem to be no 

 more likelihood of a truce between them now than in the days when 

 the affected, complacent Addison made admirable copy in the 

 Spectator, and Pope, that most artificial of jingling rhymesters, 

 amused his generation by poking fun at formal gardens generally, 

 and not alone at the errors which undoubtedly disfigured much of 

 the "Italian" gardening in the England of his time. Pope, while 

 he professed to abhor hedges, pleached walks and statuary in 

 gardens, and to adore nature unadorned, nevertheless went on 

 piling up rocks and shells into grottos at Twickenham, making 

 cascades, bridges, miniature torrents and wild, mountainous im- 

 possibilities in a pastoral landscape until he had, in much condensed, 

 compendium form, a sample of every kind of scenery his fertile 

 brain could conjure, and all within five acres. 



These two literary men, Addison and Pope, with not a little help 

 from Walpole, neither artists nor yet gardeners, who knew not 

 what they were undoing, must be held largely responsible for bring- 

 ing about the radical reaction in garden methods which swept 

 away with axe, plough and grubbing hoe most of the tree-lined 

 avenues like cathedral aisles, the ancient evergreen hedges, the 



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