The Formal Garden 33 



in relation to the house, and as an integral part of a design which 

 depends for its success on the combined effect of house and garden; 

 or is the house to be ignored in dealing with the garden as a part of 

 nature ? The latter is the position of the landscape gardener in 

 real fact. There is some affectation in his treatises of recognising 

 the relationship between the two, but his actual practice shows 

 that this admission is only borrowed from the formal school to 

 save appearances, and is out of court in a method which systemat- 

 ically dispenses with any kind of system whatever/' 



And so the battle of words comes down to the present day in 

 England, from whence our training in garden tactics has been 

 largely derived. Not until quite lately have we had any garden 

 literature of our own, and even now England continues to supply 

 most of the text books. To the dispassionate observer it is quite 

 plain that ammunition for both sides of the conflict has been 

 gathered, not from the best examples of the formal or the natural- 

 istic school of gardening, but from the poorest examples of the 

 other's work that the partisan devotees of each could find. 



Where did the formal garden originate ? Wherein lies the 

 magic that draws men to it in every age ? 



Maspero, in his "Dawn of Civilisation," tells of an Egyptian 

 nobleman who lived over four thousand years before Christ, whose 

 splendid fruit, vegetable and flower garden, formally laid out, 

 was described upon his tomb. When various forms of art spread 

 from Egypt to other lands, no doubt the art of gardening was 

 widely copied. Even the sea-roving Phoenicians had fine gardens, 

 and we feel sure that the famous hanging gardens of Babylon, 

 from the very nature of their site, could have been nothing but 

 formal. Greek gardens, which, like the Egyptian, were a com- 

 bination of the utilitarian and the decorative, were laid out with 



