The Formal Garden 35 



living-room for their greater enjoyment. Can we doubt that their 

 chaste beauty was less appreciated when set on balustrades and 

 terraces against the dark background of olive, ilex, and cypress ? 



But with the growth of luxury in the Empire decadence began ; 

 the topiary gardener did his worst, and innocent trees, frivolously 

 clipped into the forms of impossible birds and beasts, with much 

 else that was absurdly artificial, marked the decline of art in the 

 Roman's once simple and dignified pleasure ground. After the 

 fall of Rome, when the darkness of the Middle Ages settled down 

 over Europe, gardening, with all her sister arts of peace, slumbered 

 for centuries. The mediaeval garden, where it existed at all, we 

 learn from old, illuminated missals, was merely a monastery's 

 patch of "simples" or vegetables tended by a monk, or an enclos- 

 ure within the castle's precincts, where herbs grew around the 

 well and fruit trees were espaliered against the walls. 



Inevitably, a great awakening would come to artistic Italy 

 with the cessation of wars, holy and unholy, and the return of pros- 

 perity to the land. In those days of marvellous artistic activity 

 which we call the Renaissance, when men delved among the ar- 

 chives of their Roman ancestors for inspiration in all the arts, the 

 classic garden was rediscovered with acclaim. Restored in all 

 its splendour throughout Italy, but given new breadth and free- 

 dom of treatment at the hands of some of the greatest artists of 

 all time, Michelangelo and Raphael among them, the Italian 

 garden of Lorenzo de Medici's day has become synonymous in 

 the artistic world with garden craft carried to its highest degree. 



Where lies the secret of its excellence ? Doubtless in the dis- 

 covery of the landscape. Heretofore the garden had been regarded 

 merely as a circumscribed architectural extension of the castle or 

 villa, as rigidly formal as the walls of a room. But the master 



