The Formal Garden 41 



used lavishly in many gardens, it is true, while in others they were 

 scarcely necessary at all, and were added, as Corot might have 

 added a touch of colour to one of his landscapes, which, even without 

 the pleasing detail, would form a well-nigh faultless composition. 



Our simple democratic society has no need of imitating the 

 great gardens of Italy, where Church and State vied with each other 

 in the splendour of their open-air functions, or the excessively formal 

 pleasure grounds of the French court to which Le Notre devoted his 

 genius; but it is a mistake to assume that the formal garden may 

 not serve our day and generation. What are the "old-fashioned" 

 gardens around our Colonial homesteads, with their box-edged 

 parterres and vine-covered arbours but an evidence of the Italian 

 fashion in vogue in England, France, and Holland when our fore- 

 fathers first came to these shores ? We feel no prejudice against 

 our grandmothers' formal gardens quite the reverse but that 

 there is a decided modern prejudice against the formal treatment 

 for anything but the large estates of the newly rich Americans 

 one cannot deny. Our Teutonic blood prejudices us, as a people, 

 toward a more general love for nature than for art; our training, 

 derived from English text books, inclines us toward the naturalistic 

 method; and our ignorance of the best examples of the formal 

 school, which may scarcely be found outside of Italy, might easily 

 account for the scorn which Americans generally feel for formal 

 gardens. 



The refreshing truth is that nowhere so well as on a small place, 

 where the house is the dominating object in the home picture, 

 is the formal or architectural treatment of the grounds so well 

 adapted. How much of the charm of the simple, dignified Colonial 

 house, on the elm-lined village street in New England was due to 

 the box-hedged path leading directly from the front gate to the 



