Garden Furniture 349 



no one who can afford the luxury of architecture in the classic 

 style for house and garden need forego a coveted piece for their 

 embellishment. Even the stone lantern, without whose saving 

 presence to frighten away evil sprits no Oriental man with a hoe 

 would be content to work in a Japanese garden, is now repro- 

 duced in an artificial material so durable as to almost defy 

 detection. From the old-fashioned garden, however simple, 

 the sun-dial need not be missing when standards like the best 

 ones designed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may 

 be bought for ten dollars or less. 



Quite suddenly and violently, as is our wont, have Americans 

 taken to pergolas: every type of house and garden in this broad 

 land now boasts one. Many are meaningless, leading from no 

 place in particular to no place in particular; opening up no vista 

 through leafy arches toward a beautiful view; sheltering no cosy 

 breakfast or tea table ; inviting no one to rest awhile on comfortable, 

 shady seats; growing no especially beautiful vines (usually the 

 crimson rambler to the exclusion of every other one) ; extending 

 no architectural lines that end too abruptly; tying no building to 

 the surrounding garden or landscape having, in short, no well- 

 thought-out reason for their existence. Following fashion blindly is 

 a weakness not confined to clothes. But how exceedingly beautiful 

 is the well-made, well-placed, vine-clad pergola! 



Its forerunner in old-fashioned gardens, the alley of pleached 

 or braided trees that afforded our ancestors a cool retreat on a hot 

 day, a fragrant bowery to stroll through on a summer evening, has 

 been almost wholly superseded by this recent innovation. The 

 Italian word " pergola" itself means a certain kind of grape; but it 

 soon came to be applied to the rough-and-ready arbours over which 

 the vine was grown stones of all sizes picked up in the vineyard 



