JUNE 345 



dendrons, and coarse-growing, unpruned shrubs. The 

 beautiful old walls are often levelled to the ground, to 

 make a slope of coarse-growing grass ; or the wall formerly 

 used for the trained and well-pruned Vine is smothered 

 with a mass of untended creepers. The newly planted 

 Crimson Eambler is doing very well and making excessive 

 growth, though it will never be a general favourite, as it 

 flowers too late and is not a marketable Eose ; so the 

 gardeners despise it, which is lucky, as its colour is not 

 good. The greatest crime of all as regards the spoiling of 

 Italian gardens is destroying the effect of space and cool- 

 ness, and at the same time entirely shutting out the view 

 by planting trees say, even a row of Poplars. The old 

 gardens as perhaps Dante and Boccaccio saw them are 

 now smothered in Virginia Creeper, and made to look 

 as much like a villa at Hampstead or Putney as possible. 

 Magnolias are crowded out, and Camellias seem no longer 

 cultivated (I suppose, because they are out of fashion in 

 English conservatories) ; and instead of the cool gray 

 gravel, so easily kept raked and weeded in the old days, 

 unsatisfactory grass paths are attempted. In the garden 

 that I especially remember, having spent months there 

 twice in my life, the view towards the city and the Val 

 d'Arno right away .to the Carraras which on favoured 

 evenings are rubies or sapphires or beaten gold against 

 the sky all this, so ineffaceably impressed on my memory, 

 is now hidden from sight by a dark, gloomy, tangled mass 

 of evergreens. As regards the modern treatment of newly 

 made gardens in Florence, it is only fair to say that I saw 

 them much too late, all attention being given to make 

 them beautiful up to the end of May, as at about that 

 time most of the English visitors fly northward. 



The gardens which gave me most pleasure were those 

 which had remained in the hands of Italians and retained 

 their old character. All over the world the English have 



