68 GARDEN-CRAFT. 



patterns, its quincunx, clipped hedges, high hedges, 

 and architectural adornments shall be balanced by 

 great sweeps of lawn and noble trees that are not 

 constrained to take hands, as in France, across the 

 road and to look proper, but are left to grow large 

 and thick and wide and free. True that there is 

 about the Jacobean garden an air of scholarliness and 

 courtliness ; a flavour of dreamland, Arcadia, and 

 Italy a touch of the archaic and classical yet the 

 thing is saved from utter affectation by our English 

 out-of-door life which has bred in us an innate love 

 of the unconstrained, a sympathy that keeps its hold 

 on reality, and these give an undefinable quality of 

 freshness to the composition as a whole.* 



To sum up. The main difference in the char- 

 acter of the English and the foreign schools of 

 gardening lies in this, that the design of the foreign 

 leans ever in the direction of artificiality, that of 

 England towards natural freedom. And a true 

 garden should have an equal regard for Nature and 

 Art ; it should represent a marriage of contraries, 

 should combine finesse and audacity, subtilty and 

 simplicity, the regular and the unexpected, the ideal 

 and the real "bound fast in one with golden ease." 

 In a French or Dutch garden the "yes "and "no" 



* "Mr. Evelyn has a pleasant villa at Deptford" writes Gibson, "a 

 fine garden for walks and hedges (especially his holly one, which he 

 writes of in his " Sylva") . .In his garden he has four large round 

 philareas, smooth-clipped, raised on a single stalk from the ground, a 

 fashion now much used. Part of his garden is very woody and shady 

 for walking; but his garden not being walled, has little of the best 

 fruits." 



