Planting Villa Residences. 5$ 



In English landscape gardening, that principle Avhich is 

 common to all arts of design and taste is most generally- 

 carried out, and the style of the grounds is generally guided 

 by the style of the buildings. To be guided here by such 

 principles, "Shade of Evelyn," what a preposterous idea! 

 America has not yet, we presume, produced the genius to 

 strike out a style applicable to all, or indeed exclusively to 

 any, of the innumerable oddities that are scattered over the 

 face of the country. Whatever, either in a building or in a 

 garden, cannot be justified by principles of some kind or 

 other, must be undoubtedly wrong ; and whatever cannot be 

 referred to pre-established rules, must necessarily be new, 

 and may either be right or wrong, according as they agree 

 with principles by which they are judged. These funda- 

 mental principles, as far as we have yet discovered, are to- 

 tally absent from all the artificial landscapes we have yet 

 viewed in this country. And notwithstanding what has been 

 published on the subject, not a syllable has been written that 

 had not been long ago advanced in English works ; nor can 

 we discover anything in the writings of American authors on 

 landscape gardening, calculated to adapt the works of Euro- 

 pean writers to the wants of the numerous residences where 

 this adaption is so much required. 



In small villa gardens, it is manifestly more difficult to 

 adopt the natural or irregular style than the ancient or formal 

 style. We think this remark especially true in regard to our 

 numerous suburban residences in the vicinity of Boston, and 

 on the Hudson, near New York. The reason why the geo- 

 metric style was adopted so much in England in the sixteenth 

 and seventeenth centuries, was because the country itself, in 

 its whole extent, presented all the grandest features of the 

 natural style, just as the field and forest portions of this 

 country do now. But that country now being under cultiva- 

 tion, in right-lined fields and square enclosures, the portion, 

 which to be rendered natural, must be so formed, at the 

 pleasure of the proprietor, to make a contrast. In olden 

 times, the gardens and pleasure grounds were geometric, and 

 the rest of the country in its natural irregularity ; now, the 



