296 THE PRAISE OF GARDENS 



the shimmery blue valley below the pale blue distant hills; 

 and if you had it, some antique statue, not good enough for the 

 courtyard of the town house, set on the balustrade or against 

 the tree ; also, where water was plentiful, a little grotto scooped 

 out under that semicircular screen of cypresses. A very modest 

 place, but differing essentially from the orchard and kitchen- 

 garden of the mediaeval burgher j and out of which come some- 

 thing immense and unique the classic Roman villa. 



For your new gardens, your real Italian garden, brings in a new 

 element that of perspective, architecture, decoration ; the trees 

 used as building material, the lie of the land as theatre arrange- 

 ments, the water as the most docile and multiform stage pro- 

 perty. . . . 



Now go where you may in the outskirts of Rome you are 

 sure to find ruins great aqueduct arches, temples half-standing, 

 gigantic terrace works belonging to some baths or palace hidden 

 beneath the earth and vegetation. Here you have naturally an 

 element of architectural ground-plan and decoration which is 

 easily followed : the terraces of quincunxes, the symmetrical 

 groves, the long flights of steps, the triumphal arches, the big 

 ponds, come, as it were, of them obeying the order of what is 

 below. And from underground, everywhere, issues a legion of 

 statues, headless, armless, in all stages of mutilation, who are 

 charitably mended and take their place, mute sentinels, white 

 and earth-stained, at every intersecting box hedge, under every 

 ilex grove, beneath the cypresses of each sweeping hillside 

 avenue, wherever a tree can make a niche or a bough a canopy. 

 Limbo and other Essays. (Old Italian Gardens.} 



ALICE CORGOTTEN by the side of some rosy palace by the Adriatic, 



MEYNELL 1 ^ fountain overrun with maidenhair, its gold fish twinkling 



in the marble font, and grass growing gaily and wildly where it 



will, the garden that once was trimmest has a delight and a spirit 



that it could not have without precisely that past of artifice and 



