JUNE 353 



trees — say, even a row of Poplars. The old gardens, as 

 perhaps Dante and Boccaccio saw them, are now smoth- 

 ered 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 culti- 

 vated (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 re- 

 tained their old character. All over the world the 

 English have an insane, inartistic, though perhaps 

 natural desire, not to develop the capabilities of the soil 

 and climate in which they are forced to live, which 

 would give a real interest to every plot of cultivated 

 ground inhabited by the white man, but to have a gar- 

 den as like 'home' as possible — to make a lawn, which 

 fails and is ugly, and to plant a shrubbery, which grows 

 apace and chokes everything really worth growing. 



I got last year from Seville a letter describing what a 

 southern garden should be : ' The Alkasar garden is 

 the most beautiful I ever saw: very neglected as regards 



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