The Italian Formal Garden 



THE SIMPLE BUT EFFECTIVE PLAN OF THE GARDENS' 



General View of Avenue 



length of the grounds and to the vast size of the palace. It 

 is a royal park, not a private citizen's garden. 



Fourthly, the treatment of the trees and grass is also char- 

 acteristic of the Italian gardens. The American and English 

 styles of park gardening, with broadly-sloping lawns sprinkled 

 over with clumps of shrubbery and groups of trees, in a stud- 

 iedlv accidental and picturesque arrangement, with winding 

 walks and drives giving the sense of distance and ever-chang- 

 ing prospect, is not practised in the villa gardens, because 

 it represents a wholly different conception of purpose and 

 function from that which created them. Occasionallv, as in 

 parts of the Borghese grounds, one finds broad meadows, 

 sloping lawns, and a natural or artificial wild-wood, but it is in 

 most cases sharply distinguished from the formal part of the 

 grounds, in which there is no mixing of the two sorts of 

 gardening. 



Trees are used chietiy in two ways — first on the upper ter- 

 race and around the outskirts of the formal garden, to serve as 

 a picturestjue background silhouetted with its stone pines and 



42 



