Chap. II.] 



THE PARC MONCBAU. 



43 



Roads in iJie Pare Mo?iceaji, 

 a garden. 



How to spoil 



This park might readily have been made an earthly paradise 

 of a town garden by not slashing it into four pieces by needless 

 roads. To form short cuts for 

 man or horse is not usually 

 reckoned among the objects for 

 which town gardens are formed. 

 Yet they are often spoiled in 

 the effort. A road round this 

 would have been the right thing, 

 if any were really required. 

 Howeyer, so long as we have 

 engineers for landscape-gardeners, so long shall we have stones and 

 cement where turf and flowers ought to be. Instead of making 

 such places too facile by roads, the designer might be pardoned 

 for following an opposite course and allowing nothing in the way 

 of needless roads to rob the garden of its most valuable spaces. 



A hideous blotch, from an artistic point of view, is the prodigious 

 oval of the white-leaved Maple in the centre of the park. This 

 clump consists of hundreds of trees graduated from edge to 

 centre so as to form an enormous pudding-like mass. The value 

 and beauty of the trees ,_^ 



'"xyr. 



themselves are quite 



lost through their 



being thus thickly 



massed together, in 



addition to which the 



general effect of the 



park is spoilt. The 



true way to enhance the value of trees with variegated leaves is 



to plant them in clumps of two or three, but when planted in 



masses or lines their real worth is lost. Some people would pave 



the streets with diamonds, and expect diamonds to become more 



admired in consequence. 



The Pare Monceau also contains some of the least agreeable 

 features of our modern flower-garden in the form of beds on the 

 top of small embankments. The fashion first came to us from 

 Paris. It was once employed to secure a greater degree of heat 

 to the more tender plants. But now beds of the freest-growing 

 flowers may be seen fortified with these ugly banks, though no 



Cocked-up flower-bed in the Pare Monceau. 



