THE HISTORY OF GARDEN-MAKING 



landscape gardening a voice was to be heard here and there lamenting 

 the excesses of the new school, and begging for less haste and less 

 reckless concessions to fashion. Sir Uvedale Price wrote a treatise 

 on " The Decorations near the House," in which he tells the story 

 of his dealings with his own old garden, and grieves over the changes 

 he had brought about by re-arranging it on the new lines. Sir 

 Walter Scott in 1827 championed the cause of the formal garden 

 against the inventions of the landscape gardener, and pointed his 

 argument by reference to a place in Scotland which, once delightful 

 in its antique quaintness, had become, when remodelled, " as 

 common and vulgar as may be"; and other writers followed from 

 , time to time on the same lines. 

 ,/ It was not, however, till the latter half of the nineteenth century 

 that any consistent effort was made to revive the old type of garden 

 design. Within the last fifty years there has sprung up a quite 

 considerable school of garden-makers, including many architects of 

 distinction, who treat the earlier traditions with intelligence and 

 discretion, and in applying them show a large measure of originality. 

 The work of these men is something more than a mere reconstruction 

 of what was customary two or three hundred years ago, and is free 

 from those fantastic excesses which brought the formal garden into 

 disrepute. It is frankly architectural in the sense that it is planned 

 with due regard for precision of line and balance of masses ; and the 

 effects at which it aims depend not upon happy accidents more or 

 less shrewdly led up to, but upon well-judged construction which 

 prepares exactly for what is to come. The main purpose of it all is 

 to reintroduce into modern gardens the quiet dignity and the sober 

 richness of the seventeenth century design, without closing the way 

 to those ingenious designers who can give a new meaning and an 

 increased significance to their combinations of the materials used by 

 their predecessors. 



At the same time this revival of formal planning is not by any 

 means affecting the popularity of landscape gardening. The two 

 types of work flourish now side by side, and as the modern formality 

 is freer and less restricted than the old, so the modern landscape 

 design is less conventional and narrow in application than that of 

 " Capability " Brown and his followers. The landscape gardeners 

 of to-day are not afflicted with the delusion that they can or should 

 model themselves upon popular painters, and plant compositions 

 which will reproduce pictures shown at the National Gallery or the 

 Academy. They do not merely refuse to draw inspiration from the 

 canvases of Claude or Poussin, they seek suggestions from nature 



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