6 FLOWER GARDENING 
Few will care to carry consistency beyond this 
compromise; for the more one studies Italian gar- 
dens the more one inclines to the view that to the 
average American gardener some part is of greater 
value than the whole. Perhaps it is only a group 
of cypresses in the Villa Albani, Rome, that sug- 
gests how to plant some red cedars standing out 
against the sky. Or the plan of the Villa Lante, 
at Bagnaia, is just the thing from which to adapt 
a parterre design, or the view up the terraces to 
the palace at Villa d’Este, Tivoli, the solution of a 
sloping rear-yard problem, or the Hill Walk of 
the Boboli Gardens, Florence, the pattern of a 
smaller scheme with a modest gateway. None, 
in the making of gardens, need fear to look too 
high; perhaps the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, 
as pictorially imagined, may furnish the very key 
to the planting of a cottage yard that is so hilly as 
to require a series of retaining walls quite close 
together. 
French gardens have formality, too, but there 
are long vistas—which the Italian style does not 
call for, though they are not necessarily lacking. 
For these vistas there are avenues, sometimes with 
clipped trees; and there are broader stretches of 
water and more spouting fountains than in the 
gardens of Italy. 
A reduction of the garden at Fontainebleau to 
very moderate proportions would provide an ex- 
cellent model for a French garden. Here the 
square pool has four wide approaches and the 
