Introduction 



« Italian Villas and their Gardens " has proved 

 more helpful and inspiring to the writer than any 

 other. 



Italian gardens, not unlike those we still find, 

 were known even in Pliny's time. In " The 

 Letters of Pliny the Consul" (the quotation is 

 taken from Dodsley's translation of 1747)5 ^5 

 describes a terrace perfumed with violets at his 

 villa at Laurentum (near Ostia), and he goes on 

 to say that it is " encompassed with a box-tree 

 hedge," and that there are walks suitable for hot 

 or cold weather. But it is of his villa in Tuscany, 

 where he usually spent the summer, that he gives 

 the minutest word picture. (Book V., Letter VI. 

 This is the letter with the famous allusion to 

 " liquid acanthus.") The *topiary work was, 

 according to our ideas, over elaborate, yet the 

 whole garden and house must have been of great 

 dignity and beauty. It was at this villa that Pliny 

 had his dinner on a marble bench overhanging a 

 basin on whose surface floated the smaller dishes 

 " in the form of little vessels and water fowl." 



During the dark ages that succeeded it is un- 

 likely that anyone maintained or laid out villas, 

 and even in the sixteenth century, that golden time 

 of art, we meet with no gardens south of Rome, 



* The '* topiarius " was the slave entrusted with the difficult and 

 responsible task of clipping the hedges and designing and keeping in shape 

 the various animals represented in box and other shrubs and the clipped 

 inscriptions. These were very elaborate, but happily the custom was so 

 modified in the best XVIth century gardens that except in three cases 

 where the name of the villa is cut in box, the writer has never seen any 

 topiary work in Italy that could be objected to. 



