38 THE BOOK OF GARDEN DESIGN 
frequently see an avenue, perhaps no more than fifty 
yards in length, leading to a modern villa. Against 
this we protest, as a form of pretentious imitation, 
foolish to the last degree. The avenue, which should 
never be less than one hundred yards long, is essentially 
associated with a house and estate of considerable size 
and some measure of importance, and to attach it to a 
small residence is merely to cast ridicule on the owner. 
Plantations of shrubs, with a few bold groups of 
deciduous trees, will give the needed shelter to carriage 
drives, and at the same time allow of far greater 
freedom of design than is permissible with a style of 
planting which is both formal and exacting. 
As regards the use of clipped yews for garden hedges, 
much diversity of opinion exists among designers. On 
the one hand, we have men who employ them in nearly 
every garden they undertake to lay out, and argue that, 
far from being objectionable, every opportunity should 
be embraced for planting them; on the other, a class 
who regard them as wholly foreign to the ideals of 
beauty and the picturesque. Which is right? Cer- 
tainly not the former, for of all things tending towards 
monotony both in summer and winter, an undue pro- 
portion of evergreens—clipped evergreens especially— 
must be considered the most likely. If people must 
have topiary gardens, such as exist at Levens and 
Elvaston, by all means let them; but, at the same time, 
they should not fail to realise that these are gardens of 
deformity, mere curiosities in no way connected with the 
teachings of Nature. Yew hedges are the great delight 
of the “office designer,” whose thought is less for the 
true beauty of the living plant than for the elegant 
completeness of his deftly-drawn plan. An ill-kept 
hedge is a wretched sight, thin at the bottom, full of 
holes, and generally decrepit, and the labour of keeping 
some hundreds of yards of clipped yew in repair entails 
